Newsletters

Date: November 30th 2008

I arrived in Barranquilla on November 3, the day before the US presidential election. Those first days I was here there was interest among the Colombians about the election and I was impressed by how well informed they were. I spent time with one teenager the day of the election who knew the importance of Ohio and Pennsylvania to the early returns of the evening and also spoke to me of the electoral college.

But news from the United States dwarfed the news that splashed across all the newspapers that same week and that has been the subject of many conversations I´ve had since arriving here. Apparently in late September, the Colombian press reported the discovery of eleven corpses of young men who had been murdered by Colombia´s military. The victims--all from a poor barrio of Bogota, lured away from their homes to another area of Colombia with false promises of a job--were killed by the military who then reported them to be leftist guerrilla fighters killed in combat, 700 kilometers northeast of Bogota.

In Colombia they are known as "false positives", a term that refers to the corpses of civilians presented by the Colombian military as guerrillas or paramilitaries killed in action. It is a part of a system that rewards soldiers and officers for showing "results," in terms of battlefield casualties in the counterinsurgency fight.

As the news of these false positives spread around Colombia and the globe, the scandal led to the removal of several military and noncommissioned officers, including a few generals. And on the day that Barack Obama made news by winning the US election, the buzz in Barranquilla was of the resignation of army chief General Mario Montoya. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe made the announcement and while he treated the question of false positives as if it were a recent phenomenon, people here were very excited that is was coming out in the press, but also surprised that Montoya who was considered the main promoter of the "body count" policy was actually made to resign.

Those who are working with victims in Colombia say that this recent discovery of false positives is not an isolated incident. Because of the government´s policy to pay extra money each month to soldiers if they meet their quota of killed guerrillas, it has become a practice of the military to lure poor young men from the barrios to the high conflict areas, killing them and planting papers on their bodies that indicate that they are guerrillas. Colombians are grateful that the international community is aware of the scandal and want them to put pressure on the Uribe government to take steps to stop it.

Since the very public announcement of General Montoya´s resignation, there has been little follow up in the newspapers. However, I saw two articles in the newspaper this week - one large one saying that human rights groups were pressing indictments for all who were involved in the 11 false positives and another small notice that General Montoya who had resigned his post recently after more than thirty years of service to his country, was being considered for the ambassadorship to the Dominican Republic.

There have been several other interesting news items in the Colombian newspapers these past few weeks, but I´ll just mention one that got small coverage, but is a real concern for people I have talked with. In a small two paragraph news brief, it was noted that Colombia's Chief Prosecutor warranted the arrest for 55 public university students and teachers, suspected of being FARC guerrillas that infiltrated Colombian universities. The prosecution office said it had documents, testimonies, and intercepted communication to prove the guilt of the suspects.

Last week when I talked with a university professor and on another occasion with a young man who works with displaced people and other victims, both of them brought up this disturbing news. They both said that this has been happening for awhile, that students and teachers who are working for human rights have been brought in for questioning and in some cases jailed. When released, they have not been able to return to the classroom because of the insinuation that they are associated with terrorists. Listening to these two talk, I was reminded of our US history of the fifties and of McCarthyism.

And so, as I begin my fourth week in Colombia, I continue to accompany the Presbyterian Church in Colombia. I hear their pain and I share it with you.

Jean McLeod Doughty
Barranquilla, Colombia
November 24, 2008
(jeanmcleod@aol.com)