Luz Marina Bernal holds a photograph of her slain son.
BY STIG ARILD PETTERSEN
Luz Marina Bernal straightens the sheet on the top of the bunk bed in the narrow, florescent-lit room. “This is where I last saw my son alive,” she says calmly. “When the rest of us came back the next afternoon he was gone. He left to find work, but never returned home to his mother.” Six months later Luz Marina would dig her son out of a mass grave 400 miles from home stuffed in a plastic bag. According to the army he was ‘N.N.’ – the unidentified commander of a narco-terrorist group who fell in battle with the Colombian Army’s 15th Infantry Brigade. He was really Luz Marina’s mentally disabled son who loved and trusted everyone around him.
This is not just the story of how 26 year old Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal was brutally executed by Colombia’s army. It’s the story of more than 2,000 innocent young Colombians who have possibly suffered the same fate. It’s the story of how agents of the state took advantage of poor Colombians’ dreams of a better life and murdered them for profit. The so-called ‘false positives’ scandal of the armed forces created waves of shock and disbelief throughout Colombia when it was uncovered in 2008. Still, two years later, families of the victims are struggling to see justice served.
On a sunny day in late November 1981. Luz Marina Bernal was five months pregnant with her second child and on her way to the gynecologist for a routine check of how the baby was doing. She was 22 years old. As she was crossing an avenue a car at high speed appeared in the corner of her eye, but it was too late to avoid being hit. The impact threw her several yards down the road, smashing her belly with her unborn son into the ground. The accident would change the child’s fate and ultimately lead to his death 26 years later.
The scene of the accident was Soacha, a town on the outskirts of Colombia’s capital Bogotá on the busy south-bound highway Autopista del Sur. Most people who take this route out of Bogotá only catche a glimpse of the suburb through the window of the bus or car as it rapidly flies by. If they take any notice at all, they might just consider it the last frontier of urbanism before the highway soon drops into the majestic Magdalena River Valley.
Soacha was once a small town of its own, removed from the hectic life of the capital. But as the rural population of Colombia migrated in large numbers to the cities in search for work and prosperity, Bogotá slowly closed up on it. In the 1970s the Colombian Communist Party helped thousands of migrants build illegal houses that still stand today, and the town grew exponentially, finally filling the small gap that was still left between Soacha and Bogotá in the early 80s. Now, an outsider wouldn’t distinguish Soacha from the many poor neighborhoods that encircle central Bogotá.
When you get off the highway and enter Soacha itself, the potholed dirt road makes any speed above 10 mph feel like you’re on an involuntary ride down a mogul trail. The dust instantly starts covering your car, diffusing its color into a shade of brownish grey. The ramshackle houses that make up big parts of Soacha are mostly made out of unpainted concrete or red bricks. Sometimes the dust that covers them makes it hard to tell the difference.
No one really knows how many people live in Soacha. Estimates go almost as high as one million people, but a 2005 census found less than 400,000. Corrupt politicians in Bogotá were widely blamed for deflating the numbers, to avoid giving Soacha’s local government the money needed for social services. The real number is probably somewhere in between, and continues to rise. Schools and health clinics feel the pressure created by more people settling here, displaced by conflict or poverty in other parts of the country. When they arrive in Soacha, jobs are hard to come by, and a majority of Soachans make their living the informal sector as street vendors or with illegal activities. Many make the one hour commute to the center of Bogotá every morning and return late at night.
The volatility of Soachan society makes it open to exploitation by people with bad intentions.
Paramilitary groups and other armed gangs work like traditional mafias in many areas, extorting “taxes” from private businesses and public institutions alike. Rates of unemployment are only matched by those of drug addiction, alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Most people would grab any chance of a better life than what Soacha has to offer.
The accident in 1981 left Luz Marina with a fractured pelvic bone, spinal injuries and badly bruised legs. But the news about her baby was even worse. The doctors said the impact had hurt the fetus so much that they expected it to die, and told her to go home and wait for her body to expulse it. But the young woman wouldn’t give up. In spite of the almost unbearable pain she suffered, she refused to take any drugs in order to not hurt her child.
A month later, Luz Marina proved the doctors wrong. Just past midnight on December 22 1981 little Fair Leonardo was born – three months premature. The lack of proper care and incubators at the hospital made him vulnerable to infection, and he was soon diagnosed with meningitis. For days the newborn was in a limbo between life and death. Fair Leonardo survived these dramatic first days of his life, but the result was brain damage and health problems that plagued him for the rest of his life.
“On the outside my son was 26 years old, but inside his head he was really just nine,” Luz Marina says as she wipes a humid cloth over a picture of her son to keep the dust away. The young man on the picture, placed on the glass door of a large cupboard that takes up a whole wall in the modest living room, has a wide neck and shoulders and sports a black suit and beautiful blue tie. The neatness of his attire and haircut could make him pass for a business executive. The expressionless mouth makes him look serious, but the light blue eyes signal innocence, kindness and trust. Fair Leonardo wasn’t like the other boys in the neighborhood.
“They are all my friends,” he would say of drug dealers and robbers alike when he came back to his mother before his nine o’clock curfew every night. The brain damage he had suffered from birth impeded him from learning how to read and write and he never felt comfortable sitting at a school desk. When Luz Marina finally managed to persuade the local school authorities that Fair Leonardo had severe learning disabilities, they enrolled him in a program where he learned to bake, paint and make music.
“He loved to help people and trusted everyone,” Luz Marina says. Fair Leonardo would get up early in the morning and spend the whole day working wherever he was needed. He volunteered in church, helped clean up the park, and even participated in the campaigns of local politicians. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Fair Leonardo was special, and some took advantage of his love of working at construction sites, carrying materials and mixing cement. “He just wanted to feel useful, and money was never on his mind,” his mother explains. “He could come home after a long day’s work with 500 pesos (US$ .25) in his pocket and a big smile on his face. The little money he earned he often gave away to friends or he bought milk or fruit which he brought home to the family.”
Fair Leonardo understood that he wasn’t like everyone else. When his mother teased him and asked about girlfriends, he answered that girls didn’t want someone like him. But he still followed the local beauties around and loved whatever attention they gave him. Even though it wasn’t like him to defy the rules of the house, trailing the girls was what Luz Marina hoped Fair Leonardo was doing when he still hadn’t returned home at 9PM on 8 January 2008. John Smith, Fair Leonardo’s older brother, said that Fair Leonardo had received a phone call that morning where he only replied “yes, boss” and hung up. “A friend has offered me a well-paid job, I’ll see you later,” he told his brother before he left the house. It was the last time anyone in the family saw Fair Leonardo alive.
When her son hadn’t returned the next morning, Luz Marina became worried and went to the local police station to report Fair Leonardo as missing. In a country where tens of thousands of people go missing every year, worried mothers are not a top priority of the police, so she was told that she had to wait until he had been gone for 72 hours. “You know how young men are, Ms. Bernal,” the police officer told her. “He has probably found some girl and gone away with her for a few days to have some fun.” The family started searching for him everywhere they could think of. “We worried that had been in an accident and lost his memory. We searched the streets of Bogotá, hospitals, rehab centers, everywhere,” she says of the first days after his disappearance. “It was a horrible feeling that he had disappeared without a trace.” Luz Marina went to the medicina legal, an administrative office in charge of forensic investigations, to look for him in the pictures of dead people that they post every eight days. She was relieved to see that he wasn’t one of them. “I really thought he was still alive,” she says.
Meanwhile, 400 miles away, close to a small town called Abrego in the province Norte de Santander near the border with Venezuela, Lieutenant Diego Aldair Vargas Cortes of the Colombian Army’s 15th Infantry Brigade reported to his commanders that his unit had been in a brief exchange of fire with a group of narco-terrorists who were known to extort money from local villagers. The clash had resulted in the death of the group’s leader who was classified as an ‘N.N.’ fallen in battle. The corpse was taken to the nearby town of Ocaña, where it was registered, put in a plastic bag and buried in a communal grave beneath three other dead unidentified criminals.
It would take eight months of uncertainty and pain before Luz Marina discovered that the N.N. of this incident was her own son. In early September a neighbor told Luz Marina that he body of his cousin who had disappeared from Soacha in late January had turned up in a mass grave in Ocaña, and that the medicina legal had a list of another 30 previously unidentified people that had been buried in the same place.
“The bus ride to the local medicina legal took only an hour, but it seemed like a lifetime,” says Luz Marina. “I still had a hope that my son was alive, and wanted to see the list of names to make sure he was not on it.” But when she arrived and was given the list, Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal was at the top of it. Still hoping that someone had made a mistake, she asked to see a picture of the deceased. As she talks about the experience in the comfort of her living room almost two years later, tears start running down her cheeks and her voice falters.
“It was a gruesome sight… he had been shot several times in the head and his face was almost completely destroyed. ‘Is this your son,’ the doctor asked me as I looked at the picture on a computer screen. ‘Yes, this is my dear son,’ I replied. How can I get to him?”
Luz Marina was told that it would cost her about 15 million pesos (US$ 7,700) to get permission to exhume the body and to transport it back to Soacha. With her husband Carlos, who works as a truck driver and is gone from home for long periods of time, she managed to scrape together half of that, some through loans made with the property of relatives as collateral. They borrowed a pickup truck and on the morning of 24 September Luz Marina, Carlos and John Smith arrived at the medicina legal office in Ocaña. There, the doctors came with shocking allegations.
“Did you know that your son was the head of a narco-terrorist organization, Mrs. Bernal?” one of them asked her. “He was killed in a military offensive on 12 January at 2.24 a.m. and was found wearing a guerrilla uniform with a 9 millimeter gun in his right hand.” Luz Marina became furious. “Tell me, doctor, how could my son who disappeared from Soacha on 8 January, who was declared 53 % handicapped, who did not know how to read or write, who did not understand the value of money, and who only used his left arm because of disabilities in the right, become the head of a narco-terrorist organization 400 miles away in a matter of three days? This is an insult, and I cannot accept it,” she said.
In Ocaña there are so many N.N.s that there isn’t enough room for them in the cemetery. So Fair Leonardo had been buried in a small town down the road called Las Liscas. Luz Marina and her husband were told by the mayor’s office in Ocaña that they could start the exhumation of Fair Leonardo’s body early next morning, but only if Luz Marina managed to persuade the journalists that had already caught interest of her story to stay away. At 5 p.m. the three met with representatives of the local authorities at the central cemetery. As Fair Leonardo’s body was the bottom one of the four in the grave, it took them until late afternoon.
Luz Marina tries not to think too much about these events. Eight months in a grave had made Fair Leonardo impossible to recognize, she says. As they pulled him out, the situation made everyone present feel sick and want to vomit. Having to transport the corpse of their own son the 11 hour drive back to Soacha was a burden beyond imagination. When they stopped to refuel, she recalls, the smell of the body on the back of the car was horrible, and people at the gas stations would stare disgusted at them. Back in Soacha they held a Christian funeral for Fair Leonardo. “It was a beautiful ceremony,” she says. “This was a day when God took one of his angels back to heaven.” As soon as the funeral was over, Luz Marina’s battle for justice started.
It turned out that Luz Marina wasn’t the only mother whose son had been executed by the Colombian army far away from home. “First I thought this was a special case,” Luz Marina says. “But it soon turned out we’re hundreds, maybe thousands of families who have experienced the same.” When Luz Marina and three other Soachan mothers revealed their stories to the media, it unleashed what has become known as the ‘false positives’ scandal, the most devastating defamation of the Colombian armed forces in modern history. Soon similar stories started emerging all over the country. The big question was how such gruesome mass murder could be executed by an institution that was meant to protect the people of Colombia from external and internal threats?
The answer was greed. In 2005 President Álvaro Uribe introduced a new policy to motivate the army to fight harder in the battle against the guerrillas. For every illegal fighter they managed to kill, commanders would receive 1.5 million pesos (US$ 770), 15 days of leave and a possible promotion. To some in the Colombian army, this opened an opportunity for easy cash and a climb up the military hierarchy.
Criminal charges have been made against six army personnel for involvement in the murder of Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal. But there is an ongoing fight between the military and civil courts over who is the right one to try the case. In court it has become clear that the abduction and execution of Fair Leonardo were thoroughly planned by a number of individuals, and included both military people and civilians. The story is remarkably similar to what has become known of other cases, and reveals a bloodthirsty and greedy industry involving a large number of people.
According to court records and media reports, the deadly scam worked this way: The victims were recruited by civilians who often have connections to the army or paramilitary groups. The recruiters were often people with knowledge of the local communities, and the victims far from randomly selected. In Fair Leonardo’s case the alleged recruiter’s name was Alexander Carretero Días, a man who lived a few blocks away from the Bernal family and whose brother-in-law is an army officer. The recruiters in Soacha mainly did their jobs in a neighborhood store where unemployed men often came to drink beer and find work. According to the criminal investigation, Fair Leonardo was transported by Mr. Díaz to Abrego where they were stopped at a fake military checkpoint. Fair Leonardo was taken into military custody because he didn’t carry proper ID. Mr. Díaz got 200,000 pesos (US$ 100) for the job, turned the car around and left.
What happened from here on is still unclear. But investigations of other cases have revealed a macabre pattern: Army personnel transported the victims to a nearby house known as Tienda de Costeros where they would intoxicate them with alcohol or drugs. When the young men were too weak to make resistance, soldiers took them somewhere more remote. There they often fired off some rounds of ammunition and a few grenades to make it sound to local villagers like there was a battle going on. Then they executed the innocent men by rifle shots, dressed the corpses in guerrilla uniforms and took pictures for documentation.
As more and more stories came out in the media through the fall of 2008 and spring 2009, attention turned to the politicians. In the days after first cases became public, President Uribe denied that the armed forces had done anything illegal. To the media he said that these men that had been killed in Norte de Santander had not gone there to work as coffee pickers but to participate in the armed battle against the Colombian state. “He called our sons criminals,” says Luz Marina. “That’s when I decided that we had to fight the government and military.”
As many as 1,273 criminal investigations involving 2,077 ‘false positives’ have so far been launched. According to the human rights group Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo in Bogotá, which supports many of the families with legal assistance, the number of victims may be as high as 2,600 – worth more than $2 million in bonus payments to the officers who allegedly killed them. A large number of officers, as high up as colonels, have been arrested.
When the extent of the scandal became clear to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Philip Alston, last summer, he decided to go on a ten days fact finding mission to Colombia. Mr. Alston cannot yet comment on the report he will present to the UN Human Rights Council in June, but in a press conference at the end of his mission to Colombia, he was very clear that the country faced enormous challenges. “The explanation favored by many in Government,” he said, “that the killings were carried out on a small scale by a few bad apples – is unsustainable. The sheer number of cases, their geographic spread, and the diversity of military units implicated, indicate that these killings were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military.”
The international recognition of the cases has so far not helped Luz Marina and the other families of the victims much. In late December last year 40 of the military personnel who are under investigation for extrajudicial executions, including the six who are connected to Fair Leonardo’s case, were released because they had been held in custody for too long without trial. According to Reynaldo Vilalba Vargas of Colectivo de Abogados there are a number of obstacles facing those who are fighting for justice in the false positives scandal.
The most pressing question is that of whether the cases belong in a civil or military court. The army wants to handle this case internally, and argues that the alleged crimes were committed by personnel on duty, Mr. Vargas says. Secondly, there are many powerful people that have strong interest in limiting the consequences of this scandal. They manage to restrict the information that both the families and the courts are eager to obtain. Then there’s the problem of threats. Families, judges, media and NGOs who are involved in the fight for justice on behalf of the false positives are consistently harassed and threatened.
In a large surveillance scandal which was rolled up in 2008 it was revealed that Vargas himself and his organization have been under intense illegal surveillance by the Colombian security agency DAS. Mr. Alston’s mission also found that family members of victims have been attacked and even killed. John Smith, Luz Marina’s oldest son, has on two occasions found notes slipped under the door of their house where he is told to stop talking to the media and not dear to exit his house. If he does, one of the notes said, he would have to face the consequences. He has now moved out of the house for the sake of his family’s security.
The families have not received any economic compensation from the state. A social program that supports the families of the victims of Colombia’s armed conflict is limited to crimes committed by guerrillas, paramilitaries or other criminal groups. Executions committed by the state are not covered. “We are not in this fight for the money,” says Luz Marina. “All we want is the truth, justice, to make sure that this crime will not be committed again and that the names of our sons are cleared forever.”
In February Luz Marina was informed that Fair Leonardo’s case has been returned to a military court. She has no belief in that the army will hold a fair trial over the crimes committed by its own personnel.
“If the case in the end will be heard in a military tribunal, we only have one choice left: To appeal to the International Criminal Court. There is clearly no justice left in Colombia.”
Luz Marina has no doubt why Soacha is one of the army’s favorite sources of victims. “The economic situation here is bad, so people are easily fooled by offers of work and good salaries. People think that we will not fight back, that we don’t care about our sons. We mothers stand together in the fight for justice, but we are too poor and have too little influence in society,” she says and looks at the blue sky outside the living room window.
“My dream is that one day we can get all the families of the victims from all over the country to come to Bogotá and protest outside the presidential palace. Imagine, we would be thousands of people. The politicians couldn’t ignore us anymore; they would have to let justice prevail.” But Luz Marina fears the opponent the families are up against. “President Uribe and his men are well organized and will continue to let the army do as they want. Our country has come to a point where the life of a poor person, a farmer, a drug addict, an indigenous person, is worth a few hundred thousand pesos. Is there no moral, no dignity anymore?”