![]() “The country took a huge step backwards on human rights.” “The false positives tarnished the government’s record on successfully fighting off the insurgencies,” said Kyle Johnson, a researcher at the Conflict Responses foundation. When confirmation of the scandal hit the press in 2008, in the weeks after Jacqueline Castillo identified the body of her brother, it shook Colombia’s image of itself as a nation overcoming the brutalities of its past to become a more prosperous, modern state. What makes the false positives scandal so shocking is not just the scale of the crimes, but the sheer banality of the motive: thousands of civilians were murdered so that the soldiers who did the killing could get more holiday, or a large bonus. ![]() The result was a system of perverse incentives that led soldiers to kill vulnerable civilians. Soldiers who killed six “enemies” or more were eligible for bonuses of up to 30m pesos (then worth $15,000). They offered a series of rewards, such as money, medals and additional holiday leave, to military units that achieved high body counts, according to Human Rights Watch. Since the early 2000s, the ministry of defence and the army had put out directives that prioritised body counts above all other results. What lay behind the killings was a government policy that sought to defeat, at all costs, the Farc guerrilla movement against which it had been fighting for decades. But by the mid-to-late 2000s, soldiers who murdered civilians had become so numerous and blatant that it was inevitable that their atrocities would be discovered. Initially, only a small number of soldiers took part in such killings, experts believe, and they were careful to cover up their crimes.
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