The Colombia Documentation Project

Michael Evans, project director
202/994-7029
mevans@gwu.edu

Andrea Mesa, project intern

About the Project - The National Security Archive's Colombia Project seeks to identify and obtain the release of documents from secret government archives on United States policy in Colombia and to disseminate these records through publications, conferences and the Archive's web site. Major themes of the project include security assistance, human rights, impunity and counternarcotics programs.

New - January 7, 2009
"Body count mentalities"
Colombia's "False Positives" Scandal, Declassified

Documents Describe History of Abuses by Colombian Army

Gen. Mario Montoya Uribe announces his resigation as Colombian Army Commander in November 2008. (Photo credit: Semana.com)

Washington D.C., January 7, 2009 - The CIA and senior U.S. diplomats in 1994 reported a “body count syndrome” and the use of “death squad tactics” by Colombian security forces, according to declassified documents published on the Web today by the National Security Archive. These records shed light on a policy—recently examined in a still-undisclosed Colombian Army report—that influenced the behavior of Colombian military officers for years, leading to extrajudicial executions and collaboration with paramilitary drug traffickers. The secret report has led to the dismissal of 30 Army officers and the resignation of Gen. Mario Montoya Uribe, the Colombian Army Commander who had long promoted the idea of using body counts to measure progress against guerrillas.

Archive Colombia analyst, Michael Evans, whose article on the matter was published today on the Web site of Colombia’s Semana magazine, said that, “These documents and the recent scandal over the still-secret Colombian Army report raise important questions about the historical and legal responsibilities the Army has to come clean about what appears to be a longstanding, institutional incentive to commit murder.”

Highlights from today's posting include:

• A 1994 report from U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette decrying “body count mentalities” among Colombian Army officers seeking to advance through the ranks. “Field officers who cannot show track records of aggressive anti-guerrilla activity (wherein the majority of the military’s human rights abuses occur) disadvantage themselves at promotion time.”

• A CIA intelligence report from 1994 finding that the Colombian security forces “employ death squad tactics in their counterinsurgency campaign” and had “a history of assassinating leftwing civilians in guerrilla areas, cooperating with narcotics-related paramilitary groups in attacks against suspected guerrilla sympathizers, and killing captured combatants.”

• A Colombian Army colonel’s comments in 1997 that there was a “body count syndrome” in the Colombian Army that “tends to fuel human rights abuses by well-meaning soldiers trying to get their quota to impress superiors” and a “cavalier, or at least passive, approach when it comes to allowing the paramilitaries to serve as proxies … for the COLAR in contributing to the guerrilla body count.”

• The same colonel’s assertion that military collaboration with illegal paramilitary groups “had gotten much worse” under Gen. Rito Alejo Del Río Rojas, who is now under investigation for a murder that occurred during that same era.

• A declassified U.S. Embassy cable describing a February 2000 false positives operation in which both the ACCU paramilitaries and the Colombian Army almost simultaneously claimed credit for having killed two long-demobilized guerrillas near Medellín. Ambassador Curtis Kamman called it “a clear case of Army-paramilitary complicity,” adding that it was “difficult to conclude anything other than that the paramilitary and Army members simply failed to get their stories straight in advance.”

 

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