In Colombia, 10 military members and one civilian have been accused of murdering at least 120 people, forcibly disappearing two dozen others and falsely claiming their victims were guerrilla members who had been killed in combat. Tuesday’s indictment marks the first time Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace tribunal charged military members involved in what’s known as the “false positives” scandal, where thousands of extrajudicial killings were falsely portrayed as leftist rebels who died in combat. The “false positives” were meant to help give a sense of the Colombian military’s victory in the half-century U.S.-backed conflict against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. This is Catalina Díaz, a judge with Colombia’s peace tribunal.
Catalina Díaz Gómez: “We have found that it was a pattern of macro-criminality, which is to say the repetition of at least 120 murders during two years in the same region by the same group of people associated with a criminal organization and following the same modus operandi.”
The tribunal was created after a peace deal was signed in Colombia in 2016. Click here to see our interview with Mario Murillo yesterday.