I once asked a prominent social movement leader and former Colombian Senator if there was any organization or movement in her country similar to the US groups Veterans for Peace or Iraqi Veterans Against the War (now About Face). It was in 2011, and I was there with a delegation sponsored by the Alliance for Global Justice and the National Lawyers Guild. She looked at me a moment and then said, “We have veterans, but they are not for peace.” Her answer confirmed my own limited experience.

Of course, this was Colombia in 2011, a country that had recently learned about the “false positive” scandal, with details still being revealed. That scandal refers to the ongoing practice of members of the Colombian Armed Forces to lure poor and unemployed youth to remote areas with promises of jobs, killing them, and dressing their bodies in uniforms of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) and claiming them as enemy combatants. This was done to inflate numbers of the dead and reap rewards and promotions for their “successes”.  The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) court says that there were at least 6,400 such cases between 2002 and 2008, alone, although some studies put the figure as high as 10,000. The scandal resulted in the incarceration of six members of the army, the firing of 27 officers, and the resignation of the Army Commander Gen. Mario Montoya.

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