U.N. says Colombian military executing civilians

Colombia's U.S.-backed security forces are engaging in "systematic and widespread" extrajudicial executions of innocent civilians as part of their counterinsurgency campaign, a top United Nations diplomat said last week.

Speaking in Bogota after a weeklong fact-finding tour, Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the scale of the killings could constitute a "crime against humanity" under international humanitarian law, adding that international courts could intervene if the Colombian government was "unwilling or unable" to handle the investigations itself.

"An offense becomes a crime against humanity if it is widespread and systematic against the civilian population," Pillay said at a news conference.

This brings us to the story of two brothers who had not seen one another in almost ten years.

The soldiers in Antelope Company's Third Platoon hadn't registered a guerrilla kill in months. And without results, they feared they wouldn't be let off base for Mother's Day. So they hatched a plan, according to Pvt. Luis Esteban Montes: lure a civilian to their camp, murder him and register him as a rebel slain in combat. Montes, 24, didn't object -- until he met the quarry. It was Leonardo, the older brother he hadn't seen since he was 9.

Montes says he tried to dissuade his commander, who responded with threats. He slipped his brother out of the camp, he says, only to see him show up dead a week later, a "guerrilla kill" with three bullets in his torso and a gaping facial wound likely caused by a knife.

The men of Antelope Company of the 31st Rifle Batallion, 11th Brigade, 7th Division, did not get their "liberty passes." Montes' family filed a formal complaint, one of 245 involving alleged killings of civilians by Colombian security forces last year that prosecutors are investigating.

The scandal comes at a particularly delicate moment for Colombia's President Uribe. U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has cited human rights concerns in opposing the U.S.-Colombia trade agreement that President Bush wants ratified before he leaves office in January.
Obama has told Bush that he opposes including the deal in an economic stimulus package the U.S. Congress is to begin debating next week.