Colombian General and 10 Others Admit to Crimes Against Humanity

“Today, I want the environment to know that they have been peasants,” Néstor Guillermo Gutiérrez, a previous corporal in the Colombian armed service, explained of his victims, “that as a member of the navy, I cowardly assassinated them, I stole their children’s goals, I ripped out their mother’s hearts, since of force, to generate effects, to develop phony final results, to make a federal government joyful. It’s not proper.”

The court’s magistrates believe that that their victims are just a little fraction of these killed in between 2002 and 2008, all through the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, as component of the fake positives method. In all, the court claimed in a the latest investigative report that the military services is liable for killing 6,402 civilians and claiming they ended up rebels.

For several years, a lot of Colombians have demanded to know who was the highest determine with awareness of the scheme, who was the greatest figure to orchestrate it and why Mr. Uribe did not quit it.

Human rights groups and the United Nations human legal rights business office had raised alarm about suspicious deaths at minimum as significantly back again as 2005.

The listening to did not reply who was ultimately accountable for the technique. General Coronado is the highest-ranking official to admit accountability in the false positives circumstance, but his confession centered on his failure to oversee other people.

“I did not comply with the first lesson they gave me when I entered armed service school: The commander is liable for what his subordinates do and do not do,” he mentioned in court. “I take my obligation for possessing served as a hierarchical superior.”

The hearings also highlighted a stage of institutional coordination intended to protect up the real truth.

“We stayed up all night performing documentation, changing documentation, even deleting documentation,” mentioned Juan Carlos Chaparro, a retired key. “And always, soon after every thing was over, tarnishing the name of their family members, contacting them what they really ended up not.”