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........

© Buenos Aires Herald