By Julia Symmes Cobb
BOGOTA (Reuters) – A special Colombian court created under a 2016 peace deal on Thursday sentenced twelve former military commanders to up to eight years of reparations work for their role in the extrajudicial executions of 135 people.
The sentences were the first given to former members of the military by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which is trying leaders from both the FARC rebels and the military for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Earlier this week the same court sentenced seven former leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas to a maximum of eight years of reparations for the group’s policy of kidnapping for ransom.
“With this sentence imposed on members of the military, we recognize and insist on a truth that for years was denied, hidden and silenced,” JEP president Alejandro Ramelli said before the decision was read, thanking the victims who participated in the case.
“Those who will be sentenced today have had to face justice, and the country’s victims, they have faced the error that they committed,” Ramelli said. “In many cases, they revealed truths that their own families did not know.”
At least 6,402 people were killed in so-called ‘false positives’ murders nationwide between 2002 and 2008, according to the JEP, though victims groups say the figure is higher.
Soldiers, eager to earn benefits like promotions and time off, lured civilians, some of them with intellectual disabilities, with promises of work, then killed them and reported them as rebels killed in combat.
Dozens of army officials have been detained and convicted for ‘false positives’ under the regular justice system and some of the victims, whose remains have not been returned to their families, are considered disappeared.
Those sentenced on Thursday committed 135 ‘false positives’ murders and disappearances when they were members of the La Popa battalion, which operated on Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast, between January 2002 and July 2005, the court said.
Among the men’s victims were members of the Wiwa and Kankuamo Indigenous communities, whose ancestral territory became a hub of drug trafficking activities by both right-wing paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas beginning in the 1990s.
Some of the men will receive lower sentences because they have already be convicted for the killings in normal courts.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb)
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