Colombia: Army mass grave discovered

[IndianaGreen]

Colombia: Army mass grave discovered

Daryl Davies
Green Left Weekly issue, #833 14, April 2010

10 April 2010

In December, a delegation of British MPs visiting Colombia reported that a mass grave had been discovered in La Macarena, a small town in the Meta region, 250 kilometres south of Bogota.

MP Jeff Ennis told British parliament on January 27: “On the village outskirts, right next to the main military base in the region, was a cemetery with more than 1000 unmarked graves.

“I was utterly appalled by the scale of the mass grave in La Macarena and it was clear that there were vast numbers of bodies buried there, the majority quite recently.”

Residents said after the Colombian army took back the area from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas in 2005, it began burying bodies at the site. The FARC have waged a four-decade-long armed struggle against the Colombian state.

Colombia's office of the prosecutor-general, charged with investigating government corruption, has estimated about 2000 bodies are buried at the site. Official government sources insist that number is wildly inflated.

El Nuevo Herald reported on January 29 that the prosecutor-general’s office in Bogota has sent a mission from that institution’s Technical Investigations Corps to the cemetery and confirmed the existence of “a large number” of cadavers in the grave, though it only made a few excavations.

Publico journal quoted Jairo Ramirez, the secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Colombia, who was with the British delegation. He said: “The Army commander told us that they were guerrillas killed in combat, but the people in the region told us of a multitude of social leaders, campesinos and community human rights defenders who disappeared without a trace.”

The Colombian army’s claim that all the individuals buried there are guerrillas is suspicious in the light on the ongoing “false positives” scandal. “False positive” is the Colombian military’s euphemism for civilians who are executed and then dressed up to look like guerrillas.

Soldiers use the inflated statistics of guerrillas killed to claim financial bonuses.

http://permanentred.blogspot.com/2010/04/colombia-army-mass-grave-discovered.html