The price of peace

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0:30No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Join host Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we make the choices we do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes.

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1:18In Colombia's tropical lowlands, the search is on for victims of a scandal that has scarred the nation. They were murdered. At this time, I cannot tell you who they are. During a decades-long armed conflict, government forces killed innocent civilians, passing them off as rebels. The commander of the army was very explicitly vocal about asking for results in terms of blood, very explicitly asking to fill a stadium with bodies. Finding the victims is part of a bold experiment to help Colombia confront its past. Can it bring those who committed the murders to justice? The major killed him with a shot to the head.

2:10And then he dressed him up to make him look like he had died in combat. And help the victims' families to forgive? For 19 years, I carried the burden of hatred. But what's the point of carrying all that hate if we want to help build peace in this country? Can this groundbreaking approach maintain Colombia's fragile peace and bring hope to other war-torn countries desperate to escape cycles of violence? I'm Harriet Barber and this is The Price of Peace, on the documentary from the BBC World Service.

2:57In a taped-off corner of a dusty cemetery, on the outskirts of the small town of Mutata in northwest Colombia, four men are working beneath a cluster of white excavation tents. In charge is Cesar Sanabria Medina.

3:17My role here is to lead efforts related to the search for three men who were killed at the beginning of 2008. The operation will end tomorrow at 5pm. It will conclude whether or not any bodies are found. César is one of the country's few forensic anthropologists, an expert in piecing together evidence and identifying the dead. The idea is to uncover the evidence, not remove it piece by piece. When dealing with a body, we don't start taking out whatever we find as we go. Instead, we uncover the entire body using brushes and trowels so we can document the position in which it was buried, whether there was evidence on top of it or beside it, and everything is recovered systematically.

4:07They are searching this site because of the evidence of a man trying to atone for his part in one of the greatest atrocities of modern times. My name is Jaime Coral Trujillo. In the army, I reached the rank of Sergeant First Class. In 1988, Jaime enlisted in the Colombian army and found himself embroiled in the country's long-running civil conflict. For over 50 years, there was an armed conflict between what was known as the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and the Colombian government. I'm Juanita Gubertus. I'm a Colombian lawyer and I currently direct the America's Division Human Rights Watch.

4:53There was 12 million victims, the majority of them victims of internal displacement in Colombia, but hundreds of thousands of killings. All of these types of victimization have left a country deeply broken. I'm Andrei Gomez Suarez. I'm a UK-based Colombian academic and peace negotiator for the Colombian government. Whenever you talk to anyone in Colombia, and this is a common recurrence, everyone, talk about their armed conflict, would know someone who had suffered something. So the uncle or the cousin or a friend who was kidnapped, who lived extortion, who was killed, who was internally displaced.

5:36I mean, I haven't met the first person in Colombia who cannot actually tell a close story of someone who they know being victim of the conflict. In the face of the ongoing crisis, Jaime hoped that joining the army would benefit his country. My parents have always been farmers. We didn't have, well, all the luxuries we should have. And I enlisted in the army so that I could protect the civilian population, their homes and possessions, and the people themselves. Instead, Jaime found himself at the centre of a national disgrace. In the false positive scandal, Colombia's armed forces murdered more than 7 ,800 people, inflating body counts and creating the illusion that the war against the rebels was being won.

6:30These were killings carried out by the Colombia military by selecting innocent people, mainly young people, from poor neighborhoods of the country. They were abducted, killed, and put into some of the battle zones as if they had been killed in combat between the army and the FARC. And this is the horrendous gross human rights violation that has taken place in Colombia. I don't really know, to be honest, of any other case like that in the world. The crisis came to a head after the 2002 election of hardliner Alvaro Uribe.

7:26For Jaime, this was a life-changing moment. The government needed results. If any members of FARC surrendered, they had to be killed. It was all about showing results. They weren't interested in arrest or seizures of equipment. The only thing that mattered was body counts. Believing that killing rebels would convince the public that they were winning the war, the government offered incentives to their troops. Patrol leaders or commanders who racked up kills were rewarded with trips abroad, and that's how I spent time overseas. They also offered medals, cash bonuses and promotions. The government had incentivized their soldiers to kill indiscriminately.

8:14And Jaime claims one of his superior officers was determined to take advantage. I met Major Guzmán Ramírez David. He selected me for a special unit and taught me new techniques. Most I'd seen in other units, but he also trained us to harm civilians. We'd kill them and plant weapons on their bodies. Then we'd falsify our reports and official statements. Soldiers passed off these executions as enemy rebels killed in combat, reaping rewards from the government and falsely boosting the official statistics. Because of this, the victims became known as false positives. To begin with, Jaime was solely a witness.

9:06The Major killed him with a shot to the head. And then he dressed him up to make him look like he had died in combat. And then shot him a few more times through his uniform so it looked like he's been killed fighting our troops.

9:23As was normal, the weapons they planted on this person were fired using the deceased person's own hands. So the evidence would point to the individual shooting at the troops, leaving their hands covered in gunpowder residue.

9:45Though deeply troubled by the killing of innocent civilians, Jaime was too afraid to speak out. I felt it was the worst thing that I had ever done in my life. But at the same time, I felt unable to speak up or report it because of something you might call overwhelming fear. People were afraid that they might stage some kind of fake combat situation and kill you for talking about what was happening inside the patrol unit. So people kept quiet, out of fear. Soon, a commanding officer demanded that Jaime become an active participant in the murders. Captain Vargas orders me to go on an operation. And a farmer appears, and Captain Vargas orders me to kill him.

10:32And I shot him. But since I was not used to that kind of thing, I shot him in the shoulder. I just couldn't do it. So the captain came over and killed him himself. From that moment on, I was totally compromised. Jaime witnessed or carried out around 40 killings. And across the country, soldiers murdered thousands more. But in Suacha, a poor town on the outskirts of the nation's capital, Bogota, a group of women unexpectedly fought back. My name is Blanca Novia Monroy. I am the mother of Julián Oviedo Monroy, a young man who disappeared on March 2, 2008 and was killed on March 3. Julián's death would prove to be a pivotal moment in Colombian history.

11:24It would help expose the entire false positive scandal. Like many young men in Colombia, Julian faced an uncertain future. Unemployment was high and money hard to come by. He left the house at seven o 'clock in the evening to meet with someone about a job. He left full of hope that he would find a job so he could help us pay the rent and keep us from being thrown out of our house. But we never heard from him again. Months passed. Then Blanca began to hear worrying news on the town's streets.

12:06At that point, I had no idea that there were more missing boys. I thought it was just my son, only him. But as time went on, more and more started to come out about the disappearance of other boys. That's when 19 families from Soacha began to come together. And that's when I realised it wasn't just my son. It was a neighbour's son and others too. It was a whole group of young men who had disappeared. And all of them had left for the same reason. They were offered jobs and told to go to work. Six months later, the family were told Julian's body had been found. Just one day after he had disappeared from Soacha, He'd been killed in Ocaña, a town over 400 kilometres away.

13:02Then the truth slowly started coming out. Mothers were told they could go to Ocaña to bring back their sons. But when the families arrived there, they were told their sons were guerrillas or criminals, basically the worst kind of people. They told my husband, did you know your son was a guerrilla? That he was planting landmines? And my husband said, that's a lie. My son disappeared on March 2nd and was killed on March 3rd. When would he have had time to become a guerrilla? Then other families began noticing patterns. Young men would disappear from their town and within four days they were dead.

13:44Little by little, every family began to understand how their son had died and why they had been killed. Rather than accepting the army's word, the families fought back. Mothers of Soacha are a group of mothers that became organized after trying to look for their disappearing children. It was a quest to defend their honor and to be able to prove that they actually had never been members of the guerrilla. And so that became a quest for justice. they grew to become one of the most important human rights groups in Colombia. Their fights were soon picked up by the media. Our children were by no means criminals.

14:38What we want is justice and truth. They are a symbol of resistance and dignity of the victims. They were very humble women. They were coming from a really humble background, really difficult socioeconomic conditions. I mean, these were people whose sons were targeted because the perpetrators, the army, thought that they wouldn't have the means to start a judicial proceeding, that no one would really miss these kids because they thought that they were troubled kids or they were, you know, from Soacha, one of the really poor neighbourhoods near Bogota. As news of their struggles spread, discontent grew across the nation.

15:26And in October 2008, the head of the army, General Mario Montoya, was forced to admit, live on radio, that his soldiers were murderers. Everything would appear to clearly indicate that, yes, there was a homicide. A month later, Montoya resigned and dozens of soldiers were arrested for their part in the killings. Then, even more disturbing details about the murders began to surface. The boys were taken to houses, locked in rooms, given drugs or alcohol and using their plan. When the order came to deliver the package, the people involved would take the young men to the place where they were going to kill them.

16:18They would make them run or stage some kind of confrontation and then they murder them. Afterwards, each family was told their son had died in combat with the army because supposedly they were guerrillas. From his army barracks, Jaime anxiously followed the success of the Mothers of Soacha's campaign and the mounting public outcry. In 2008, which is when it happens and explodes, I did feel worried, of course. I was on high alert. I was still an active soldier. and knowing that I was involved in similar cases to those of the Swatcha mothers, I felt very concerned. In April 2010, the authorities did catch up with Jaime and he was sentenced to 60 years for his role in the false positive killings.

17:17In my case, I really did wish I could turn back time and I said to myself that if I could go back, I would never have harmed anyone. On the contrary, I would have reported it. After six years in prison, a seismic announcement offered Jaime the chance to atone for his past and potentially win his freedom. After many years of fighting, kidnapping and war, and four years of negotiations with the FARC rebels, Colombia's president finally had some good news. Hoy podemos decir por fin que todo está acordado. Today, we can finally say that everything is agreed upon. Thanks to the titanic efforts of the delegations at the negotiating table, the final pending matters were agreed upon.

18:06President Juan Manuel Santos announced the final peace agreement, ending decades of conflict with the FARC and ushering in a new era of peace and optimism. them. The feeling in 2016 was one of the most exciting moments ever. I mean, it was unbelievable to see that. Colombians took to the streets to celebrate the historic feast deal. This announcement is very important for us Colombians. Most of us were born in a country at war, and this offers a ray of hope. When looking at a terrible past, it offers the chance of a bright future. It was so exciting. It was a way of thinking that a new beginning had started in Colombia.

18:53With the people in the streets, there was a sense of, I would say, brotherhood. It was a sense of, we've finally gone through this and now the country is going to get united to move into a new phase where we don't have to fight each other. The deal also included steps to help the country move on from the conflict towards a more peaceful future. The 2016 agreement created a transitional justice comprehensive system that includes a truth commission, includes a unit to search for the missing. and emblematically it creates a special jurisdiction for peace, a national special tribunal that is charged with the role of prosecuting those most responsible of the most serious and representative crimes committed during the Colombian armed conflict, both by the member of the armed forces and by the members of the guerrillas.

19:58Known as the Jurisdicción Especial Palo La Paz, or HEP, This tribunal was tasked with tackling the false positive scandal, not as a punitive process, but one of truth and reconciliation. Soldiers who admit to the murders can have jail terms replaced with limited freedom, with their movements restricted to a set area, but only if they cooperate fully with the HEP and the victims' families. For Jaime, this offered a lifeline. Even though I hadn't finished with the ordinary justice system, the sentences were still extremely long. It was a 60-year sentence. So when the Special Jurisdiction for Peace came along, I felt the best thing to do was to submit to it.

20:51Hep and Jaime also shared a common goal, bringing those who had issued the orders to justice. We were really just used as tools to carry out these killings. In my particular case, they paid for a lawyer, and the first thing the lawyer said was, let's put these three non-commissioned officers and this officer forward and let everyone else go free. You end up saying to yourself, how could I have caused so much harm, and why am I the only one paying for it here when there are other people responsible who are still out there? Jaime's next step was appearing before a magistrate in a hep court known as a sala or room.

21:37Good morning, Your Honour. Good morning to everybody present. My name is Jaime Coral Trujillo. I pleaded to be held accountable as one of those most responsible for all of them, and I also made a commitment to cooperate. It was like a system, a pattern that ran through several units and it was practically like a virus that everyone caught because we all did the same. During his hearings, Jaime provided information about the murder of three false positives in Mutata. It was this testimony that led César and his forensic team to the town's cemetery. So far, we've only found what you would usually find in a public cemetery.

22:28We haven't yet reached what we were looking for. Waiting for news in a nearby hotel is the father of one of the men believed to have been killed by soldiers. My name is Alberto Royave. I'm the father of Richard Alberto Royale. I want to know what happened. to know if he's alive or dead, to know the truth. That's the only thing I want. Alberto's hopes rest solely with the success of the forensic team's search. And they have made a discovery in the corner of the cemetery. Yes, we found a lot of personal items. We also found some bone fragments that seem to be associated with funeral items, meaning clothes or personal effects.

23:23However, César doubts that these are the remains of false positives. He thinks they are linked to a common problem in Colombia's cemeteries, overcrowding. Usually four years after the burial, the relatives come and dig up the dead. Their remains have to be exhumed and the bones placed in a small box called an ossuary. This ossory is transferred to a smaller above-ground tomb, which is much cheaper to rent. But bone fragments are often left behind. There's a lot of evidence, but it's not the evidence that we were looking for. With dusk rapidly approaching, the team will have to continue their search tomorrow.

24:07You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. The Price of Peace continues in a moment. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free-range self-directed investing. Or perhaps you pick up a few farm-fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor. That's full-service wealth management. Mix, match and change your mind whenever you want. Because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place.

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25:23Colombia is coming to terms with the false positive scandal. Incentivised by the government, the army killed over 7 ,000 innocent civilians and passed them off as rebels during the country's decades-long civil conflict. Murders that incensed peace negotiator André Gómez Suárez. That the army of a democracy carried out 7 ,000 extrajudicial killings to pretend that was winning the war and to actually create a culture within the armed forces that they could do this in order to get benefits. to get holidays, to get a promotion. It is absolutely unheard of. I'm Harriet Barber and you're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

26:17This is The Price of Peace, an exploration of how a groundbreaking justice system called HEP is helping Colombia to overcome the false positive scandal.

26:33In a cemetery in the town of Mutata, a team of forensic scientists is carrying out a key aim of the process, finding the remains of the victims. They have unearthed fragments of bones and teeth, but forensic anthropologist César Sanabria Medina is convinced these aren't connected to the missing. Well, we are in a cemetery, so it's common to find all kinds of evidence. If we were to stick a shovel in the ground here and dig a hole, we'd find little pieces of bone everywhere. César's team was directed to dig here by the evidence of a man seeking redemption for his part in the scandal. Jaime Corral Trujillo admitted being complicit in over 40 false positive murders and claims the practice was endemic.

27:26I believe it was a system. It was systematic. False positives were being carried out across all the units and the senior commanders were fully aware of what was happening. That's why they were ordering those of us in subordinate positions to carry out these acts. Although Jaime's evidence is yet to lead to discoveries in Muqata, his testimony has already proved vital in other false positive cases. My name is Amparo Cano Correa. I am the mother of John Harvey Cañas Cano. In 2023, Amparo's son, John Harvey, had been missing for 18 years. He was a pretty quiet young guy. He didn't really have friends because he was more of a loner.

28:18Very serious, with a bit of a strong personality But he was a good kid He had last been seen alone and desperately looking for a job According to Jaime, his commanding officer singled out such individuals To boost his unit's killing statistics Major Guzman gives us some money And ordered us to bring him a number of individuals from Medellin because others were getting results targeting vulnerable people. Jaime and fellow soldier Fidel Ochoa dressed in civilian clothes and took a bus to the city. Imagine we find a person sleeping on a table. Ochoa wakes him up, gives him something to eat and tells him there are some job opportunities at a fruit pulping plant.

29:10This person was Jean Harvey. Jaime and Fidel took him to Zabayeba, 150 kilometres to the north, where the rest of their unit was waiting. Major Guzman immediately discharges a firearm at John Harvey Cañas Cano's head. And they reported it as a combat kill, saying he was a FARC member who had died in a firefight.