The “false positives” scandal has revealed that the army murdered civilians, who were then dressed in rebel uniforms or given guns. They were then presented as guerrillas or paramilitaries killed in combat.

These allowed units to fabricate results, and officers to gain promotion.
The number of victims is believed to be in the thousands. “The issue of the false positives puts into doubt the doctrine of the security forces with respect to human rights,” said Maria Victoria Llorente, director of the think-tank Foundation Idea for Peace. “This puts at risk a prized value for the military: legitimacy.”

Demand for results

By certain measures, the “democratic security” policy of President Alvaro Uribe has been a great success. It has pushed back Marxist rebels from around the cities and deep into their mountain and jungle strongholds.

It has demobilised 30,000 members of an illegal right-wing paramilitary army, the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia. It has seen a massive drop in kidnapping and a fall in the murder rate, once among the highest in the world.

But Mr Uribe’s demand for results has pushed his security forces to the limit – and this appears to have provoked this scandal of the false positives. The scandal broke last October when it was found that poor, young men had been recruited from the slums of Bogota, promised well-paying jobs in the province of Norte de Santander, then murdered in cold blood and presented by the army as having been killed in combat.

The attorney general’s office has evidence that 30 young men were murdered in such circumstances, and so far 17 soldiers have been arrested in connection with these extra-judicial killings.

Cases multiply

The funding for these operations allegedly came from the budget for informants. The paying of informants is one of the central struts of the democratic security policy. Many people… have made false accusations, to try to paralyse the action of the security forces

However, more examples of false positives are coming to light, spread across the country. Prosecutors now have 900 cases on their books, involving 1,500 victims, with more reports arriving daily. Sixty-seven soldiers have already been found guilty and more than 400 have been arrested and are awaiting trial. A total of 1,177 members of the security forces are currently under investigation linked with cases of extra-judicial killings.

It is alleged that soldiers were sent to the city of Medellin to round up homeless people from the streets who were later presented by the army as rebels killed in combat. Investigators have managed to identify six cases, and 46 operations by the battalion are being scrutinised amid fears that they were simply staged using murdered civilians.

Student snatched

The most recent case of a false positive took place in the northern province of Cordoba in December last year, which was well after 27 soldiers, among them three generals and 11 colonels, were sacked as part of the scandal.

Defence Minister Santos, who is likely to run for the presidency in 2010, then stated that the problems had been resolved and that the human rights abuses would be stopped.

However last week he admitted that a student, Arnobis Negrete Villadiego, had been snatched off the streets of Monteria in Cordoba on Christmas Day. The corpse of the 18-year-old appeared a day later, presented as a member of a drug-trafficking gang killed in combat.

Military defended

But the minister insists that the situation is not as bad as the media is making out. “We have discovered that there are many false denunciations, many people that want to present legitimate killings in combat, terrorists, guerrillas, as extra-judicial executions, in order to stain the good name of our military institutions,” said Mr Santos.

President Uribe has said the same thing, insisting that elements linked to the guerrillas are using the false positives to undermine military morale.

“We have to be the first to denounce that many people, using the [false positives scandal], have made false accusations, to try to paralyse the action of the security forces against the terrorists,” the president declared.

International implications.

The British government has now diverted part of its aid to the Colombian military to other programmes that could have no links to the false positives, explained Alan Campbell, of the UK’s Home Office, who visited Bogota this week.

The White House is also studying the aid package known as Plan Colombia, which has delivered more than $6bn (£4bn) in mainly military aid since 1999.

Sources in the US embassy in Bogota said that it is likely to be cut, or at best have funding directed away from the military and into social investment programmes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8038399.stm

A Sao Paulo state court said former Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra tortured the three Brazilians when he headed the Sao Paulo secret police from 1970-74.

Local news media report that Thursday’s verdict is the first of its kind in Brazil. The media say the verdict represents only a recognition of guilt, however. Ustra is protected by a sweeping 1979 amnesty that exempts both leftist guerrillas and the military from prosecution for any political crimes committed during the regime.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/AP/story/721079.html

A huge campaign of marches, vigils, speeches and art is being held in Argentina, aimed at ensuring that a retired builder is not forgotten. Julio Lopez, 78, is a name that everyone in Argentina recognizes.

He disappeared two years ago after appearing as a witness in a major human rights trial. Mr Lopez has become a symbol in the fight for justice for the atrocities committed by Argentina’s military government in the 1970s and 80s.

He was a victim twice over. He was kidnapped and tortured by the authorities working for the Argentine military which governed between 1976 and 1983. Then two years ago, he gave evidence in the trial of police chief Miguel Etchecolatz. But the day before the policeman was sentenced to life in prison for human rights atrocities, Mr Lopez disappeared.

Unlikely hero

His family and human rights activists believe he was taken by police officers or ex-police officers as a warning to others considering testifying in subsequent human rights trials against former members of the military government.

Mr Lopez has not been seen since, despite a massive campaign of marches, rallies, media coverage and appeals from his family and the president.

To mark the second anniversary of his disappearance, a fresh round of protests has been organized in Buenos Aires and in Mr Lopez’s home city of La Plata.

A large silhouette of the former building worker is being unveiled on a wall in the capital, candles are being lit and thousands are marching from the Argentine Congress to the presidential palace.

The demand is simply that Mr Lopez be found alive.

The frail, quietly spoken man has become an unlikely hero in the continuing fight in Argentina to bring to justice those responsible for the tens of thousands of people kidnapped, tortured and killed during a period that become known as the Dirty War.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7624394.stm

Violence unleashed against journalists and news media to be major topic at upcoming meeting in Caracas

Miami (March 19, 2008).- The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) expressed outrage at the murder of Argentine journalist Juan Carlos Zambrano earlier today in Jujuy city and called upon local authorities to conduct an immediate investigation to identify the perpetrators, uncover their motives and bring them to justice.

Zambrano, a 46-year-old radio and television reporter, worked at LW8 radio station and Canal 7 television in Jujuy, the capital of the province of the same name located in the far northwest of Argentina. He was intercepted at 2:00 a.m. by two assailants who shot him point-blank outside his home as he arrived with his fiancée.

Police arrested one of the assailants but the motive for the murder was not immediately known. Zambrano’s lawyer said his client had received threats after publishing certain allegations but there is also a theory that he was killed for reasons other than his work as a journalist.

The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information,Gonzalo Marroquín, stressed the urgent need to carry out a prompt investigation“to identify both the instigators and the perpetrators of this crime.”

The IAPA will examine in detail the issue of violence against journalists at its Mid Year Meeting in Caracas, Venezuela, later this month. Zambrano is the latest journalist to be murdered in recent months. Carlos Salgado was killed in Honduras and Gerardo Pimentel in Mexico. Two other Mexican journalists, Mauricio Estrada Zamora and Juan Pablo Solís, have disappeared in the same period and their whereabouts remain unknown.

During the Caracas meeting, scheduled for March 28-30 and in which more than 300 newspaper editors and publishers will participate, the IAPA plans to issue new documentation on the levels of impunity surrounding crimes against journalists,which in the last 30 years have amounted to 330 murders of men and women journalists in the Americas killed while doing their job reporting the news.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The 600 skeletons are packed into fruit cartons and stacked on shelves in the walk-in closet of a forensic lab, in the dim glow of a single bare light bulb. They are “Skeleton No. 4″ or “Skeleton No. 21,” and nothing more.

But a quarter-century after Argentina’s dictatorship and “dirty war” against its own citizens ended, DNA technology raises the possibility of finally learning the identities of these skeletons in the closet, collected from mostly unmarked graves across Argentina.

Funded by U.S. taxpayers, anthropologists have launched an ambitious campaign, drawing on techniques pioneered in Bosnia and at New York’s World Trade Center after 9/11.

On television and radio, celebrities exhort relatives of “the disappeared” to provide blood samples for a nationwide DNA database. A weekday call center advertises its toll-free number on banners at soccer games.

“If you have a family member who was a victim of a forced disappearance … a simple blood sample can help identify them,” says a popular Argentine soccer sportscaster in a TV ad.

The campaign began in November and is already paying off.

“We’ve received some 2,000 telephone calls,” said Luis Fondebrider of the independent Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which was founded in 1984 to document the missing and has since applied its know-how in more than 40 countries, from El Salvador to Iraq to East Timor. It also led the identification through dental records of Cuban revolutionary Ernest “Che” Guevara’s remains, exhumed in the 1990s.

The nonprofit group hopes soon to recruit a U.S. lab to cross-match the samples with DNA from all 600 skeletons in the closet, many of which have bullet holes in their skulls or signs of torture.

Large-scale DNA sampling has become quicker and cheaper since it was pioneered in Bosnia, according to Mercedes Doretti, a founder of the group and a recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

After Bosnia’s war in the early 1990s, the International Commission for Missing Persons developed a system to conduct sophisticated DNA tests on thousands of exhumed bodies. After 9/11, U.S. experts expanded the technology, building software to compare thousands of DNA samples simultaneously from the fragments from the Twin Towers.

But Doretti’s group didn’t have money to use these new technologies until the U.S. Congress gave it a grant last year of nearly $1.5 million.

The Argentine government provides logistical support, arranges free air time for the advertisements, puts public blood banks at the group’s disposal and speeds the importation of equipment through customs.

Adding to the urgency of identifying the dead, Argentina’s new president, Cristina Fernandez, has pushed to speed up trials in hundreds of human rights cases that were blocked by an amnesty for alleged perpetrators. The amnesty was repealed in 2005.

The campaign could also lead to a more accurate death toll from the “dirty war” against leftist opponents by Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and bridge the gap between the more than 12,000 officially listed as dead or missing and the 30,000 estimated by human rights groups.

“We hope there might be more people coming forward, especially in the provinces,” to report missing relatives for the first time, said Luis Alen, a government undersecretary for human rights.

In most cases, victims’ remains have never been found, and of those recovered by Doretti’s group, fewer than 300 have been identified.

The last identification was in 2005, when DNA testing gave a name to remains that years earlier had washed ashore, apparently tossed from a “death flight” in which drugged prisoners were thrown alive into the sea. French nun Leonie Duquet was given an emotional funeral at the Buenos Aires church where she had been abducted in 1977.

Such matches were made by steadily improving DNA technology, which helped identify Hugo Omar Argente’s brother Jorge, a youth activist whose body was among 30 dynamited after a 1976 massacre.

“They wanted to make the bodies disappear,” said Argente, 55. “I found out on March 17, 2000, when they called me on the phone and said the test results had identified him. I just cried and cried.”

Protesters took to famous locales in the nation’s capital such as the Plaza de Mayo, where mothers of victims of the dictatorship gather to protest.

During the so-called “Dirty War” dictatorship (1976-1983) about 30,000 were killed or went missing.

Former Dirty War leaders have escaped prosecution until recent efforts by former President Nestor Kirchner to prosecute ex-leaders for human rights violations.

Argentina Dirty War 1976 – 1983

The Dirty War, from 1976-1983, was a seven-year campaign by the Argentine government against suspected dissidents and subversives. Many people, both opponents of the government as well as innocent people, were “disappeared” in the middle of the night. They were taken to secret government detention centers where they were tortured and eventually killed. These people are known as “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared.”

After the death of the controversial President Juan Peron in 1974, his wife and vice president, Isabel Peron, assumed power. However, she was not very strong politically and a military junta led a coup against her and removed her from office. This military junta maintained its grip on power by cracking down on anybody whom they believed was challenging their authority. Casualty counts from this war range from 10,000 to 30,000 people.

Although the military dictatorship carried out its war against suspected domestic subversives throughout its entire existence, it was ironically a foreign foe which brought the regime to an end. In the early 1980s, it became clear to both the world and the Argentine people that the government was behind the tens of thousands of kidnappings. The junta, facing increasing opposition over its human rights record, as well as mounting allegations of corruption, sought to allay domestic criticism by launching a successful campaign to regain Las Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands).

The Falkland Islands have been a source of contention between England, which administers them, and Argentina, which claims them, since 1820. The junta had thought that it could reclaim these islands relatively easily, that England wouldn’t mind their loss, and that the government would regain its popularity and control over its people. However, the government was wrong in its anticipations when 72 days after the invasion of the Islands, the British military won the war, having captured 9,800 Argentine POWs.

This unexpected loss was the final blow for the military regime, and in 1982, it restored basic civil liberties and retracted its ban on political parties. The Dirty War ended when Raul Alfonsin’s civilian government took control of the country on December 10, 1983.