When Beyer Ignacio Pérez Hernández was offered a job building a bridge with his cousin three hours from home, near the small colonial town of Nunchía in Colombia’s eastern plains, he didn’t think twice. 

They set out a few days early to find a room near the building site. When they arrived, thirsty from spending hours on the road, they went into a small roadside restaurant and grabbed a drink. The next moment, soldiers burst through the door and forced them to the floor, gagging them. 

From there, they were forced into a truck, driven to the remote area of Las Tapias, and murdered. The soldiers removed the men’s IDs and left them at the local morgue. 

It was April 6, 2007 — 10 days before Beyer’s birthday.

Beyer was one of an estimated 6,402 civilians that the Colombian army and paramilitaries murdered and attempted to pass off as guerrilla combatants in the country’s 53-year armed conflict, in order to inflate their kill counts. These mass killings, which took place mostly between 2002 and 2008, became known as the “false positives” scandal.

Now, a group of human rights lawyers and relatives of the victims are seeking to try Colombia’s former President Álvaro Uribe in Argentine courts over the killings.

The case against Uribe is possible because of a legal provision known as universal jurisdiction, which allows some of the most serious crimes — such as genocide, war crimes, and forced disappearances — to be tried in Argentina even if they were not committed here.

The plaintiffs chose Argentina because it’s a Spanish-speaking country with broad universal jurisdiction laws and a track record of prosecuting human rights crimes. While universal jurisdiction laws exist in several countries, they often require some kind of connection with the nation — Germany’s universal jurisdiction requires that the accused be resident in the country, for example. But in Argentina, individuals can be tried even if they have no connection with the country.

Momentum to prosecute Uribe abroad increased after the International Criminal Court decided not to continue investigating Colombia in 2021, according to Sebastian Escobar, a lawyer from the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Colective (CAJAR, by its Spanish initials), one of the human rights organizations leading the case.

Rewards for killing

The case against Uribe revolves around the fact that he presided over the army and implemented policies that motivated soldiers to kill civilians living in zones controlled by insurgent groups. Members of the military who killed people in combat would receive perks like days off, trips, and promotions, while those who failed to meet their quotas could lose their jobs, according to Escobar. 

“That combination ended up molding the behavior of the troops so that they would present more and more combat deaths,” he said. In many cases, the army prioritized vulnerable people they thought wouldn’t be missed: those who were unhoused, had substance abuse problems, or were extremely poor. Others, like Beyer, were taken hundreds of kilometers from home in the hope that they wouldn’t be identified.

Paramilitaries and soldiers alike have testified that right-wing paramilitary groups collaborated with the Colombian security forces and intelligence services to carry out extrajudicial killings of citizens.

Human rights investigations conducted while Uribe was still in office demonstrate that he knew the mass killings were taking place. But it was not until 2008 that he changed policies. When he did, levels of extra-judicial killings dropped almost immediately.

“There were policies that favored the murders, but there were also orders given by Uribe in his capacity as president and commander of the armed forces, asking his troops for casualties,” said lawyer Sergio Arboleda of the nonprofit Corporación Jurídica Libertad, who is representing the victims. “Uribe would call the commanders; he was very present in the terrain. He’d call for operations, and in those operations there were illicit deaths.”

‘Don’t speak to that child’

Beyer’s son Wilmer Andrey, now 27, was one of the victims who traveled to Argentina to file his demands for justice. After his father’s murder, he started to use the surname Betancourt because his community, believing that his father had been either a guerrilla fighter or a paramilitary, ostracized him. 

“It was, ‘Don’t speak to that child at school,’ because the same thing could happen to families of people that associated with us, as happened to my family,” Betancourt said. “It was total isolation.

“I couldn’t go to my basketball championships; I couldn’t just go to the swimming pool with my friends because I had no friends anymore, they didn’t want to be with me,” he said. “It had such a strong psychological effect on my grandma that she would confuse me with my dad. She’d call me by his name, and when I said, ‘No, I’m Andrey,’ she would start to cry.”

Counting his great-grandparents, grandparents, his parents, himself, and any children or grandchildren he has in the future, he expects the inter-generational trauma to affect six generations of his family.

It wasn’t until Wilmer Andrey moved to Bogotá that he began to make friends. At university, he studied an undergraduate degree in government and international relations, a masters in international affairs, and is now pursuing a second masters in public administration — he has taken refuge in study, he said — but he has struggled with periods of intense depression. 

Some Colombian military officers have been convicted in the case. In 2015, Colombia founded a special peace court to try FARC militants and members of the security forces. But the court doesn’t have jurisdiction to investigate former presidents. 

The case in Argentina is being handled by judge Sebastián Ramos. Both the victims and the lawyers alike recognize that the process is likely to take years. Trials for abuses committed during the Franco dictatorship in Spain have been making their way through Argentina’s courts for over a decade. But the victims and their lawyers remain hopeful.

“The Argentine courts represent a chance at justice,” Arboleda said.