GRANADA, Colombia — Street vendor Israel Rodriguez went fishing last month and never came back. Two days later, his family found his body buried in a plastic bag, classified by the Colombian army as a guerrilla fighter killed in battle.
Human-rights activists say the Feb. 17 death is part of a deadly phenomenon called “false positives” by which the armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and represent them as leftist guerrillas.
A macabre facet of a general increase in “extrajudicial killings” by the military, the killings are a result of intense pressure to show results in its U.S.-funded war against leftist insurgents, the activists say.
Rodriguez’s sister Adelaida said her brother had served three years in the army and was neither a guerrilla nor a sympathizer.
“He never made any trouble for anyone,” she said, adding that she believes the army killed him to “gain points.”
Killings like these have spread terror here in Meta. Last year the state led Colombia in documented cases of extrajudicial killings, with 287 civilians allegedly killed by the military, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists. That’s a 10 percent increase from the previous year.
Although there appear to be no official or unofficial tallies of alleged “false positives,” human-rights activists say they believe they are rising along with the overall increase of killings by the military, based on their discussions with victims’ families and analysis of circumstances surrounding individual cases.
“It’s quite likely, because the same scenario appears over and over again in the cases I review,” said John Lindsay Poland of Fellowship of Reconciliation, a New York-based human-rights group. “Victims last seen alive in civilian clothing later are found dead dressed in camouflage and claimed as guerrilla casualties.”
The killings have risen in recent years amid an emphasis on rebel death tolls as the leading indicator of military success, the groups say. Even Colombian officials acknowledge that soldiers and commanders have been given cash and promotions for upping body counts.
Since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002, the military has scored notable successes in winning back territory from leftist rebel groups and improving security, buoyed by billions of dollars in military aid from the United States under the anti-drug and -terrorism program known as Plan Colombia.
But at the same time, the military’s human-rights record is growing worse, charged a coalition of Colombian and international human rights groups.
While not responding specifically to the claims, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota said this month that Colombian armed forces’ killings of civilians are a “serious problem, a serious concern.”
Kidnapped as he cast his line on the River Ariari, Rodriguez may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, family members theorize.
Adelaida Rodriguez said she and her family are reluctant to press for an investigation. Referring to her brother, she said: “If we make noise, we’ll end up like him.”
