Impunity Feared in Colombia Military Justice Law The crimes were shocking, even for a country hardened by the atrocities of decades of internal conflict. Colombian troops had killed hundreds of innocent civilians for no apparent reason other than to boost rebel body counts, U.N. investigators found. Typically, the victims were down-on-their-luck men lured to their deaths with job promises, then dressed in military fatigues and registered as guerrillas slain in combat. Five years after the scandal broke, only about one-sixth of the soldiers accused have gone to trial or pleaded guilty, and only a handful of those convicted held the rank of major or higher. In all, authorities are investigating some 3,900 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings involving security force members. Human rights activists say they are afraid a new law pushed through Congress by President Juan Manuel Santos in June will make it even harder to pursue those responsible, particularly senior officers. The law, which is under review by the Constitutional Court, would broaden the military justice system's jurisdiction and narrow the definition of extrajudicial killings. Santos says the reform is needed to assure armed forces members they have nothing to fear from making peace with the country's main leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But activists fear the reforms could hinder prosecutions of past and future war crimes by security force members and thus hurt prospects for peace with the FARC, with whom the government launched negotiations in Cuba last year. The FARC has denounced the military justice reform as granting "a pirate's banner to people who have committed terrible crimes against humanity." Some rebels also face war crimes accusations, but the military justice reform applies only to uniformed personnel. "Why does the Santos government, if it's in a peace process, present legislation that strengthens impunity?" asked leftist congressman Ivan Cepeda. It's incoherent and complicates matters. The U.S. Congress is also concerned about impunity in what have become known as the "false positives" cases; military jargon identifies a "positive" as a slain enemy combatant. The bulk of the killings occurred from 2002 to 2008 during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. U.N. investigators deemed the crimes "widespread and systematic." Washington provided more than $2 billion in assistance to Colombia's military in the years that most of the killings occurred, but U.S. lawmakers are currently withholding at least $10 million in military aid over objections to the new law, said Tim Rieser, a senior aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. How much U.S. money went to units guilty of "false positives" is unclear. No breakdown is publicly available. A 1997 law named after Leahy prohibits U.S. funding of foreign military units with members facing credible accusations of rights abuses. Colombian units have been denied aid under the Leahy law, and the State Department, in response to an Associated Press query, characterized its unit vetting as "rigorous." Peace activist John Lindsay-Poland of the U.S.-based Fellowship of Reconciliation disagrees. He is compiling a false positives database and calls U.S. monitoring sloppy. The military reform will only increase impunity, said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for the watchdog group Human Rights Watch, calling it a loophole-filled "major setback for human rights."