Chapter XV - Killing Through the State in the Colombian War and Getting Away with Murder: An Exploration of Organisational Crime and Its Denial

Summary

A GLIMPSE INTO THE COLAR SHAM-KIAs

Under pressure to produce tangible results whilst confronting an elusive enemy, COLAR became a well-oiled body-counting machine, seemingly increasing its combat effectiveness, according to the reported KIAs, particularly between 2002 and 2008. These kills responded to organisational dynamics: enemy deaths were aggressively ordered down the chain of command; covered corpses were exposed in local news media as war trophies; commanders rewarded units reporting KIAs; kill ratios were used to compare the effectiveness of different tactical units; young officers were pitted against each other and promoted based on KIAs; rewards and decorations were granted based on enemy kills; and KIAs were reported by the Colombian Ministry of Defence (MoD) as the indicator of the results-based war effort. The official death tallies demonstrate the impact of the pressure to kill: whereas in 1999, the armed forces reportedly ‘defused’ 818 guerrillas and 35 paramilitary; by 2002 the yearly toll of reported KIAs had more than doubled – a total of 1,690 guerrillas and 85 paramilitaries were reportedly neutralised in action by the armed forces.

This section provides a brief description of sham-KIAs. First, the practice is examined in the context of the overall kill rates reported by the MoD and numerical approximations to the sham-KIAs are presented. The second subsection offers a qualitative approximation to the killing spree and introduces categories in order to describe the variation noted in the caseload of sham-KIAs, as a result of differences observed in the modalities of commission and the selection of victims (targeting).

KILLING IN THE COLOMBIAN WAR AND SHAM-KIAs

Death is not as common in Colombia's counter-insurgent warfare as most people would expect. Even at their height, reported combat kills were a small proportion of the overall lethal violence recorded. Most killing in the country takes place outside the context of combat; for example, in 2011, the MoD reported 406 enemy KIAs, whereas, the national forensic authority reported 16,554 homicides nationwide. This proportion is merely indicative, as underreporting needs to be considered.