Are British taxpayers helping to fund civil war killings in Colombia?

[Judi Lynn]

Are British taxpayers helping to fund civil war killings in Colombia?
By Mike Power

At first glance, the graveyard in La Macarena, 170 miles south of Bogotá, looks like any other resting place for the dead in Latin America. Well-tended graves lie in neat rows, divided by tidy paths. But slightly uphill there lies an annexe to the cemetery, and in this unofficial graveyard are hundreds of small white plaques. These are marked with neither names nor poetry but instead with mere numbers. 054-08. 07-09. 08-10. 011-10. 012-10. 013-10. The last part of the code denotes the year of the burial; new bodies are still arriving. They mark the graves of anonymous victims of Colombia’s civil war.

The dates run from 2002, when the army reclaimed this zone from the guerilla fighters of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The annexe is next to the regional army base at La Macarena, where watchtowers monitor the scene from behind a chainlink fence. Radar dishes eavesdrop on every move - nothing happens without the army knowing about it.

~snip~
The Colombian army says that all the dead on this hill are guerrillas killed in combat. But human rights groups say government forces have routinely killed civilians since 2002 and buried them here, having objected to their human-rights work, and that the army has presented them as dead guerrillas to deliver results to commanders.

~snip~
Often they dressed the bodies in FARC uniforms and planted guns on their corpses. Sometimes the dead would be dressed in new boots four sizes too big; right-handers clutching guns in their left, shot in the chest or back while their uniforms had no bullet holes. Some were executed at point-blank range.
The ‘False Positives’ scandal, as it was known, broke when 11 young men from Soacha, a poor suburb of Bogotá, were enticed away from their homes by men offering them work, then found dead hundreds of miles away, near the border of Venezuela, dressed in FARC fatigues.

Eventually, about 2,000 cases emerged. Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, said in a June 2009 report that the practice was ‘carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military’. None of the dead in La Macarena are included among the 2,000 False Positives cases. But Luis Gonzalez, director of the Department of Justice and Peace at the General Attorney’s office, which is responsible for investigating, says there are 600 or 650 unidentified bodies buried on the hill here. He claims his department has documents, including combat reports, at its base in Bogotá for all of these deaths, proving the dead were guerrillas killed in combat, and that full identification was impossible as ‘guerrillas don’t carry ID’.

More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1316777/Are-British-taxpayers-helping-fund-civil-war-killings-Colombia.html?ito=feeds-newsxml