Follow-up to yesterday's Colombia articles

Well yesterday the penal courts finally condemned ex-Colonel Luis Alfonso Plazas Vega for his role in masterminding the disappearance of 11 civilians and guerrillas during the Palace of Justice conflagration in 1985. These people were shown to have left the Palace alive, were taken to a nearby museum to be held, and then the General's tank brigade took them to their base in the north of Bogota to be tortured and executed.

So after two years of trial with many attempted interruptions, threats on the judge's life, etc., this son of a bitch Plazas will be sent to prison for 30 years, where he belongs.

In typical fashion, president Uribe says he is sad about the conviction. He says that the destruction of the Palace of Justice was really the fault of narcotraffickers and guerrillas, and that instead justice is condemning a noble soldier who was just doing his job. Many ex-generals have echoed this line. Once again this implies that Uribe and the generals see extrajudicial killings as within the purview of the Armed Forces. Or is Uribe just worried that the achievement of justice in this case (and the call to continue investigating those higher up the chain of command in 1985, including even the then-president) portends ill for him in the similar investigations into the more recent "false positives"?

False positives "is the term used in Colombia to refer to cases in which soldiers abducted and executed civilians and then presented them to their superiors as rebels killed in combat to earn promotions, bonuses and extra leave," according to this article by the Latin American Herald. “Victims were generally lured under false pretenses by a ‘recruiter’ to a remote location and then killed by soldiers who reported that there was a ‘death in combat,’ and took steps to manipulate and cover-up the crime scene,” describes a 2009 UN fact-finding mission.

The Herald article details that the Attorney General has recently launched a preliminary investigation into former defense minister Camilo Ospina and outgoing armed forces chief Freddy Padilla de Leon for the false positive killings. Ospina is implicated for his 2005 directive offering incentives for guerrilla deaths, which was the motivation at the root of the false positives scandal. He was then replaced by Juan Manuel Santos, who is now the frontrunner for the June 20 presidential elections! Of the 2272 such extrajudicial executions documented by the courts, 1200 occurred under Santos's watch. But he is not being investigated, at least not yet. Once again, Uribe has stated his dismay at the preliminary investigations, claiming that investigating Padilla is a blow to the morale of the Armed Forces. Santos has called the call for justice "moral terrorism" and treason, which he says is sometimes worse than the terrorism of violence and bullets.

Another typical, chilling twist is that Ospina was proposed last year among the short list of three candidates for the position of Attorney General! This is yet another controversy, in which instead of fulfilling his duty as president to propose to the Supreme Court three qualified candidates for Attorney General, Uribe cynically proposed three poorly-qualified personal allies, thus forcing the Court to refuse to choose any of them and throwing a wrench into what should have been a mundane bureaucratic procedure.

It's obvious that right now is a critical moment for Colombia, on many fronts. The Courts are bravely trying to promote the rule of law by prosecuting human rights criminals, and are indeed having some success of late. But the executive branch and the military are trying to hinder justice at every turn, with threats both veiled and explicit, public and hidden, attempts to seed the Courts with thugs friendly to them, and with a general campaign of delegitimation of the justice system. The seemingly inevitable election of Santos to the presidency means that the Courts face at least four more years of staunch opposition from the Executive and his powerful coalition. Will the Courts succeed in visiting justice upon all those who have bloodied their hands in Colombia's recent history? Especially interesting will be to see if charges are pressed against Uribe and Santos for paramilitarism, extrajudicial killings, and narcotrafficking. If so, it would be a tribute to the power of justice even in the face of charismatic caudillos. If not, we may head into a very dark period here in Colombia. More impunity, more paramilitarism, more leaning towards one-party dictatorship.