Why Is the Wall Street Journal Dismissing Colombia's War Crimes?
Why Is the Wall Street Journal Dismissing Colombia's War Crimes?
February 24, 2015
By Joel Gillin
One of the most shocking crimes in Colombia's recent history—and that's saying something—is the “false positives” scandal. Over the last three decades, military units—many of which received American military aid—have been murdering civilians, usually young men from impoverished communities, and dressing them up as guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to present them as combat kills. Most false positives occurred during the two presidential terms of hardliner Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) and peaked in 2007, when at least 40 percent of combat kills were in fact civilians.
In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, Mary O’Grady openly questions these well-established facts. The FARC rebels, who have been negotiating a peace deal with the Colombian government since 2012, have often brought up the responsibility of the Colombian state and right-wing paramilitaries in crimes like the false positives. O'Grady believes that the rebels are trying to smear the military in order to create a false equivalency and thus avoid jail time for their own war crimes. She proposes “a heaping dose of skepticism” about the systematic nature of the military killings. Citing a now-infamous 2008 case in which 22 men from a poor neighborhood in the capital Bogotá were offered jobs, only to be extrajudicially executed by states forces, she writes that “it’s a lunar leap from these cases to allegations now reported in the press of more than 3,000 such murders,” which would suggest an “institutional breakdown of epic proportions.”
To cast doubt on this number, O’Grady points to Colombia’s broken justice system and an academic study by a Colombian lawyer and government research agency, which estimated some 3,000 cases of false testimony. There is no doubt that Colombia’s judicial branch is a congested mess. It is unable (or unwilling) to investigate threats against unionists, process land restitutions claims, or curtail corruption. That's why, in addition to demands for better pay and work conditions, thousands of judicial workers went on strike last fall. The false testimonies, whose relation to false positive prosecutions is unclear and unaddressed in O'Grady's article, point to the difficulties of prosecuting war crimes. As InSight Crime, a site which covers organized crime and Colombia extensively, wrote of the academic study, “cases that occur during war are difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. … The results, as is evident, can be chaotic.”
Nonetheless, no reputable human rights group, international organization, or governmental body questions the phenomenon of false positives and its systemic nature. And far from being a “lunar leap,” 3,000 false positives is almost certainly a conservative estimate. As of January 2014, the attorney general’s office in Colombia was investigating more than 4,200 cases of extrajudicial executions, with nearly 5,000 state agents being implicated. Some human rights groups think the number could be significantly higher. In 2010, the Fellowship for Reconciliation and the Colombia-Europe-U.S. Human Rights Observatory examined more than 5,700 executions and found that “in 2007, at least one execution was directly attributed to 99 of the Army’s 219 combat battalions and mobile brigades.” That's hardly a “share of bad actors,” as O'Grady put it.
More:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121136/wall-street-journal-dismisses-colombian-false-positives-scandal
