Security & Strategic Review May 2011 (ISSN 1741-4202)

COLOMBIA | Report says extrajudicial executions are on the rise. On 7 May the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (Cinep), a Jesuit-linked NGO, released a study which reports that the number of extrajudicial executions had risen in 2010 to 12 cases with 23 victims, from 7 cases with 16 victims in 2009. This has raised the total recorded in Cinep's database since 2001 to 562 cases with 887 victims. These extrajudicial executions are known in Colombia as ‘false positives', a phrase coined to refer to those cases in which the military had passed off murders as deaths of guerrillas killed in combat.