'false positives' scandal

The "false positives" scandal (Escándalo de los falsos positivos in Spanish) was a series of murders in Colombia, part of the ongoing armed conflict in that country between the government and guerrilla forces of the FARC and the ELN. Members of the military had poor or mentally impaired civilians lured 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.

As of June 2012, a total of 3,350 such cases have been investigated in all parts of the country and verdicts have been reached in 170 cases. Human rights groups have charged that the judicial cases progressed too slowly.

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.

The scandal broke in 2008, when 22 men from Soacha who had been recruited for work were found dead several hundreds of miles away. A recruiter later testified that he had received $500 from the Colombian military for each man he recruited and delivered to them. In June 2012, six members of the army were sentenced to long prison sentences in that case.

After the 2008 Soacha discoveries, defense minister Juan Manuel Santos denied knowledge of the scheme, fired 27 officers including three generals and changed the army's body count system. General Mario Montoya, commander of the Colombian Army, resigned on November 4, 2008. President Alvaro Uribe ordered the cases to be handled by civilian courts to ensure impartiality.

Accusations of similar cases had occurred much earlier. A recently declassified 1990 cable by U.S. Ambassador Thomas McNamara reported on a case involving nine men who were killed by the military, dressed in military fatigues and presented as guerrilleros. Similar extrajudicial executions have been reported throughout the 1990s.

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Wikipedia