Mike Power, FirstPost.co.uk

Mariel Munoz was out selling food near her home in Vista
Hermosa, Colombia, when a local boy ran up to her and said: "The army took
Jailler and I think they killed him."
By the time Munoz (right) found her son, the soldiers had dressed
his corpse in guerrilla army fatigues and planted a radio, a gun and grenade on
him. Under pressure from President Alvaro Uribe to show gains in the endless
fight to destroy FARC - the leftist rebel army which has been at war with the
Colombian state since the 1960s - the soldiers were trying to pass off
15-year-old Jailler as a guerrilla.

There is no evidence that the boy was ever a member of FARC.
"He worked by his father's side," his mother told me. "When he
wasn't here, he'd tell me where he was. He was a decent boy, he didn't like
drinking, he liked watching TV and playing football."
Jailler worked stripping the leaves from coca plants - an illegal but common
enough job in Colombia,
the world's biggest cocaine producer - or as a wood carrier. "Everyone
loved Jailler," his mother said. "They killed him for supposedly
being a guerrilla, but he never liked the guerrillas, or the army. They killed
him because they felt like it."
Mariel Munoz's story might be treated as the outpourings of a grieving
mother unable to bear the truth - if her story wasn't a common one. Last month,
Amnesty International USA published a report on extra-judicial killings in
Colombia, and detailed cases where peasants have been seized by the army in
civilian clothes, killed and later dressed in guerrilla fatigues in a
phenomenon known as 'false positives'.
Jailler died in 2006. Last year, Munoz decided to launch a legal case to
question the killing. In February she had to leave her home when army officers
threatened her after learning about the lawsuit.

"The army came to my home. One of them said, 'What a shame
that I let you escape,' And then he made a gesture like he was slitting
someone's throat. I left everything dumped there, and fled with the clothes I
was wearing. They didn't give me time to get anything else."
She now lives in Bogota,
supported by friends. "What else am I going to do? I'll keep on
fighting," she says.

Jailler's death came in a wave of executions carried out with
almost complete impunity by the Colombian army, according to Ramiro Orjuela, a
Bogota-based lawyer working for victims of state violence. In the Meta province alone - a cattle-ranching region south-east
of the capital - 300 people have been killed since 2006. The army's 12th Mobile
Brigade operates there, and is believed to be responsible for most of the
killings. reported to be "nearly dying of hunger" when she handed
herself in after President Uribe guaranteed her safety if she surrendered.
However, behind the government celebrations of Karina's capture, and of the
recent high-profile raid into neighbouring Ecuador to execute FARC's number
two, Paul Reyes, the army's casual slaughter of innocent people continues.
As John Lindsay-Poland, of New York's
Fellowship for Reconciliation, puts it, the killings are easy: the army are
rarely if ever prosecuted for killing civilians, and they measure success by
body count. "The predominant proclamation of success is how many
guerrillas were killed in combat. There is seldom any punishment for killing a
civilian." Out of 955 reported cases of military killings of civilians
over five years - including 'false positives' - only two have resulted in
convictions.
Mariel Munoz recalls the moment she confronted the officers who confirmed
they had killed her son. "They laughed, right there and then."