The first trickle of Wikileaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Colombia appeared on the Internet late last night. While this represents only a tiny fraction of the 2,416 cables from Colombia reportedly obtained by Wikileaks, the revelations so far are pretty interesting.
A quick review:
- By far the most interesting revelations come from former Colombian Army Inspector General Maj. Gen. Carlos Suarez, the man put in charge of investigating the “false positives” scandal—which revealed an epidemic of extrajudicial killings of innocent civilians by the Army to inflate the guerrilla body count. In a February 2009 meeting, Suarez told an Embassy official that the “phenomenon originated in the 4th Brigade in Medellín,” a unit once led by “former Army Commander Mario Montoya and current Army Commander Oscar Gonzalez.”
- Suarez said the “insistence by some military commanders on body counts as a measure of success despite [Ministry of Defense] directives to the contrary—coupled with some commanders’ ties to criminals and narcotraffickers—led to the specific pattern of murders” in the “false positives” cases.
- Army Commander Gonzalez “opposes his work” according to Suarez, and had “tried to intimidate witnesses not to testify about murders committed by the 11th Brigade in Sucre.” (more…)
