Blanca Monroy held a picture of her son Julian Oviedo, a laborer killed by Colombian soldiers. The army called him a subversive.

By SIMON ROMERO

SOACHA, Colombia - Julian Oviedo, a 19-year-old construction worker in this gritty patchwork of slums, told his mother on March 2 that he was going to talk to someone about a job offer. A day later, he was shot dead by army troops some 563 kilometers to the north. He was classified as a subversive and registered as a combat kill.
Colombia’s government, the Bush administration’s top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the killings of Mr. Oviedo and dozens of other young, impoverished men and women . Some were vagrants, others street vendors or manual laborers. But their fates were often the same: being catalogued as insurgents or criminal gang members and killed by the armed forces.
Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that Colombia’s security forces are increasingly killing civilians and making it look as if they died in combat, often by planting weapons by the bodies or dressing them in guerrilla fatigues. With soldiers under intense pressure to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits , reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say.
The deaths call into question the depth of the military’s recent gains against the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
President Alvaro Uribe’s government announced in October that it had fired more than two dozen officers and soldiers, including three generals, in connection with the deaths of Mr. Oviedo and 10 other men from Soacha . On November 4, the commander of Colombia’s army, General Mario Montoya, resigned.
Mr. Oviedo’s mother, Blanca Monroy, discussed her son’s death in an interview in her cinder-block hovel in Soacha. “If the responsibility of the army is to protect us from harm, how could they have killed my son this way?” asked Ms. Monroy, 49. “The official explanation is absurd, if he was here just a day earlier living a normal life.”
The wave of killings has heightened focus on the American Embassy here, which is responsible for screening Colombian military units for human rights abuses before they can receive United States aid. A study by the human rights groups Amnesty International and Fellowship of Reconciliation found that 47 percent of the civilian killings reported in 2007 involved Colombian units financed by the United States.
A senior official at the American Embassy said the reports of civilian killings were of concern. “If the facts in some cases do show that parts of the armed forces were taking part in murder, that’s wrong, and there should be mechanisms to prevent this from happening and mechanisms to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Even before the most recent cases, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002. The increase spurred the Defense Ministry to issue a directive last year making it a priority to capture rebels rather than kill them.
Until the latest wave of killings, it appeared that the new policy was starting to work. But the spate of cases in Soacha and elsewhere suggests that the problem may be more systemic than once thought.
In some cases, victims’ families spoke of middlemen who had recruited their loved ones with vague promises of jobs elsewhere, only to deliver them to war zones where they were shot dead by soldiers.
One morning in April 2004, soldiers approached the home of Juan de Jesus Rendon, 33, a peasant farmer in Antioquia Department, and shot him in front of his son, Juan Esteban, who was then 10.
The soldiers placed a two-way radio and a gun near Mr. Rendon’s body, court records show, and told his son that his siblings would suffer the same fate unless he said his father had fired at the soldiers.
The five soldiers involved were convicted of homicide . The case is one of a small number - fewer than 50 - that have resulted in convictions this decade.
“I still fear this can happen again.” Vilma Garcia, 35, Mr. Rendon’s widow, said in an interview. “The soldiers think we are poor and worthless, so nobody will care how we are killed.