Former Colombian army officer gets 20 years for 8 killings

Bogota, Mar 17 (EFE).- A former Colombian army captain has been sentenced by a judge to 20 years in prison for his role in the killings of eight people, including three children, in Antioquia and Cordoba provinces in 2005, the Attorney General's Office said.

Retired Capt. Guillermo Armando Gordillo Ssnchez pleaded guilty to homicide, criminal conspiracy and other charges, the AG's office said.

The investigation into the murders was launched after two adults and a child were killed in San Jose de Apartado, a village in the northwestern province of Antioquia, and three other adults and two children were killed in Tierra Alta, a village in the northern province of Cordoba.

"Based on what has been established, members of the Heroes de Tolova Bloc of the self-defense forces (militia groups) committed the crimes cited, while serving as guides for regular troops carrying out" a military operation, the AG's office said.

Former militiamen Huber Dario Yañez, known as "Comandante 21," Joel Jose Vargas Florez and Jorge Luis Salgado David also reached plea agreements with prosecutors in the case.

Ten other soldiers are being tried for the killings.

The country's largest paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, militia federation, demobilized earlier this decade.

The AUC, accused of committing numerous human rights violations, demobilized more than 31,000 of its fighters between the end of 2003 and mid-2006 as part of the peace process with President Alvaro Uribe's administration.

The group was made up of numerous rural defense cooperatives formed more than 20 years ago to battle leftist rebels.

Many of the militias, however, degenerated into death squads and carried out massacres of peasants suspected of having rebel sympathies, along with slayings of journalists and union members accused of favoring the leftist insurgents.

Under the terms of the 2005 Peace and Justice Law, pushed through Congress by the U.S.-backed Uribe administration to regulate the militiamen's reinsertion into society, former AUC members face a maximum of eight years in prison if convicted of any of the scores of massacres of suspected rebel sympathizers attributed to the rightists over the years.

Colombia's Constitutional Court upheld the law in 2006 but conditioned the sentence reductions on full disclosure and confession of crimes and reparations to victims.

On May 13, 2008, the Colombian government extradited 14 former AUC chiefs to the United States.

The former AUC commanders were wanted in the United States on drug, money laundering and other charges.

The penetration of the AUC into Colombian politics came to light in November 2006 when the so-called "para-political" scandal broke, and dozens of legislators, the overwhelming majority of them supporters of Uribe, now in his second four-year term, have been implicated.

Since then, more than 60 politicians, including some three dozen members of Congress, have been arrested for their alleged links to the AUC.