The painful ranking of false positives: the chilling confession of a sergeant who agreed to kill civ
Google translation of large Colombian newspaper:
The painful ranking of false positives: the chilling confession of a sergeant who agreed to kill civilians
The hearing began yesterday Monday in Valledupar and continues today. The narratives have been terrifying; in the La Popa Battalion the order was to kill, it did not matter that innocents died as long as the number of positive results increased.
7/19/22
Hearing of false positives at the JEP - Photo: JEP
“The personnel that made up the La Popa Battalion, under the command of Colonel (r) (Publio Hernán) Mejía knew what was happening. We brought people even alive who were finally killed as if they were guerrillas, but they were innocent. Forceful, cold and painful, this was the statement of the first sergeant (r) Efraín Andrade Perea, who revealed chilling details of what happened around the year 2002, in the La Popa Battalion, where it has been shown how, by orders of superiors, the soldiers of this garrison became a machine to assassinate civilians to present them as casualties in combat, which is known as false positives.
Andrade was the head of intelligence for the battalion, one of the largest in the country. There, before relatives of victims, he acknowledged his responsibility for participating in what he called "all logistics to cover up the deaths of innocents, falsely presented as subversives."
"I accept today in front of you as a co-author of homicide, conduct that also constituted crimes against humanity, murder and forced disappearance of people," he said before the JEP magistrates.
For them, in La Popa, it was not about humans; no, they were figures, cold figures. At one point in the hearing, with tears, he said that the La Popa Battalion sought to win first place in a ranking to have the highest number of dead, innocent civilians, brutally murdered to later be presented as guerrillas.
"If I had spoken in time, when I realized that my men were doing illegal activities, showing lies to my people, I would not be here today," he said at another time, through tears, acknowledging that what happened could have been avoided. , if the high command had not allowed so many illegal actions.
False positive rewards
Although in most of these crimes the victims were civilians, guerrillas were also involved who were not given first aid, as indicated by International Humanitarian Law.
According to the crude account of Yeris Andrés Gómez Coronel, a soldier who was a member of that battalion at the time, a guerrilla was wounded in the middle of a confrontation against the ELN's so-called December 6 Front. Gómez said that he received the order from Major José Pastor Ruiz Mahecha to assassinate him. "We do not provide the first aid that a former combatant deserves, violating the right to life and violating the right to citizen security ," said the now former soldier.
But what was most surprising in his testimony was the award he received from his superiors for having committed that murder. “The commander of the La Popa battalion, at the troop ranch, gave me 100,000 pesos and also bought Chinese rice for the entire special group. We did not deserve that because we violated the rights of the people, ”he said regretfully.
https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/competiamos-para-tener-el-mayor-numero-de-muertos-escalofriante-confesion-de-un-sargento-por-los-falsos-positivos/202234/
