To understand True Negatives, it's essential first to consider the nature of the state-fantasy it challenges. The false positives in Colombia are among the most significant scandals in the country's history of internal conflict. The final report from the Truth Commission describes it as “one of the most serious reports about violations of Human Rights from the military forces in history”
The term “false positives” originated from the way the press portrayed extrajudicial executions during conflicts. In Colombia, it primarily refers to events from 2008 to 2010, when, under the administration of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the focus was on cracking down on FARC guerrillas, offering incentives such as days off and monetary rewards to the military personnel. This created a high-pressure environment that resulted in an urgent demand for deaths in combat.
Testimonies from military personnel interviewed by the Truth Commission reveal that the pressure to deliver results was intense and that incentives alone were not enough. The government narrative blamed the enemy entirely, making them a scapegoat for all the nation’s problems, which led civilians to get involved by providing information about guerrillas.
The false positives were not limited to the murder of civilians. A complete structure was built around it, including the preparation and recruitment of victims, the search for strategic locations and crafting of scenarios to make the murders look like combat encounters, and the later ruling and "cleaning" of the crimes by judges involved.
The false positives were more than crimes; they were a meticulously crafted official imaginary designed to create a fake sense of security and victory. The Especial Justice for the Peace declared that 6,402 civilians mostly young, poor, and marginalized persons who were murdered, dressed in guerrilla uniforms, and falsely shown as casualties of war. This practice involved a collective denial and a distorted reality: victims turned into perpetrators, murder into victory, and the state became both protector and perpetrator. The term "false positives" is a clinical euphemism that obscures a grotesquely inhumane reality, embodying what Rolando Vázquez (2020, p.15) critiques as the colonial imposition of a single, official narrative that erases alternative truths and personal experiences.
Presidential address broadcast on October 7, 2008, in which President Álvaro Uribe Vélez addressed for the first time the disappearance of the young men from Soacha — a statement perceived by many as an attempt at justification and the pursuit of impunity.
“The Attorney General of the Nation stated that the disappeared youths from Soacha were killed in combat; they didn’t go to pick coffee, they had criminal intentions, and they didn’t die a day after their disappearance but a month later.”
Writing shortly before his death in 1940, Walter Benjamin offers a useful parallel: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it actually was’… it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin, 1969). He further argues that history “decays into images, not into stories,” and the past must be grasped in its dialectical image (Benjamin). The state’s fantasy was an active suppression of these dangerous “flashpoints” of memory, substituting for them a sanitized, official image of combat and triumph. The state’s project was one of representational erasure: silencing, subsuming, and rendering the victims invisible for political gain.
For more context on the False Positives cases and the state-produced fantasies that sought to distort their reality, see the following links from the Colombian Truth Commission.
https://colombiacheck.com/especiales/sipaso/narrativa-negacionista-falsos-positivos.html
The first cases of false positives started to emerge in 2008, with reports of missing young men. Their families and mothers sought government support to find them. A notable case involved the discovery of nineteen young men from Soacha near Bogotá, who had been executed and falsely claimed as guerrilla fighters killed in combat by the Colombian Army.