This week, we accompanied Colombian grassroots Indigenous and campesino spokespeople to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The human rights situation in Colombia has been dire for decades, and Indigenous communities continue to live with the threat of violence from actors on all sides.

When you hear the term “false positive”, you might think of an inaccurate COVID test result. But in the context of Colombia’s 50-year civil war, the term garners a much more macabre connotation.

To show quantitative results in their war on left-wing guerrilla groups, Colombian soldiers killed thousands of innocent people and passed them off as dead insurgents.

On the morning of March 28, 2022, ostensibly acting to capture a “finance lieutenant” of the Comandos de la Frontera in the community of Upper Remanso, a U.S.-backed counter-narcotics unit of the Colombian military killed 11 people.

Government officials, including then-President Ivan Duque, immediately claimed that the victims were armed members of guerrilla groups that had failed to demobilize in the 2016 peace process.

Testimonies gathered by human rights groups and Colombian journalists would quickly call into question the official version.