Okay, so let's unpack this term, false positive.
Right. If you walk into a doctor's office. or
you're running some kind of statistical model,
a false positive is usually just an annoyance.
Yeah, it's a glitch. Exactly. It's a test telling
you that you have a condition when you're actually
perfectly healthy. It's a data error. But today
we are looking at a moment in history where that
sterile clinical term was used to cover up something
absolutely horrific. It really is. It's one of
the most chilling euphemisms in modern history,
I think. Because we aren't talking about lab
results or broken algorithms here. No. In Colombia,
specifically between 2002 and 2010, false positive
became the label for a systematic practice where
the state military murdered civilians. Civilians.
Yeah, civilians. And then they dress them up
to look like enemy combatants just to boost their
statistics. And that is exactly the mission for
this deep dive. We're going to look at the false
positive scandal in Colombia. And for you listening,
we're drawing our information today from reports
by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. Which
is known as the... JEP. Right. The JEP, as well
as United Nations investigations, Human Rights
Watch and Wikipedia's historical records. But
we're not just reciting history here. We really
need to understand the psychology behind this.
Like, how does a system designed to protect citizens
end up incentivizing their execution? To understand
the gravity of this, we really have to start
with the scale of it. For a long time, early
investigations, they hovered around a figure
of about 3 ,000 victims. Which is already massive.
A staggering number of lives. But the JEP, that
Transitional Justice Court established after
the peace treaty with the FARC, they released
a report in February 2021 that completely shattered
that understanding. Yeah. They documented 6 ,402
victims between 2002 and 2008 alone. 6 ,402.
Yeah. I just want to pause on that because that
is hard to even wrap your head around. It is.
That's more than the capacity of some concert
venues. And I've even seen some studies in the
sources that suggest the real number could be
as high as 10 ,000. Right. That's not a glitch.
That's a catastrophe. It's a complete humanitarian
catastrophe. And what we are really exploring
here, the core theme, is the danger of metrics
in war. There's this concept in economics called
Goodhart's Law. Right. It states that when a
measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
measure. Like if you measure a call center solely
by how many calls they take, the workers will
just hang up on people to keep their numbers
up? Exactly. Now apply that exact logic to warfare.
When you measure success solely by body counts
and you attach rewards to those numbers, you
create an incredibly perverse incentive structure.
You essentially gamify death. You do. The military
wasn't measuring territory controlled or civilians
safe. They were measuring liters of blood. Effectively.
And that specific choice of metric turned a defense
force into a predation force. So let's trace
how this unraveled, because for years these were
just scattered reports. You had grieving families,
mostly very poor families that no one listened
to. But then came the Soacha case in 2008. This
seems to be the thread that pulled the whole
sweater apart. Walk us through that. The Soacha
case is absolutely the catalyst. It made the
pattern impossible for the public and the media
to ignore. Soacha is a municipality right near
Bogota, the capital. Okay. It's a working class
area. It often houses people who've been displaced
by violence in other parts of the country. And
in 2008, 22 men from this area just vanished.
Just disappeared. And these weren't combatants,
right? Not at all. These were young men. Some
were construction workers. Some were unemployed.
Some even had cognitive disabilities. They were
highly vulnerable. So what happened to them?
Well, recruiters, who were often civilians working
in cahoots with the military. Yeah. would come
into these neighborhoods and they promised jobs.
They'd say, hey, I work for you on a farm or
have a construction gig. So these guys thought
they were going to earn money to support their
families. They get in a truck or a bus. And they
vanish. But then a few days later, their bodies
turn up hundreds of miles away in Oconia, in
the Norte de Santander department. Which is a
huge distance. A massive distance. And suddenly,
these young men from Sohocha are being reported
by the military as highly dangerous guerrilla
commanders who are killed in fierce combat. The
geography alone makes no sense. Why would you
take them all the way to Ocaña? To break the
link. Think about it. If you kill a kid in Sohocha
and dump the body in Sohocha, the neighbors recognize
him immediately. They'll say, hey, that's Juan,
the baker's son. He's not a guerrilla. Right.
But if you move him 400 miles away... He's just
an anonymous body in a war zone. It's so much
easier to fake the narrative. This is where the
script became visible to investigators later
on, because reading the sources, it wasn't random
at all. It was like a production line. Precisely.
The investigations revealed a very distinct pattern.
Step one was recruit the victim, usually someone
whose disappearance might not trigger a massive
media outcry immediately. Step two, transport
them to a remote location. And then step three
is the execution. By military members, usually
very soon after arrival. And then step four is
the scene manipulation. Scene manipulation, which
is a very polite way of saying they dress the
stage. Exactly. They put weapons in their hands.
Often these were old, non -functioning guns kept
specifically for this purpose. They dress them
in camouflage. Yeah. And then step five, the
paperwork. They filed official reports claiming
these were FARC or ELN fighters neutralized in
battle. There is one detail from the source material
that really stuck with me. It just shows the
incredibly transactional nature of this whole
thing. A recruiter actually testified that he
received roughly $500 from the military for each
man he delivered to be killed. That's the commodification
of life I was referring to earlier. Five hundred
dollars. That was the market price for a positive
result. But hold on. How does this happen on
a systemic level? I mean, I can understand. Well,
not understand, but I can imagine a bad apple
soldier looting a body or making a terrible mistake
in the heat of battle. But thousands of deaths.
Yeah. That requires a system that requires a
culture that explicitly allows it. You have to
look at the political and policy context of the
time to understand the why. This was occurring
largely during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe
Velez. And you have to remember the atmosphere
in Colombia in the early 2000s. It was incredibly
tense. Right. The country felt like it was on
the brink of being a failed state. Kidnappings
were rampant. The FARC was controlling huge swabs
of territory. People were terrified. So the public
was absolutely desperate for safety. Desperate.
Uribe came in with a flagship policy called democratic
security. It was a very iron fist approach. The
promise was to retake the country from the guerrillas.
And because the public wanted safety so badly,
there was immense overwhelming pressure on the
military to show results. Tangible, visible results.
And in this context, results meant bodies. Yes.
And there's a specific document that experts
point to. It's Ministerial Directive No. 29,
signed in 2005 by the defense minister at the
time, Camilo Ospina Bernal. This directive is
crucial. Why? What did it actually do? It detailed
a specific scheme of benefits and rewards for
combat kills. Wait, pause for a second. Are you
saying there was an actual menu of rewards? Like
official paperwork saying, kill this many people,
get a prize? Essentially, yes. It formalized
the incentives. If a unit produced combat kills,
the soldiers could get promotions, medals, special
training courses abroad, and crucially, vacations.
Vacations. So, kill a civilian, go to the beach.
That is the grim reality of it. Now, the directive
didn't explicitly say, go kill civilians, of
course. It said, we will reward you for every
enemy you neutralize. But when you combine that
intense pressure from the top to produce numbers
with the promise of tangible rewards, you create
a market for dead bodies. Because finding actual
gorillas is hard. Very hard. Finding and fighting
gorillas in the jungle is dangerous, grueling
work. So if you couldn't find one, you created
one. It creates a situation where the soldier
who plays by the rules and patrols for a week
without firing a shot is seen as a failure by
his commanders, while the soldier who murders
an innocent civilian is a hero who gets a week
off. Exactly. It completely erases the line between
a civilian and a combatant because the statistic
is the only thing that matters to your career
progression. The body count became the currency
of the military. And that leads us to the evidence
because eventually the cracks in the story got
too big to ignore. In June 2009, the U .N. special
rapporteur Philip Alston conducted a massive
investigation. Yes. And the details he found,
they absolutely destroy any idea that these were
legitimate combat situations. Alston's work was
pivotal. He looked at the forensic evidence and
it was incredibly sloppy. The cover -ups were
almost arrogant in how poorly they were done.
The detail that haunts me the most is the boots.
Alston noted that victims were wearing jungle
boots that were brand new. Right. Just think
about the logic there. You're supposed to believe
this hardened gorilla has been living and fighting
in the Colombian jungle for months, trekking
through mud and rain. But his boots are pristine.
No scuffs, no mud. And worse, the sizing. The
reports mention victims found wearing boots that
were three or four sizes too big for them. Imagine
the sloppiness required to put size 10 boots
on a size 7 foot and think, yeah, this looks
convincing. It shows a total disregard for...
the victim's humanity. They weren't even seen
as people anymore. They were just props. Alston
also found left -handed men clutching guns in
their right hands. Yeah. And many of them were
killed with a single precise shot through the
back of the neck. That's not a chaotic jungle
firefight. That's an execution. Exactly. And
Alston's conclusion was very careful. But very
damning. He said he found no evidence that this
was official government policy, as in he didn't
find a memo from the president saying kill civilians.
Right. However, he also explicitly stated the
bad apples theory. The idea that this was just
a few rogue soldiers acting alone was equally
unsustainable because it was happening in Antioquia,
Arauca, Meta, Norte de Santander. It was systemic.
It was happening everywhere. And inside that
massive system, there were actually people who
tried to say no. We really have to talk about
the whistleblowers because the cost of truth
here was incredibly high. This wasn't just violence
against civilians. It was violence against the
military's own conscience. The internal pressure
to conform was suffocating. If you didn't produce
bodies alongside your unit, you were suspected
of being soft or worse, a guerrilla sympathizer.
We have records of a colonel who eventually received
a 21 -year sentence. Oh, wow. He admitted to
his involvement in killing two peasants, but
he also admitted his unit had carried out 57
similar murders. And he was even recorded extorting
other army members to keep them from testifying.
But then you have someone like Corporal Raul
Antonio Carvajal Londoño. And this story, it
just breaks your heart. It really does. In 2006,
he called his father, Don Raul. He's terrified.
He told his dad that he was actively refusing
to execute two innocent young men just to label
them as insurgents. He drew a line in the sand.
He refused to do it. And days later, he was dead.
The official story from the military was that
he died in combat or by suicide, but the family
never accepted that. They firmly believed he
was murdered by his own unit for refusing to
participate in the crimes. And his father, Don
Raul Carvajal, became this incredible, tragic
symbol of resistance. If you looked up photos
of protests in Colombia from that time, you'd
see him everywhere. He spent 15 years traveling
the country. He drove this truck with his son's
body, well, the coffin, and the whole story plastered
on the side, just demanding justice. And he did
that right up until he died of COVID -19 in 2021.
He was a constant, visible reminder that the
system aggressively protected itself. Which brings
us to the political fallout of all this. Because
when the scandal first broke, specifically after
the Soacha case, the reaction from leadership
wasn't introspection. No, it was pure denial.
Total denial. Juan Manuel Santos was the defense
minister at the time, and he later became president.
And Alvaro Uribe was president. Initially, they
claimed these were just isolated incidents. They
even suggested these were false claims made specifically
to stain the honor of the military. There was
a very famous, very controversial line where
Uribe suggested the young men from Soacha weren't
gathering coffee, implying they were actually
criminals up to no good. Blaming the victims.
Exactly. That narrative only started to shift.
when the evidence, like the pristine boots, like
the testimonies from the mothers, became totally
overwhelming. After Soacha, Santos fired 27 officers,
including three generals. And the army commander,
General Mario Montoya, he resigned in November
2008, right? He did. But even then, for a long
time, the official line was still rogue elements.
They refused to admit the structure itself was
rotten. It took a really long time for a formal
apology. It wasn't until 2021 that Juan Manuel
Santos, acting as a former president at that
point, issued a heartfelt apology to the victims'
families. He admitted he didn't believe the reports
at first, and he apologized for his late response.
And we also can't ignore the role of international
pressure in forcing that reckoning. Human Rights
Watch released a major report in 2015 called
On Their Watch, and they implicated the top brass.
Oh, specifically. They named General Juan Pablo
Rodriguez and General Jaime Lasbrilla, who were
leading the armed forces at the time the report
came out. The report pointed out that they had
headed units during the absolute peak of the
killings. This pressure eventually led to more
dismissals in 2016. So you have these mothers
screaming for truth. You have whistleblowers
dying for it. And the standard court system was
just too slow or honestly too biased to handle
the scale of this. And this pressure cooker is
what eventually forced the creation of the JEP.
Yes. Can you explain for the listener exactly
what the JEP is and why it's so different from
a normal court? The JEP, the Special Jurisdiction
for Peace, is a transitional justice court. It
was born out of the 2016 peace treaty with the
FARC. Its priority is fundamentally different
from a regular criminal court. In a normal court,
the goal is often just punishment. Lock them
up. In the JEP, the priority is truth and restorative
justice. It's unique because it invites actors,
guerrillas, and military alike to come forward
and confess. If they tell the full truth and
acknowledge their crimes, they can receive lighter
restorative sentences. But if they lie or hold
back and are found guilty, they go to regular
prison for decades. So it's a tradeoff. We give
you leniency, but you have to give us the absolute
truth. Exactly. And that's exactly where that
massive number 6 ,400. came from. The JEP has
access to data and inside testimonies that regular
courts just didn't have. And they've been aggressive
with it. They actually charged General Mario
Montoya Uribe with war crimes and crimes against
humanity. And he is the highest ranking official
charged, right? Yes, he is. The charges are brutal.
lying about combat kills, pressuring soldiers,
using violent language to incite violence. The
JEP basically accuses him and others of creating
the exact environment where these crimes flourished.
Now, reading through the sources, there's also
this ongoing legal tug -of -war between civilian
courts and military courts. Why does that matter
so much? It matters entirely because of impunity.
Historically, if a soldier commits a crime and
is tried in a military court, the judges are
other military members. Right. The sentences
tend to be significantly lighter, or the cases
just mysteriously get buried to protect the institution.
Human rights groups have always thought tooth
and nail to keep these false positive cases in
civilian courts. But the defense lawyers try
to move them back to the military courts. Always.
There was a law passed in 2013 that tried to
regulate this, stating clearly that extrajudicial
executions must stay in civilian jurisdiction.
But defense teams often argue that the deaths
were homicides related to active service. They're
always trying to find loopholes to get their
clients back into the military justice system
where they know they might find more sympathy.
It sounds like a constant, exhausting battle
just to keep the truth from being buried under
bureaucracy again. It is. And that's why the
JEP's work is so absolutely critical. It's forcing
a public confrontation with the past that statistics
and official versions tried to hide for a decade.
It's forcing these generals to look the mothers
in the eye and admit that their sons were not
combatants. When we look back at all of this,
we have 6 ,402 lives at a minimum completely
erased. We have families destroyed. And we have
a military that, for a time, functioned almost
as a mercenary force against its own people,
getting paid by the state per body. It's a total
distortion of reality. The false positives scandal
isn't just about a failure of command. It's about
what happens when you build a bureaucracy of
success based entirely on violent metrics. They
needed to show they were winning the war. So
they literally manually... manufactured a reality
where they were winning at the cost of innocent
civilian lives. It makes you look at every metric
differently. Honestly, whether it's police quotas,
corporate targets, or even hospital wait times,
as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases
to be a good measure. That's the core takeaway
here. And if I can leave you listening with one
final thought to mull over. We often think of
the military's job as protecting the population
in order to win a war. Right. But in this case,
the metric for winning was simply the number
of dead bodies. So here is the question. If the
metric for victory is the body count, is it ever
possible for a military to actually protect the
population? Or does the population inevitably
become just another resource raw material to
be used to win? That is a deeply terrifying thought
and definitely something we should probably all
keep in mind when we look at how we measure success,
even in areas far removed from the battlefield.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Thank
you for having me. We'll see you next time.