Juan Manuel Santos says he’s ready to say what he knows about false positives at JEP

After the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) revealed a report on false positives, this Friday, February 19, the former president Juan Manuel Santos spoke of this phenomenon that the country experienced to a large extent when he was Minister of Defense in the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

“Thanks to the peace agreement, the truth about the conflict is known. Since last year I put myself at the disposal of transitional justice to tell them, among other things, how we investigated, discovered and put an end to this horror of false positives”Santos said.

In 2006, more than 1,200 false positive cases were recorded and the peak of this practice was experienced in 2007, when former President Santos was already in charge of the military forces. Santos commented in an interview with Noticias Caracol, in 2018, that when he started his first term he began to know about the thousands of cases of civilians executed by the army to be presented as guerrillas killed in action. “It really hurt me to find out about this (the false positives) and that’s why we deleted them ipso facto. It was an effort to change doctrine, we started demanding demobilizations, then arrests and finally deaths. “said the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But with him as Minister of Defense between 2006 and 2009, cases grew exponentially, as confirmed by the JEP. As the graph shows, both at the aggregate level and for each of the sources, the year of greatest victimization is 2007. The CNMH, FGN and CCEEU independently identified 2007 as the year with the highest number of such assassinations, the peace court said.

About what was revealed by the JEP

The figures of the Criminal Oral Accusatory System (SPOA), the Judicial Information System of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (SIJUF), the Observatory of Memory and Conflicts of the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH) and the Colombia Europe States Coordination -Unis (CCEEU) differ in the scale of the crime being investigated by the JEP.

However, various official and non-governmental sources have identified the period of 2002 to 2008 as the one with the highest number of victims. The result shows that during this stage 78% of the total historical victimization was recorded. Sources also agree that the macrocriminal phenomenon dropped drastically in 2009, from 792 victims in 2008 to 122 reported cases in 2009.

With the universe of facts and behaviors that make up the delimited case, the prioritization criteria have been applied which have now made it possible to establish a reasonable order of attention for them and to allocate differentiated resources for instruction. sub-cases.

As part of the bottom-up investigation strategy for Case 03 The Recognition Chamber has prioritized 6 sub-cases which will allow it to clarify the phenomenon, first at the local level, then to go back to the level of regional and national responsibility.. In this logic, in the second phase of the investigation of the case, the Chamber will address the events that occurred in the departments of Arauca, Boyacá, Caquetá, Guainía, Guaviare, Sucre and Putumayo, among others.

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