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" in which the armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas.
A macabre facet of a general increase in "extrajudicial killings" by the military, "false positives" are a result of intense pressure to show progress in Colombia's U.S.-funded war against leftist insurgents, the activists say.
Rodriguez's sister Adelaida said he 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 believed the army killed her brother to "gain points."
Such killings have spread terror here in the central state of Meta. Last year the state led Colombia in documented cases of extrajudicial killings, with 287 civilians allegedly slain by the military, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights group. That's a 10% increase from the previous year
Although there appear to be no official -- or unofficial -- tallies of "false positives," human rights activists say they believe such incidents are on the rise, along with the overall increase in killings by the military, based on their discussions with victims' families and analyses 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 the New York-based Fellowship of Reconciliation. "Victims last seen alive in civilian clothing later are found dead dressed in camouflage and claimed as guerrilla casualties."
The killings have increased in recent years amid an emphasis on rebel death tolls as the leading indicator of military success, the human rights groups say. Even Colombian officials acknowledge that soldiers and their commanders have been given cash and promotions for upping their units' 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 Plan Colombia, the program that fights drug trafficking and terrorism.
