BOGOTA: Sitting in a shack that totters on stilts in a slum overlooking Bogota, Colombia's capital city, Gloria Torres gasps as she looks at the creased and faded photograph of her son. He is smiling slightly, dressed in his best, thumbs in pockets, his dark eyes soft.

Torres will remember 7 June 2007 for the rest of her life. She can even pinpoint the hour she knew that her son, 17-year-old Aurelio, was dead.

“It was 3am. I felt something, like he'd come home, come to my bedside. I awoke and spoke to him, but he wasn't there. Then a feeling, a pain came over me, which to this day I still can't shake off.”

In Colombia, torn apart by decades of civil war, premonitions of deaths foretold are often heeded. “Later, I found out that at that very moment the army were assassinating him,” she says.

Colombia's conflict is a three-way standoff between the leftist Farc (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, the government, which is represented by the military, and paramilitary groups founded by wealthy Colombian landowners. And swept up in this conflict in the most brutal manner are ordinary families.

The Farc was formed in the 1960s by peasants after government soldiers attacked rural communist enclaves, and today numbers about 10,000 men, women and children. They face down the Colombian military, funded by the US under its Plan Colombia, an anti-drugs and counter-insurgency initiative introduced by the Clinton administration.

In the 80s, as the Farc gained territory, wealthy Colombian land-owners formed paramilitary groups (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC) to defend their property. But the brutal, pro-government groups of the AUC were little more than death squads, often carrying out the government's dirty work.

In this crossfire are the campesinos, the rural poor. Unluckily for Torres, the soldiers wanted a combat kill to please commanders. They are rewarded with cash or holidays for killing guerrillas but, essentially, any corpse will do in this dirty war. They had intended to bury Aurelio as a “no name” (NN), an unknown guerrilla combatant, but a friend of the boy identified his body at the graveyard.

“There are so many mothers here in the same situation, who have lost their sons as NNs,” says Torres.

She says an ex-paramilitary commander admitted that his men killed many boys like her son, and presented them to the army. They charged 4m pesos (1,350 British pounds).

“That's what my son was worth — 4m pesos,” says Torres.

She shoos her daughter out of the room. “Sometimes, when I'm out walking here, I think I see him. I always think I'll see him, every day. Then I have to remember again that he is dead,” she says.

Although most of these killings remain largely unreported around the world, one particularly brutal event in another part of the country sparked a macabre international cause celebre. In October 2008, 11 young men were enticed away from their homes in Soacha, a poor suburb of Bogota, and offered work. A few weeks later, they were found in a grave in Ocana, near the border of Venezuela, dressed in Farc uniforms and presented as dead guerrillas.

The Soacha killings prompted Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, to say: “... while the Soacha killings were undeniably blatant and obscene ... they are but the tip of the iceberg.” The practice, he said, was “carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service