Colombia has a singular capacity to absorb horror without disturbing the order of things. It is not indifference; it is a collective anaesthesia that power reproduces and the media administer. On 27 April 2026, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) announced in Apartadó that the number of victims of extrajudicial killings, the so-called “false positives”, civilians murdered by the armed forces and presented as guerrilla fighters neutralised in combat, had risen from 6,402 to 7,837. That same day, presidential candidate Paloma Valencia was insisting that former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez should be the minister of defence in her eventual administration. These two things happened simultaneously, without either placing the other in any real danger.
The number
The figure was announced by magistrate Pedro Elías Díaz, of the JEP’s Chamber for the Definition of Legal Situations, during an audience in Macrocase 03, the dossier investigating murders and enforced disappearances falsely presented as combatants killed in action by State agents. The new consolidated total results from the extension of the period under analysis, which previously covered 2002 to 2008 and now spans 1990 to 2016, combined with cross-referencing of at least five institutional sources, including reports from victims’ organisations, records from the Attorney General’s Office, data from the Inspector General and information from the National Centre for Historical Memory. The increase represents approximately 22 per cent compared to the 2021 figure.
Antioquia alone accounts for 1,932 cases; in the sub-case for that department, 228 people were subjected to enforced disappearance, 41 were tortured and 99 remain unaccounted for. JEP president Alejandro Ramelli stressed that the figure remains provisional and liable to grow as territorial hearings with non-maximum-responsibility defendants proceed. Macrocase 03 has so far implicated 21 generals, of whom seven have already accepted responsibility. General Mario Montoya, who served as Army Commander during the most intense period of these crimes, is scheduled to conclude his voluntary testimony before the tribunal in early June 2026.
Macrocase 03 documented four modalities of extrajudicial killing. Operators murdered civilians identified without evidence; they deceived young people from poor backgrounds with false job offers, transferring them to other regions before executing them; they eliminated combatants who were hors de combat; or they fabricated operational results to satisfy pressure from commanders. The total figure of 7,837 victims, which remains provisional, covers the period 1990-2016.
The massacre and the general
The audience at which the figure was revealed was not an abstract event. It took place within the judicial process for the La Resbalosa massacre, perpetrated on 21 February 2005 in the hamlets of Mulatos Medios and La Resbalosa, on the boundary between Antioquia and Córdoba. On that day, eight civilians were murdered by paramilitaries from the Héroes de Tolová Bloc, with the cover of soldiers from Infantry Battalion N.47 Francisco de Paula Vélez, attached to the 17th Brigade. Among the victims were three children: the youngest aged 21 months, a five-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy, killed alongside their parents and other community members. The bodies were dismembered and buried in clandestine graves. The crime took five days to come to light.
At the hearing on 23 April 2026, former lieutenant colonel Orlando Espinosa Beltrán revealed that it was General Mario Montoya who, following the defeat at El Porroso in which 22 soldiers died, ordered the location of the responsible guerrilla group and gave the express instruction that if there were no paramilitary guides to identify enemy presence zones, the operation would not proceed. Espinosa declared that for Colonel Duque, the battalion commander, the community of San José de Apartadó was a “guerrilla nest”, an argument that internally justified the alliance with the paramilitaries. More than a hundred soldiers and fifty paramilitaries patrolled together for days, slept in the same camps and shared field rations.
Captain Guillermo Armando Gordillo Sánchez, sentenced to 20 years by the ordinary courts in 2008 and subsequently received by the JEP, admitted before the tribunal that his inaction amounted to participation in the murders. “It is as though I had done it myself by leaving those people with those paramilitaries”, he declared. At the start of the hearing, the victims’ families covered the space with flowers, cacao and plantains, and lit candles. A sister of Luis Eduardo Guerra asked the appearing parties to clear the names of her relatives, who had been identified as guerrilla members for years by the very institutional apparatus that had killed them. It was not a rhetorical petition; it was the minimum condition for truth to be of any use.
In Macrocase 03, Magistrate Pedro Díaz confirmed on 27 April 2026 that the coordination between the 17th Brigade and the Héroes de Tolová Bloc in Urabá was documented through the JEP’s Information Analysis Group (GRAY) contextual report, the geolocation of military units and the testimonies of appearing parties. The tribunal described the pattern as “a de facto policy of collaboration in this region with the paramilitary armed actor.”
The cover-up
What followed the massacre was not silence. It was something more active and more costly. The government of Álvaro Uribe, whose policy of democratic security was at its zenith, responded with an institutional disinformation campaign. Witnesses were fabricated, paid by the paramilitaries, and presented before diplomats, Congress and the Attorney General’s Office to attribute the massacre to the guerrilla. Uribe himself publicly stated that some community leaders were accused of aiding the FARC and seeking to use the hamlet as a refuge. The cover-up strategy followed the same chain of command, with the participation of the Caribbean Joint Command, then under General Montoya.
In 2019, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court sentenced Lieutenant Colonel Espinosa to 34 years in prison along with five other soldiers as co-authors of the crimes. The massacre has long since ceased to be a dispute over the facts. What the JEP now has before it is the documentation of the complete chain of command; the recent confessions trace the path upward, towards General Montoya, towards the Caribbean Joint Command, towards those who made decisions from Bogotá and concealed those decisions behind a fabricated official narrative.
The minister
On 25 April 2026, three days before the new figure was announced, Paloma Valencia launched her proposal at an event in Santa Rosa de Osos, Antioquia. She announced she had already identified her future minister of defence and asked people to persuade Uribe to take the post and revive democratic security. Her running mate Juan Daniel Oviedo indicated publicly that this was not the message he wished to convey. Valencia replied without ambiguity. “I am the presidential candidate”, she stated. “I am the one who will appoint the ministers.” Late-April polling placed her third, behind Iván Cepeda Castro and Abelardo de la Espriella. Elections are scheduled for 31 May. In those same days, Uribe issued no statement of any kind regarding the figure of 7,837.
That same week, the JEP charged 20 former mid-ranking FARC commanders with 1,559 cases of child recruitment and use in the conflict. That news circulated widely in the political milieu that habitually demands the tribunal’s abolition. The false positives figure, produced by the same institution in the same days, did not receive equivalent coverage. The mechanism is not difficult to read; the JEP is legitimate when it convicts the guerrilla, and a political instrument when it investigates the State. This selective partition is not individual hypocrisy; it is the grammar through which impunity is administered in a democracy.
Argentina’s Federal Criminal and Correctional Chamber has before it the appeal filed by eleven families of victims and three Colombian human rights organisations, including the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, seeking to reopen proceedings against Uribe for his alleged responsibility in the false positives between 2002 and 2008. The case was archived in late 2025 by federal judge Sebastián Ramos, who argued that Colombia possesses a functional judicial system. The victims appealed. The hearing was held on 14 April 2026 in Buenos Aires; the tribunal has yet to decide whether to reopen the investigation or close it permanently.
The JEP has no jurisdiction over former presidents. The House of Representatives’ Accusation Commission, which theoretically does, has gone decades without resolving anything of substance. The ordinary courts sentenced mid-ranking soldiers. Someone gave the order. Someone covered it up. Someone spoke on camera identifying the victims as accomplices of terrorism. On 14 April, the families spoke in Buenos Aires. On the 23rd, the soldiers confessed in Apartadó. On the 27th, the number reached 7,837. On the 25th and the 29th, Paloma Valencia repeated her proposal. Álvaro Uribe Vélez said nothing. Silence, too, is a way of administering impunity…
G.S.
Sources
- JEP raises false positives figure to 7,837 following extension of analysis period
- JEP reveals new victims figure: not 6,402 but 7,837 false positives
- Before the JEP, former soldiers acknowledge details of paramilitary alliance during La Resbalosa massacre
- Before the JEP, former 17th Brigade soldiers acknowledge responsibility for San José de Apartadó massacre
- Twenty years of impunity and the search for truth: the San José de Apartadó massacre before the JEP
- I did not prevent the killings: former soldier admits omission in La Resbalosa massacre before JEP
- Iván Cepeda demands justice over new 7,837 false positives figure and attacks Uribe
- Paloma Valencia proposes Álvaro Uribe as minister of defence in her eventual 2026 government
- I am the president: Paloma Valencia reasserts authority and defends Uribe as minister of defence
- Argentina: victims request reopening of case against Uribe over false positives
- Uribe case archived in Argentina; victims file appeal
