The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has handed down this Friday a new ruling against five former senior Army officials of Colombia for their participation in the death and enforced disappearance of some thirty civilians, who were falsely presented as guerrillas killed in combat, as part of the so-called false positives.
It is the third time that the JEP has issued a restorative-character sentence, which implies that those responsible will not go to prison because they have admitted their guilt in these crimes, according to the transitional justice model designed after the 2016 peace agreements signed with the now-disbanded FARC guerrilla group.
The ruling includes 18 episodes that left 35 victims in Dabeiba and other municipalities in the northwest of Antioquia between 1997 and 2007. It comes after the confessions of these five defendants made it possible to locate 77 bodies of missing persons, 17 of which have already been returned to their families.
The former servicemen have been sentenced to restorative terms of between five and six years, focused on projects such as repairing roads and bridges, removing antipersonnel mines, searching for the disappeared, and other measures aimed at the integral reparation of victims and their communities.
According to the JEP, on the one hand, there was the murder of peasants accused without evidence of collaborating with the insurgency, "in a context of alliances between state agents and paramilitary groups"; and on the other, the execution of people from other areas, brought with deception to be murdered and reported as operational results of the Army.
A third pattern identified consisted of the disappearance and concealment of the bodies in municipal cemeteries, including that of Las Mercedes, in Dabeiba, where the remains of these 77 victims have been found.
Previously, two other restorative sentences had already been handed down. On September 16, 2025, the first was applied against seven former senior commanders of the FARC, including the one who had been their last commander, Rodrigo Londoño, alias "Timochenko," who were imposed supervised freedom and other remedial measures to make reparations to victims of kidnappings, extortion, and other crimes committed during captivity.
A few days later, the JEP ruled against seven former members of the Army for the murder and forced disappearance of civilians presented as combat casualties in the north of César and the south of La Guajira, with similar restorative sanctions, which included projects for the benefit of the affected indigenous communities.
To access this type of sentence, the defendants are required to provide full truth, acknowledge their responsibility, and guarantee non-repetition. If they fail to meet these conditions, they expose themselves to prison terms that can reach up to twenty years.
The JEP has determined that, at least, 6,402 people were victims of extrajudicial executions —the so-called false positives— between 2002 and 2008 at the hands of Colombian security forces, incentivized with labor and economic rewards for reaching certain quotas. However, the actual figure could be higher, since there are no official records prior to that period.