De guerrilleros a víctimas; de héroes a perpetradores: movimientos y relaciones del conflicto armado colombiano y la práctica de identificación e investigación forense en el caso de los Falsos Positivos

In this text, we address how forensic practices of investigation and identification participate in the production of certain types of victims and perpetrators in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. We argue that forensic investigation and identification practices, like any other practice, produce what they study. Here we refer to the case known as the “false positives”: young civilians, without any ties to guerrilla groups, and who were deceived with false promises of work were presented as guerrilla casualties in combat. As for the perpetrators, it was members of the Military Forces who carried out the extrajudicial executions of the civilian population in order to convey the idea that the war against terrorism was being won. We address the work of forensic experts from Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office and we base our analysis on data collected through a combination of (self)ethnographic and reflective conversations held by the authors, interviews with four forensic experts from the Attorney General’s Office and archival research. This way of approaching the production of forensic knowledge makes it possible for us to understand these experts as active actors (and not mere witnesses) of the armed conflict, to the extent that they participate in the production of both victims and perpetrators.