Colombia army Gen. Mario Montoya resigns

Army commander Gen. Mario Montoya resigned Tuesday amid a widening scandal surrounding the Colombian armed forces’ alleged practice of inflating body counts by shooting innocent civilians and claiming them as guerrillas killed in combat. Montoya is the highest-ranking official to lose his job over the ‘false positives’ controversy, which last week forced President Alvaro Uribe to dismiss 20 officers from the army’s leadership corps. After months of denials, Uribe was forced to act after a Defense Ministry commission reported findings of ‘negligence’ and ‘possible collusion’ of officers in connection with its investigation of macabre deaths of a dozen young men from the poor Bogota suburb of Soacha. Family members said the men were lured by ‘recruiters’ to the northern border state of North Santander with promises of high-paying jobs, then killed by the army and buried as anonymous guerrilla casualties. Montoya acknowledged to reporters later that Uribe had not informed him before last week’s purge.