When president Alvaro Uribe was elected back in 2002, he had just one goal; to exterminate the world’s oldest guerrilla organization, the 40-year-old FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas).

Uribe was the first president elected just to make war. He had money (which came from the US-sponsored Plan Colombia) and public opinion on his side.

His defense ministers began encouraging the army to produce results as part of a complex political scheme he called ”Seguridad Democrática.” Under the scheme, soldiers who killed an enemy in combat received promotions or money and their direct superiors were guaranteed a fast career up the army ranks.

The presidential definition of FARC as a terrorist organization became commonly accepted by the Colombian press and the organization was included in the terrorist lists of Europe and the US. This inclusion largely justified the quick swell of the army to a force of 400.000 men and the concept that against terrorism, everything is accepted.

Slowly, the results started to show up.

The army regained control of the country’s roads that had been repeatedly raided by common criminals, guerrillas and paramilitaries. Across Colombia, reports of hundreds of guerrillas killed in action began to spill into Bogota. The victorious soldiers earned money, the field commanders earned promotions and Uribe looked like he was close to bringing Colombia’s 40-year-old civil strife to an end.

But the truth was that the happy ending everyone expected was far from being a reality.

The press slowly began to rumor of a disturbing fact. It seemed that some of the presumed guerrillas that were killed in action were not really killed in action… nor were they really guerillas. They were homeless people and kids from Colombia’s poorest urban neighborhoods that had been recruited by middlemen with the promise of well-paid work in the remote rural regions of the country. They were then sold to the army, executed in a fake firefight and buried in common graves where it was thought that their corpses would never be found.

Handling the situation was impossible. What became known as the ”False Positives Scandal” quickly spread across the country in every magazine and newspaper. Juan Manuel Santos, then defense minister, now presidential candidate, could hardly refute the accusations that were being thrown at him.

“In some instances, there has been gross negligence in the army, and that has permitted some people to involve themselves in crimes, which in some regions resulted in the killings of innocents to show success against the criminals,” Uribe said in an unforgettable press conference back in October 2008, right before firing 27 army officers and soldiers, including three generals. Coincidentally, or maybe not, Navanethem Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was visiting Colombia for the first time that same day. Following his visit, the CCEEU (a coordination of more than 200 NGOs working on human rights issues in Colombia) presented a report that included hundreds of Falsos Positivos cases from across the country.

A few days later, Mario Montoya, the commander of the Colombian army, was forced to resign. He was dispatched far away from the eye of the scandal’s storm and given an embassy in Santo Domingo. “He was ‘punished’, as too often happens in Colombia, with an embassy, in this case, the one in Santo Domingo,” commented US Senator Patrick Leahy, a careful observer of the Colombian situation.

Today, prosecutors in Colombia have counted around 2200 documented cases of False Positive. Civil society organizations have demanded a full investigation of high rank military officials, including the Minister of Defense, Juan Manuel Santos, in order to end the culture of impunity that has existed in many past cases in Colombia.

At present, Santos is a presidential candidate with the highest number of votes in the polls for the elections of May.

The United Nations, in it’s last report concerning the human rights situation in Colombia, describes the extrajudicial executions of the scandal as “an extended and common event committed by a significant number of military units throughout the country.” If this is the case, by the UN’s own definition, the False Positives scandal falls within the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) interpretation of a crime against humanity.

During his first visit to Colombia, ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo commented on the possibility of the ICC extending its jurisdiction to Colombia: “Either the national courts do their job or we will do it. There is no more room for impunity”. Because of the scandal, the UK decided to suspend part of it’s military aid to the Colombian army. The United States is also rethinking it’s monetary contribution to ”Plan Colombia”, which has caused two years of consecutive reduction of it’s military part.

In Colombia, the conflict between the government and the FARC has degenerated to the point where people are no longer killed for an ideology, or for ethnic or political reasons. Today’s killings and assassinations are done for money and to continue what has become a profitable war. The tragedy of Colombia is that the False Positives scandal is a small symptom of what has become a macabre cycle of death and despair.

Living in Colombia I have been moved by the families who have lost relatives in such a senseless situation.

This story has been ignored by mainstream media around the world and for this reason I decided to film a documentary of this subject.

”Falsos Positivos” the movie has got a position in several festivals in Europe and Latin America, but still a lot has to be done to not to let this scandal fade away.







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