[Reader-list] How police kill poor boys to improve their criminal-catching statistics

[Rana Dasgupta]

UPPING THE BODY COUNT
Not that hard, when any body will do

Oct 30th 2008 | BOGOTÁ
 From The Economist print edition

IT IS the kind of outrage that Colombians hoped belonged to the past 
rather than the present. Over the course of this year, a score of 
unemployed young men disappeared from their homes in Soacha, a poor 
suburb of Bogotá, only to turn up dead, apparently killed in combat by 
the army, several hundred miles farther north. There was speculation 
that they had been offered jobs by paramilitary groups. But as 
investigations have proceeded, the truth turns out to be even worse. The 
young men appear to have been kidnapped, turned over to army units and 
then murdered in order to inflate the body count of dead guerrillas.

After three army colonels were dismissed over the case, President Álvaro 
Uribe and his defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, took more drastic 
action on October 29th. They announced the firing of three generals and 
24 other officers or NCOs, in the biggest purge of the army for a 
decade. A military investigation had found that “in some parts of the 
army there has been negligence”, Mr Uribe said. “There may be members of 
the armed forces involved in murder.” The government has ordered the 
attorney-general’s office to investigate, and officials say that any 
officers who are charged will be tried by civilian, not military, courts.

Worryingly, the case of the Soacha youths may not be an isolated one. 
There have been reports of similar disappearances of young men in two 
other parts of the country. In a report released this week, Amnesty 
International, a human-rights group, says that the security forces were 
responsible for 330 “extrajudicial executions” last year, up from an 
average of 220 a year in 2004-06. Amnesty says paramilitaries killed 
around 300 civilians last year and guerrillas about 260. The 
government’s own watchdog is investigating 930 suspected killings by the 
army.

Officials argue that overall levels of violence have fallen steadily 
over the past decade, as a result of the demobilisation of many of the 
right-wing paramilitary groups and the army’s success against the FARC 
guerrillas of the left. The government has been shaken by previous 
reports of army units killing civilians and passing them off as dead 
guerrillas. Last year the defence ministry adopted a new policy that 
measures the army’s success by the number of guerrilla captures or 
desertions, rather than the body count. In firing the generals 
commanding two divisions where abuses occurred, the defence ministry 
appears to be sending a message that it will hold commanders responsible 
for ensuring that the new policy is carried out.

The purge follows two other recent cases in which Mr Uribe has been 
embarrassed by the actions of his subordinates. The government was 
forced to order an investigation over a video aired on CNN which showed 
that, contrary to their denials, police opened fire on thousands of 
Indian marchers demanding land, killing two protesters. And the director 
of intelligence resigned after it was revealed that a mid-level official 
in her agency had spied on Gustavo Petro, an opposition senator.

The only good news for the security forces was the escape of Óscar Tulio 
Lizcano, a former senator who had been held as a hostage for eight years 
by the FARC. Several months ago the army identified the camp in the 
jungles of western Colombia where he was held. Troops surrounded the 
camp, cutting off supplies. The guerrilla commander guarding Mr Lizcano 
opted to desert, taking his hostage with him. The military operations 
which achieved this happy ending were “an honour for the Colombian armed 
forces”, Mr Uribe declared. Sadly, that honour appears to have been 
tarnished by the murder of innocent civilians elsewhere in the country.