"False positives" scandal

The "false positives" scandal (Spanish: Escándalo de los falsos positivos) was a series of murders in Colombia, part of the armed conflict in that country between the government and guerrilla forces of the FARC and the ELN. Members of the military and their civilian collaborators lured poor or mentally impaired civilians to remote parts of the country with offers of work, killed them, and presented them to authorities as guerrilleros killed in battle, in an effort to inflate body counts and receive promotions or other benefits. While Colombian investigative agencies have found cases as early as 1988, the peak of the phenomenon took place between 2006 and 2009, during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe Vélez.^[1]

As of June 2012, a total of 3,350 such cases had been investigated in all parts of the country and verdicts had been reached in 170 cases. Human rights groups have charged that the judicial cases progressed too slowly.^[1] The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) established in a February 2021 report the total number of victims to be 6,402 between 2002 and 2008.^[2] The JEP is a special type of court without compulsive participation to any of the actors accused and involved, only those willing are put on the stand.^[3] An article from The Guardian shows a 2018 study claiming a total of 10,000 "false positive" victims between 2002 and 2010.^[4]

The name of the scandal refers to the technical term of "false positive" which describes a test falsely detecting a condition that is not present. However, in armed conflicts such as this one, it refers to "The victim being lured under false pretenses by a 'recruiter' to a remote location. There, the individual is killed soon after arrival by members of the military. The scene is then manipulated to make it appear as if the individual was legitimately killed in combat.”^[5]