After years of generous funding by the Bush administration, it appears that Colombian military and paramilitary outfits, which "are modeled on the U.S. military," have embraced some of the same tactics of their American counterparts operating in Iraq and Afghanistan: dress up killed civilians with planted "evidence," call them "guerrillas" or "terrorists," depending on locale, and then hail the mounting enemy body count as evidence of "progress" and "success." It even appears that some Colombian army units carry evidence planting "kits," including grenades and small arms that might be planted on or next to bodies, should such a need arise.

[U]nder intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other yardsticks to measure battlefield success.
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But with the recent demobilization of thousands of paramilitary fighters, many of whom operated death squads to wipe out rebels, army killings of civilians have grown markedly since 2004 …. The spike has come during a military buildup that has seen the armed forces nearly double to 270,000 members in the last six years, becoming the second-largest military in Latin America.

There are varying accounts on the number of registered extrajudicial killings, as the civilian deaths are called. But a report by a coalition of 187 human rights groups said there are allegations that between mid-2002 and mid-2007, 955 civilians were killed and classified as guerrillas fallen in combat -- a 65 percent increase over the previous five years, when 577 civilians were reported killed by troops.

"We used to see this as isolated, as a military patrol that lost control," said Bayron Gongora of the Judicial Freedom Corp., a Medellin lawyers group representing the families of 110 people killed in murky circumstances. "But what we're now seeing is systematic."

Even investigations of these killings come under pressure from military commanders, yet another tactic straight out of Iraq, where those involved in the Haditha massacre have seen nothing but dropped charges, which blinkered Bush supporters believe indicates that the marines did absolutely nothing wrong.

In cases that appear criminal, civilian prosecutors take over, as they did in the slayings of Valencia and Castañeda in San Francisco. But human rights groups and government prosecutors say the initial probes have usually been perfunctory, and investigators have been under intense pressure from high-ranking military officers to rule in the army's favor.

Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patrick Leahy, finds these developments troubling, though this will no doubt be portrayed as symptomatic of Democrats' intrinsic antipathy toward "free trade" with Colombia.

"We've had six years, $5 billion in U.S. aid. More than half of it has gone to the Colombian military, and we find the army is killing more civilians, not less. And by all accounts, all independent accounts, we find that civilians are just being taken out, executed and then dressed up in uniforms so they can claim body counts of guerrillas killed."

Exacerbating this is a Colombian army policy of rewarding amassed kills with extra pay and vacation days.