2008: Amid the “false positives” and “parapolitics” scandals

While marches were being organized to reject the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Peoples’ Army (FARC-EP), there was a group of the armed conflict’s victims who did not feel recognized and whose demands for justice, truth, and guarantees of non-repetition were being left out. Given this situation, victims of State crimes organized a march and began to demand their rights as victims, creating the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes – MOVICE.

It took the victims of State crimes several years to be recognized as victims. That same year a scandal came to light in relation to the extrajudicial killings of youth who were disappeared from their neighborhoods and later found dressed guerrillas who were reportedly killed in combat: the ill-named “False Positives.”[1]

Iván Cepeda remembers how, on 6 March, 2008, thousands marched to affirm that “in Colombia, the State is also part of the problem. That many crimes were carried out by State agents in the company of paramilitaries.”

Iván’s father, Manuel Cepeda, was assassinated on 9 August, 1994, in Bogotá, at a time when there was a systematic assassination of members of the Patriotic Union[2] (UP) political party. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court H.R.)[3] later ruled against the Colombian state in this case.