“On the day Carlos Arturo Cáceres was murdered, his son was born. Upon receiving the news, he prepared a jug of milk and set out to meet him. He never made it. He never arrived. He never met him.”
On 15 July 2003, which should have been one of the happiest days of his life, the Kankuamo indigenous man left the field where he worked to visit his wife Claudia Arias and their new-born baby Carlos. On the way, he was intercepted by a group of soldiers from the Colombian Army’s ‘La Popa’ 2nd Artillery Battalion. They were guided by paramilitaries from the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), who falsely accused Cáceres of being a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group. The soldiers killed him on the spot and presented him as a rebel killed in a combat that never took place.
Twenty-three years later, with this macabre and moving account, the Colombian transitional justice tribunal, known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace or JEP, began reading the ruling convicting retired Colonel Hernán Mejía Gutiérrez to 20 years in prison, the highest penalty contemplated by the special tribunal stemming from the 2016 peace agreement, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Cáceres’s was one of 72 extrajudicial executions, known to Colombians by the euphemism ‘false positives’, for which the commander of the battalion operating in a vast region of cattle and coal-mining savannahs flanked by mountains in the Caribbean, near the border with Venezuela, was held responsible.
The end of the JEP’s first adversarial trial
The ruling announced five days before Christmas closed a highly symbolic circle: in late September, the JEP convicted 12 former military officials who were Mejía’s subordinates – including the colonel who was his second-in-command – for their role in those same events, in one of its first two substantive legal decisions against those most responsible for serious crimes in Colombia’s half-century-long armed conflict.
However, their punishment was more lenient, ranging from five-to-eight years in a non-prison setting, because they acknowledged their responsibility for these crimes, publicly apologised to their victims, contributed to the truth and committed to redressing them.
Mejía, on the other hand, chose not to admit his role and asked for it to be proven in court. Now, a year, thirteen hearings and fifty witnesses later, the JEP has found him guilty, in what is also the first decision to come out of its second, adversarial track. In fact, several of the witnesses testifying against him were his former subordinates.
It was these two faces of Colombia’s transitional justice that presiding justice Reinere Jaramillo referred to when she said that “today we shouldn’t be announcing a ruling that resolves a dispute,” but rather “what should have happened is that the dialogue between those who participated in the conflict and submitted to this jurisdiction and the victims should have led to the clarification of the truth and to its acknowledgment.” Two other former officers from the same military unit, Colonel Juan Carlos Figueroa and Major José Pastor Ruiz Mahecha, who like Mejía don’t admit to their role, are awaiting their own trials.
Mejía, who had already been sentenced by the ordinary criminal justice to 19 years in prison for his links to the paramilitaries, announced that he will appeal the sentence, which means that his case will now be reviewed by an appeals section of the special court.
The colonel who “initiated, promoted and consolidated a criminal scheme”
For most Colombians, Mejía has been one of the emblematic figures of the ‘false positives’. Considered one of the most decorated officers in the army, Mejía was relieved of his post in January 2007 by then Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos, during the Álvaro Uribe administration, in one of the first corrective measures taken before the scandal broke publicly. It was also the first time in history that a defence minister publicly acknowledged the “operational link”, in the ruling’s words, between senior military officers and paramilitaries, which according to the JEP the homicide of Cáceres “renders visible”.
After assessing all the evidence provided by the special tribunal’s prosecution unit, much of it originating from the original indictment by the JEP’s Acknowledgment Chamber, the judges concluded that “the defendant’s participation was neither marginal nor passive; on the contrary, it was structural and decisive in the configuration and consolidation of the aforementioned pattern.”
In the ruling’s words, Mejía “used his clout and reputation to influence his closest officers in order to initiate, promote and consolidate a criminal scheme” to murder and disappear civilians unrelated to the armed conflict and present their bodies as the result of false operational successes. These were not “autonomous actions by his subordinates,” the JEP concluded, but “crimes (...) perpetrated within the framework of organised power structures, with a high degree of coordination.” Colonel Mejía “had not only formal command, but also material control over operations, reports, numbers and the construction of an institutional narrative aimed at making actions appear legal when in fact their results were totally illegal”.
With this, the court rejected Mejía’s defence, which presented him as an exemplary military officer who saved the Cesar region from “the plagues ravaging it,” including FARC. While not denying the crimes committed in the battalion, it argued that the colonel never gave an illegal order.
“We were able to clear Carlos Alberto’s name”
“A weight has been lifted off our shoulders after 23 years,” says Armando Pumarejo, whose son Carlos Alberto was murdered inside the La Popa battalion on June 22, 2002, and presented in the media as a FARC militiaman. His death, now recognized as the homicide of a protected person, deprived a two-year-old girl and two twins, who were in the womb of his partner Gelka Hinojosa at the time, of their father. Mejía has now been found responsible because, according to the JEP, “he issued the order for Operation Coraza 037A, instructing his subordinates to shoot (...) and issued subsequent orders aimed at making the events appear to be legitimate combat in which two casualties were reported.”
“Despite my skepticism, because I was somewhat pessimistic, we are seeing these decisions. We were able to clear Carlos Alberto’s name,” says Armando, who, notebook in hand, followed all the hearings in the trial against Mejía. For him, the greatest satisfaction came from the 12 officials who admitted to their role because, in his words, “everything fits” with what they knew had happened. Mejía’s conviction, which he believes was rendered possible by those testimonies, leaves no doubt that “the fuel for that criminal train was the blood of our relatives.”
Although there are still some contradictions that he is asking the JEP to clarify, especially regarding two soldiers who have not been charged and are awaiting the resolution of their legal situations, the transitional process has been for Pumarejo the difference between “never even receiving a summons to court” in the ordinary justice system and “having a voice and being listened to.” “So many truths could not go unpunished between heaven and earth,” he sighs.
Politicians who defended Mejía keep silent
Mejía’s conviction is a milestone for another reason. The political sector led by former President Alvaro Uribe, in whose government he was removed from the army following allegations by a subordinate, used his case to oppose the peace negotiations with the FARC. In their narrative, the colonel was the victim of an alleged plot hatched by President Juan Manuel Santos and his peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, who had been the defense minister and deputy minister who initiated the measures that made it possible to put an end to the criminal phenomenon. They also cited the disgraced colonel’s theory that the guerrilla had a ‘special secretariat’ to secretly control the state and even the church and the largest companies.
However, during the JEP’s eight years of investigations and trial, Mejía lost his influence and magnetism among a political sector that used to called him a ‘great hero’ and ‘victim of infamy‘. Many politicians who defended him ardently a decade ago are now silent. Former President Uribe, who spread the theory of an alleged conspiracy against him and posed with signs bearing the title of his book, tweeted about him for the last time in 2018, the year Mejía flirted with becoming a presidential candidate. Nor did he testify in his favour, as his defence initially requested.
Uribe’s party, the Democratic Centre, has not mentioned him since 2016. Several of its most visible figures, such as its current presidential candidate Paloma Valencia and Congresswoman Paola Holguín, also stopped defending him around that time. Only María Fernanda Cabal, until recently a presidential candidate and part of the party’s far-right wing, has continued to defend him after his conviction.
17 military, a former guerrilla and a politician in waiting
The transitional justice track inaugurated by Mejía still has much work to do, although – as a Justice Info analysis published last July showed – most of the JEP’s indictees have chosen to acknowledge their crimes. Nine out of ten have done so.
As of December 2025, 21 persons had been referred to the JEP’s Investigation and Prosecution Unit (UIA), the body responsible for prosecuting or closing investigations against those who, following preliminary investigations conducted by the tribunal’s Acknowledgment Chamber, do not admit their role, provide truth or redress victims. That number includes 19 former military officers, a former FARC rebel and one civilian – although one military, Colonel Cipriano Peña, died after being charged. Except for two, all have been charged for their participation in false positives. This reluctant group includes several former senior military officers: six generals and eleven colonels. Two of them, Colonels Juan Carlos Figueroa and Fernando Moncayo Guancha, have been living in the United Arab Emirates.
They are joined by Héctor Albeidis Arboleda, better known as the ‘Nurse’, accused of forced abortions within FARC and referred for failing to even admit to his membership in that group. There is also former congressman Luis Fernando Almario, the most prominent politician in transitional justice, who was accused of being a co-author of a “criminal plan to capture the state” in alliance with the FARC, consisting of exterminating his rival political group, led by the Turbay Cote family, in the Amazonian department of Caquetá.
Delays in the adversarial track
Although Mejía was the first to go through the adversarial track and every new procedure brings adjustments, the timing of his case raises questions about what is to come. Originally charged by the JEP’s Acknowledgment Chamber in July 2021, his case was referred to the prosecuting unit six months later after the colonel refused to own up to his role. In July 2023, after a year and a half of investigation, the prosecutor’s office formally accused him, and another year later, in September 2024, his trial began. Fifteen months later, the decision was handed down. That means it took a total of four years to reach a conviction since his case was referred to the UIA.
The timelines have been similar for the other four defendants to date. Colonels Juan Carlos Figueroa and David Herley Guzmán were charged two years after their cases reached the UIA, a period that increased to three years in the case of Major José Pastor Ruiz. None of the three has gone to trial. Guzmán’s trial was scheduled to begin in July 2025 but has been postponed twice, first because he requested an extension to prepare and then because he revoked his defence lawyer’s power of attorney. In total, he has changed his defence four times. There has been no public news since October about a new date. Neither Figueroa nor former congressman Almario have been called to trial by the court, despite also having been formally charged for more than two years. When asked if it had weighed moving from the current logic of individual accusations to grouping some defendants according to macro cases, as the original indictments do, the UIA told Justice Info that it has not considered it.
At least one of these trials will have a very high public profile. Although the JEP has so far indicted 21 generals, including three former commanders-in-chief of the Army and one of the Armed Forces, none has captured the public attention like Mario Montoya. This general, who led the Army between 2006 and 2008, coinciding with the peak of extrajudicial executions, promoted – according to the JEP’s original indictment – “the message that combat casualties were the only indicator of success”. “Don’t bring me problems, bring me litres of blood,” he used to say to his subordinates.
Is a third track emerging?
Among all the cases before the JEP prosecutor’s office, one lies in an interesting limbo. Indicted by the JEP in July 2022 as responsible for extrajudicial executions in Casanare, Colonel Germán Alberto León initially refused to acknowledge his responsibility, so his case was referred to the adversarial track. Once in the UIA, however, he decided to accept it, prompting the prosecutor’s office to return his case to the court. Now the justices of the non-acknowledgment section must decide his future.
One possibility is that León will fall on an intermediate route contemplated by Colombia’s transitional justice. Having acknowledged responsibility, but doing so belatedly, he could receive a sentence halfway between the 5-to-8 years in a non-penitentiary environment designed for those who own up to their role and the 15-to-20 years in prison for those who do not and are convicted in trial. That intermediate sentence would be 5-to-8 years in prison, subject to the same conditions of admitting their crimes, contributing to the truth and providing reparations to the victims.
The JEP countdown
These lengthy periods for filing charges and reaching judicial decisions, which are not exclusive to the UIA but extend to the entire JEP, raise questions about whether the Colombian transitional tribunal will have enough time to fulfil its mission.
In total, the JEP has a legal deadline of 10 years to bring charges and an additional five years to conclude its activities, including handing down sentences against those most responsible and resolving the legal situation of some 12,000 persons. Given that it began work on 15 January 2008, this means that transitional justice has only two more years to bring charges.
That clock is a challenge for both tracks, not just the prosecuting unit. The Acknowledgment Chamber has unveiled preliminary charges in seven of its 11 macro cases, but has only filed formal charges (called ‘conclusion resolutions’) in two of them. Two of the original seven cases, opened seven years ago, only saw their first indictments in December, and four more, opened between 2022 and 2023, have not yet seen any. That means the current pace of two to three years to file final indictments will not work in the final stretch.
The intersection of the two tracks’ current timelines raises difficult questions. Will the Acknowledgment Chamber run out of time to file all of its remaining indictments? Will the JEP prosecutor’s office change its view of individual accusations given the tight deadlines? Will any defendants be tempted not to confess and bet on the UIA running out of time to charge them? Could this harm the incentive system of Colombia’s transitional justice, which combines carrots and sticks to encourage acknowledgment of responsibility and reduce the number of cases that go to trial? Could this lead to less satisfaction for victims, who expect more truth and more public acts of forgiveness?
Amidst the milestone that is the 20-year prison sentence handed down to Colonel Mejía for dozens of extrajudicial killings that he refused to admit to, these existential questions hang over the special tribunal that has managed to get most of those responsible for serious crimes in the Colombian conflict to face their victims.
