Colombia army blamed in deaths

Hundreds of innocent civilians have been slain by soldiers and falsely identified as guerrillas killed in combat as part of a “more or less” systematic practice by significant elements of Colombia’s military, a U.N. human rights investigator said Thursday.

After a 10-day visit interviewing more than 100 witnesses and survivors, special envoy Philip Alston told reporters that he had found nothing to indicate that such extrajudicial killings were state policy or that President Alvaro Uribe and his defense ministers knew of them.

However, the Australian investigator said it was “unsustainable” for officials in Uribe’s government to argue that the killings were carried out “on a small scale by a few bad apples.” The vast majority of the slayings occurred after Uribe’s 2002 election.

Under Uribe, Colombia’s government has put leftist rebels on the defensive and seriously curbed kidnapping and killing with the help of more than $4 billion in U.S. aid.

Deputy Defense Minister Sergio Jaramillo told reporters that the government was taking Alston’s preliminary report very seriously and was pleased that he recognized “the seriousness of the measures we’ve taken” to halt the killings and punish those responsible.

Alston said he would issue a full report in four to five months.

Criticizing what he called too few successful prosecutions of extrajudicial killings, Alston said Colombia needed more human rights prosecutors and complained that military judges have tried to “thwart the transfer of clear human rights cases” to the ordinary justice system.

He characterized as “blatant and obscene” the most highly publicized case: at least 11 young men lured from the poor Bogota suburb of Soacha early last year with promises of work only to be found dead hundreds of miles away, depicted as rebels.