Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Hostages’ Deaths Still a Mystery, One Year On

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, Jun 19 2008 (IPS) - Eleven wax palms, Colombia’s national tree, will be planted in the botanical garden in the capital in memory of 11 regional lawmakers who were killed a year ago after spending more than five years as hostages in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

The legislators were part of the group of hostages held by the FARC with the aim of swapping them for hundreds of imprisoned insurgents. Still held captive in remote jungle camps today are former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who holds dual French-Colombian citizenship, 17 military officers and non-commissioned officers, 20 policemen and three U.S. military contractors.

One regional parliamentary deputy, Sigifredo López, survived when his 11 colleagues were killed in mysterious circumstances a year ago, because he was not with the group at the time. According to the FARC, the incident occurred on Jun. 18, 2007.

The 11 wax palms (Ceroxylon quindiuense) presided over a ceremony held Wednesday to pay homage to the legislators in Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá’s central square. Alongside each potted tree was a photo of one of the deputies and thousands of flowers brought by schoolchildren.

Two massive nationwide marches were held in the last year to protest the FARC’s practice of kidnapping and taking hostages. But on Wednesday, the square was half empty. The families of the dead hostages attended a special mass in Cali, the capital of the western province of Valle del Cauca, where the regional deputies were from.

“I don’t know who is worse, the kidnappers or those who have forgotten about us,” Juan Carlos Narváez, the former head of the Valle del Cauca regional assembly, who was one of the hostages killed last year, said in the last video provided by the FARC to prove that the lawmakers were still alive.

Narváez and the others were buried on Sept. 11, after a lengthy delay in handing over their bodies to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One year later, the circumstances in which the 11 hostages were killed have not been clarified. According to an investigation by an Organisation of American States (OAS) international forensic commission, the hostages died from multiple gunshot wounds, with bullets fired from different directions and several kinds of guns.

Their bodies were preserved in good condition by the guerrillas, who handed them over far from the spot where they were killed.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe refused to accept the services of the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission established by the first supplementary protocol to the 1949 Geneva Convention on International Humanitarian Law.

In an email message sent to IPS on Sept. 2, 2007, Colombia’s High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo stated that “information gathered by intelligence bodies and handed over to the Attorney General’s Office points to a confrontation between two guerrilla structures, Front 60 that was guarding the deputies and Front 29 that operates in that area.”

“The deputies were apparently killed on the order of alias ‘El Grillo’, who believed that a military rescue attempt was taking place. After the deputies were killed, their bodies were manipulated and transferred to the spot where they were later handed over,” said the official.

Restrepo wrote IPS to express his disagreement with the report published by this agency in August 2007, according to which the hostages were killed in heavy fighting between an elite military unit and the insurgent group that was moving the hostages after a “suspicious desertion” by 17 to 19 guerrillas, according to a source close to the FARC.

The rebel group had reported that the hostages were killed on Jun. 18 in the midst of crossfire “with an unidentified military group.”

In addition, the laptops that the Colombian government claims to have seized at the rebel camp of FARC negotiator “Raúl Reyes”, which was bombed in Ecuador on Mar. 1 by Colombian forces, contained two different versions of the incident.

One email was supposedly written by “Alfonso Cano”, who is now the group’s top leader, to then FARC chief “Manuel Marulanda”, who died of a heart attack in March.

In the message, which coincides with Restrepo’s version, Cano said that a FARC unit mistook the rebels guarding the hostages for members of the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN – known as “elenos”), and launched an attack.

“Good afternoon comrade. Because of a disastrous confusion with another FARC unit, who mistook them for elenos and attacked, the deputies’ guards executed 11 of the 12 hostages because they thought they were being attacked by the army. A grave mistake that will cause us many problems,” says the email message, according to the Defence Ministry.

In news reports, however, the quote appeared with different wording.

The Ministry reported that Cano proposed “drawing” the security forces to the spot where the legislators were killed, to implicate them in the killing.

But in another message, Marulanda allegedly gives instructions to “report that the prisoners’ guards deserted along with the hostages, and that in the persecution, all of them were killed in the midst of combat, and we are prepared to hand over the bodies.”

Yet another version that has recently emerged refers to “a kind of alliance between the FARC and drug traffickers, which led to the murder of the hostages by a group of ‘narcos’ to generate the problem with the guerrillas and push them out of the Valle del Cauca,” journalist Carlos Lozano, who the government appointed as a negotiator for talks on the hostages’ release, told IPS.

Lozano, editor of Voz, the Communist Party weekly paper, wrote that the firefight was between the FARC unit guarding the hostages and “Los Magníficos, an elite police unit trained by Israelis and the British for precisely this kind of surprise attack.”

But the rightwing Uribe administration staunchly denies that any military rescue attempt was launched.

“At any rate, at this point all of these versions are merely speculation, all of them. And none of them can be ruled out,” said Lozano.

Voz also published, on Feb. 13, an interview with a former insurgent who deserted the FARC in 1994 and turned himself in to the Luciano D’Elhuyar army battalion in the northeastern province of Santander.

The former rebel said an operation had been planned for June 2007, in which a group of FARC deserters recruited to work with the security forces was to play a key role.

He said the military made contact in the Valle del Cauca with “several mid-level commanders of Front 30 (of the FARC), who provided them with information on the deputies’ location.”

“The intention was for a special forces group, which would go into action without wearing army insignia, to launch a sudden attack to rescue the hostages, but it would not be presented as a military operation,” he said.

The deputies were to be handed over to a group of FARC deserters who, “with the camouflaged special forces among them, would immediately proceed to ‘contact’ the peace commissioner’s office and turn themselves in, so that when the surrender occurred, it would look like we FARC fighters had gotten tired of the war and decided to reinsert ourselves in society, turning over the hostages as well,” he said.

But “what was supposed to happen on Jun. 7 – the rescue and our posing as dissident members of FARC – didn’t occur,” he added.

“When the operation was aborted, the main sponsors of the project disappeared, failing to pay us what we were promised, and some deserters died in strange conditions,” he said.

Lozano, who had been contacted by the source, said that “unfortunately, we have lost track of this demobilised insurgent. We wanted to continue talking with him to obtain further information.”

“The demobilised fighter knew where to find us, and he gave us this version. I was the first to talk to him, and in that initial conversation he told me he had quite a lot of information on what happened to the deputies,” said the journalist.

In the subsequent interview, the source focused on the “recruitment” of FARC deserters. “We had agreed with him to first delve into that part and then continue with the question of the deputies,” but the interview had to be cut off, “and we arranged a second meeting with him, which never took place.”

“The Attorney General’s Office did not want to include him in the witness protection programme,” said Lozano, who believes the man fled the country, as he had intended to do. Even the FARC was after him.

“But it would be really good to talk to him again. I believe that man has privileged information on (what happened to) the deputies,” he added.