Crude stories from one serviceman about his picking of ‘false positives’ victims in Catatumbo

The Special Court for Peace this week released Order # 125 which includes the modus operandi, charges and detailed background of how the “false positive” cases have arisen in northern Santander and, in in particular, in the Catatumbo sub-region between January 2007 and August 2008.

In this report, the JEP specifies that the military intelligence structures of the infantry battalion No. 15 “General Francisco de Paula Santander” (BISAN) and the mobile brigade No. 15 have violated the protocols and requirements to carry out quality research.

First of all, Colonel Santiago Herrera Fajardo, former commander of the 15th Mobile Brigade and lvaro Diego Tamayo Hoyos, then commander of the Bisan, transformed their military units to begin identifying the victims in collusion with trusted soldiers who had no intelligence experience.

Having the necessary information, they launched assembly operations to assassinate civilians. “The mounting of these operations required an agreement between the members of the State and the staff of the units with the members of the troop to define how the combat would be simulated and they would obtain the weapons and other elements which would be implanted in the troops. murdered victims. . ” One of the people appointed to the post in the intelligence agency BRIM15 was Rafael Urbano.

The agent selected one of the victims killed by the Korea Company from that of BRIM15. This was the case with Adinael Arias Cárdenas in the village of El Tarrito, in the municipality of El Tarra, on October 14, 2007. Cárdenas was passed off as a combat victim. Before the gunshots that ended his life, the victim was detained on his way home from the market by a group of soldiers. under the command of Captain Weiman Navarro and guided by Second Sergeant Urbano. Regarding the alleged criminal status of the victim, Urbano pointed out that:

“The information that was available was that it was he who had transported the drugs there with the police officers whose agents I never knew (…). On the other hand, Weiman Navarro underlined that: “(…) This death marked me a little, a lot, (…) it marks me because when I look the next day at the bag he was carrying, ah, it was the market and some bows, girls, toys … ”, collected the JEP.

In fact, Cárdenas was a peasant from the village of La Fortuna, in Tarra. The man had two young children and lived with his permanent partner, María Ydes Ovallos Pérez. His death sparked outrage, as community members staged a public protest at the football field where they took his body after being executed to be retrieved by a helicopter. Residents shouted to members of the Force Publique that it was a set-up.

On May 8, 2007, the Sparta Special Group of BRIM15 assassinated Álvaro Chogó, a resident of El Carmen, in Catatumbo. Regarding the evaluation of information on the alleged criminal status of the victim, NÉSTOR GUTIÉRREZ underlined:

“(…) The subject who died, whom we murdered, was identified as a member of the FARC and there was information, but hey, they arrived and things did not happen, it did not happen. found, no evidence has been found to blame him ”. The testimonies of the inhabitants of the municipality of El Carmen collected by the ordinary court indicate that Mr. Álvaro Chogó Angarita, murdered when he was 31 years old, he worked in the fields and never carried weapons.

In addition to the above, the Chamber found facts in which the intelligence agent Urbano selected the victims, not because of what he heard in the city of them, but because they were directly “delivered” by Jhon Jairo Pabón, alias Loquillo, a former member of the Bloque Nevados de Santa Marta under the command of Los Mellizos Munera, a criminal group that had left the United Self-Defense Force of Colombia. This is how the murder of another “false positive” was carried out: Luis Antonio Sánchez, known in Ocaña as “Chicharrón”. Rafael Urbano has indicated that he was not aware of this case and that he did not know who it was, despite the fact that he had contributed to his death.

“The time that I saw as ‘chicarrón’ was humbly up and down on the bike (…) the alias ‘chicharrón’ I think it was because he was selling chicharrones as a kid” , said Pabón, for his part. Luis Antonio was 27 when he was assassinated.

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