COLOMBIA: Government apologises for false positives
Thank you for reading LatinNews' chosen article from the Latin American Weekly Report, produced since 1967 - 05 October 2023
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro staged a major event in the central Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá on 4 October to comply with his government’s promise to prioritise truth and reconciliation. The purpose of the event was for the state and the military to apologise publicly for the notorious ‘false positives’ scandal that came to light under the right-wing government led by President álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). The event was attended by relatives of 20 youths from Soacha, a municipality near Bogotá, who were murdered by members of the military and presented as guerrillas killed in combat to inflate their number of ‘kills’.
The defence minister, Iván Velásquez, led the event, which had to be extended by an extra hour so that President Petro could make a brief appearance after his flight from Popayán, the capital of the south-western department of Cauca, was delayed. “This can never happen again,” Velásquez said, while apologising and asking forgiveness on behalf of the state for “the horror of [the] extrajudicial executions”. “These crimes shame us in the eyes of the world,” Velásquez added. “They were not guerrillas…but young men whose lives, hopes, and dreams were cut short by criminal action by members of the army.”
The commander of the army, Major General Luis Mauricio Ospina Gutiérrez, also apologised to the families of the ‘false positives’ victims for the “reprehensible actions that caused so much grief”. He said that the army as an institution had learnt from the scandal to “prevent repetition of this sort of behaviour…and to guarantee our commitment to uphold the constitution and human rights”. He said that those who had perpetrated the extrajudicial executions had “stained the honour of the institution”.
When Petro finally arrived he paid tribute to the mothers and other relatives of the Soacha victims attending the event who he said had been fighting for the truth for more than 15 years. He called for the full truth of the ‘false positives’ scandal to be laid bare. “He who seeks to conceal is as complicit as he who fires,” Petro said.
The relatives of the Soacha victims thanked the government for finally issuing the apology but they said that the top brass of the time and former president Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) should have been present at the event (Santos was defence minister during the worst years of the false positives scandal under Uribe) not the incumbent military chiefs and defence minister. Jackelin Castillo, the president of Madres de Víctimas de Falsos Positivos (Mafapo), and a relative of one of the victims, demanded that justice be served. She said she would keep fighting until it was known “who gave the order to commit these crimes”.
Uribe, now the leader of the right-wing opposition Centro Democrático (CD), responded to the event in a speech in Villavicencio, the capital of the central department of Meta. Uribe maintained that Petro’s claims that his government had “paid to kill innocent people” (through offering bonuses to soldiers for the number of guerrillas they had killed) was false. He claimed that his ‘democratic security policy’ had been designed to reward demobilisation and demanded that human rights be upheld. He said that his government had taken “appropriate decisions” and responded at the time by removing all those accused of false positives from the army while “many of those responsible ended up in prison”.
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Uribe’s reaction
At the time of the Soacha false positives scandal, former president Uribe quipped that the youths who had been killed “were not picking coffee”. Many years later he apologised for this remark, but it has been used to attack him and his government’s ‘democratic security policy’ on numerous occasions. Uribe maintained during his speech in Villavicencio this week that once the allegations of false positives began to multiply his government had insisted that the body of anyone killed in combat should not be touched until the technical investigation unit (CTI) of the attorney general’s office had arrived at the scene.
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