The number 18,677 took more than a decade to come into existence and barely a few weeks to become electoral ammunition. It was produced by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the tribunal created by the 2016 accord to prosecute the crimes of Colombia’s armed conflict, after painstaking cross-referencing on the recruitment of minors by the former FARC guerrilla. Today it circulates in memes and WhatsApp chains directed against Iván Cepeda, presidential candidate and one of the people who made this tribunal possible. The operation works by inversion, turning the truth produced by peace institutions against those who built it. This diversion of judicial data into propaganda, between the first and second rounds of the election, tells us more about the state of the country than any opinion poll.
The Data Factory
To understand what is being manipulated, one must first understand how judicial data is made. The JEP is a transitional justice tribunal designed to process mass crimes committed during a conflict, with the obligation to establish truth before imposing sanctions. Its method is rigorous by design. Each figure results from cross-referencing state sources, victims’ reports and academic records, eliminating duplicates to arrive at unique victims, people with a name or a file, not estimates.
Case 07 investigates the recruitment and use of children in the war. Opened in March 2019, it is the only JEP case dedicated to violence against minors, covering all armed actors. In August 2021, through Auto 159, the Recognition Chamber presented results from its cross-referencing on the sub-case covering the former guerrilla, prioritised to advance acknowledgement of responsibility. The data was neither a denunciation nor a slogan, but a provisional universe of facts built to guide a criminal investigation.
The JEP established in Auto 159 of 2021 a provisional universe of 18,677 unique victims of recruitment by the former FARC-EP between 1971 and 2016, after cross-referencing 31 databases and 36 reports submitted by victims’ organisations, state institutions and universities.
The case is far from closed. The figures for what other armed actors, including the State and paramilitary groups, perpetrated against this population will emerge in due course, as the remaining sub-cases advance. Nor did the figure remain static in a ruling; it continued producing concrete judicial effects. In November 2024, the JEP charged six former members of the last FARC Secretariat as principal perpetrators of these crimes.
In early 2026, the former commanders acknowledged in writing the facts and patterns attributed to them by the tribunal, the mistreatment, torture and killings carried out against minors within their ranks, as well as acts of sexual violence, a point on which their acknowledgement registered partial divergences from what the tribunal had established. That acknowledgement, unthinkable without the peace accord, is the reason the country now knows what was denied for half a century. And it was precisely at that moment, when the truth reached its point of greatest solidity, that the figure began to circulate as a weapon.
The Inversion Mechanism
The manoeuvre is of a striking simplicity. A figure produced by the peace institutionality is launched against those who built that institutionality, as though the number accused them rather than the perpetrators. Iván Cepeda facilitated the rapprochements that led to the Havana negotiation and has spent decades defending the rights of conflict victims, a trajectory that began with the assassination of his father, Senator Manuel Cepeda, a crime for which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the Colombian State in 2010. Without people like him, the number 18,677 would simply not exist. No one would know how many children were recruited, or where, or according to what patterns.
Fact-checkers have documented the offensive piece by piece. A viral image claimed that former FARC commanders had been pardoned for recruiting minors and implicated Cepeda and President Petro in those crimes. ColombiaCheck demonstrated it was false; the charged individuals have not been pardoned and the JEP’s statutory law expressly prohibits pardoning that crime. A 2017 video was edited to suggest Cepeda was defending the FARC against recruitment allegations, when the full recording shows him defending two peasant associations that had been stigmatised in a radio debate.
A fabricated piece imitating El Tiempo’s visual style attributed to him a proposal to incorporate the FARC into the Army; the newspaper itself denied it. La Silla Vacía found that among the three leading candidates ahead of the first round, Cepeda was the one against whom the most verified lies were circulating, most of them designed to present him as an accomplice of armed groups. These pieces do not arise spontaneously. They come from coordinated accounts and content farms, that is, paid structures that produce and amplify propaganda on social media, whose funding can almost never be traced to an identifiable source.
Not everything, however, circulates anonymously. The Centro Democrático has attempted to capitalise on the figure against Cepeda’s campaign, including through printed campaign materials distributed in the streets. Daniel Briceño, the party’s leading candidate for the Chamber of Representatives, stated bluntly that the senator is the FARC’s candidate, an imputation that Cepeda announced he would bring before the courts for libel and slander.
The detail that makes the operation legible is the chronology. The disinformation wave did not take off when the JEP published the figure in 2021, but when former guerrilla commanders acknowledged it in the middle of the 2026 presidential campaign. While judicial truth was advancing towards consolidation, electoral truth was being manufactured in the opposite direction. Those who for years had fought the very existence of the tribunal discovered that its products, duly decontextualised, were useful even before proposing their destruction.
The Mirror of 7,837
This inversion did not arise from nowhere. It is the response to another figure that certain sectors of the Colombian right have spent five years trying to bury and which has just grown larger. Case 03 of the JEP investigates killings and forced disappearances falsely presented as combat casualties by State agents, the crime known as false positives, civilians executed by soldiers to inflate operational results in exchange for leave and promotions. In February 2021, the tribunal established that at least 6,402 people had been victims of this practice between 2002 and 2008.
The number became a symbol. The mothers of the murdered young men embroidered it on banners, painted it on walls, turned it into the most uncomfortable figure in Colombian politics. The reaction was proportional to that discomfort. Sectors of uribismo challenged the figure from its publication, attacked the mothers who carried it and turned its denial into a gesture of political belonging, in a country where a mural asking who gave the order had already been erased at military request and contested in court by generals. The hostility was never directed at the confessed perpetrators, but at the number and at those who defended it.
Recent history has deepened that discomfort. On 28 April 2026, during a hearing in Apartadó on the La Resbalosa massacre, where ten former soldiers faced charges for killing four adults and four minors in February 2005, the JEP announced that the universe of victims was no longer what the country had memorised. Eight bodies from 2005, a new tally two decades later, the same case file. Memory does not close by decree; it is built, file by file, in hearings nobody films.
The JEP updated the number of victims of extrajudicial killings documented in Case 03 from 6,402 to 7,837, after its Information Analysis Group expanded the study period from 2002 to 2008 to the full range of 1990 to 2016 and incorporated records from the Attorney General’s Office and approximately one thousand additional victims’ reports.
The magistrates insisted the figure is provisional and will continue to grow as territorial hearings consolidate. The Recognition Chamber has implicated forty principal perpetrators from one brigade and six battalions, seven of eleven battalion commanders have accepted responsibility, and in early June 2026 retired General Mario Montoya was testifying before the tribunal while former soldiers in the Meta acknowledged more than two hundred cases. Transitional justice produces truth at a pace propaganda cannot afford to ignore.
Faced with the accusatory power of 7,837, which points to State crimes, the figure from Case 07 functions today as a counter-number, launched not against those responsible for the recruitment but against the candidate who embodies the peace institutionality. Whether this symmetry reflects a coordinated strategy or the spontaneous mechanics of polarisation is something no fact-checker has been able to establish. What is observable is the difference between the two uses. The victims of false positives use their figure to demand justice from the perpetrators. Those who manufacture the memes use the Case 07 figure to defame a third party who appears in the case file neither as a comparant nor as an accused.
What a Number Cannot Say
The second round on 21 June pits Cepeda against Abelardo de la Espriella, the lawyer who represented former President Álvaro Uribe in reputation litigation and received his endorsement after the 31 May results, a first round that left both candidates separated by fewer than three points, 43.74 per cent against 40.90. In that narrow margin, a battle over the meaning of public data is also being fought. An electorate that receives judicial figures converted into memes loses more than a clean election. It loses the ability to distinguish what a tribunal established from what a propaganda structure fabricated, between twelve years of documentary cross-referencing and thirty seconds of edited video.
The 18,677 victims of Case 07 were children recruited by a guerrilla. They deserve to have their number serve the purpose for which it was created, establishing responsibilities, repairing harm, preventing repetition. Every meme that distorts it victimises them a second time, now in the service of causes that fought against the existence of the tribunal that counted them. The data does not kill the narrative. In Colombia, in June 2026, the narrative devours the data, digests it and spits it back out transformed into its opposite. The only thing that remains standing, cold, verifiable, indifferent to the result of 21 June, are the case files of those who counted, one by one, those whom no one had ever wanted to count…
R.C.
Sources
- JEP · Case 07, recruitment and use of girls and boys in the armed conflict
- JEP · The JEP establishes that at least 18,677 children were recruited by the Farc-EP, Auto 159 of 2021
- JEP · Case 03, killings and forced disappearances presented as combat casualties
- JEP · Prioritisation strategy for Case 03, Auto 033 of 2021
- El Tiempo · Former FARC Secretariat acknowledges before the JEP the recruitment of 18,677 children
- El Espectador · False positives, JEP says victims of extrajudicial killings number 7,837 not 6,402
- El Colombiano · False positives, JEP raises figure to 7,837 cases
- La Silla Vacía · Former soldiers acknowledge more than 200 false positives in Meta
- ColombiaCheck · Former FARC guerrillas were not pardoned for the crime of recruiting minors
- ColombiaCheck · Cepeda did not propose incorporating the Farc into the Army and El Tiempo did not publish it
- La Silla Vacía · Cepeda did not demand respect for the Farc but for a peasant association
- La Silla Vacía · Detector, the most viral lies about Cepeda, De la Espriella and Valencia
- El Espectador · Profile of Abelardo de la Espriella, controversial lawyer running for the presidency
