Colombia’s ex-President Alvaro Uribe’s likening of the ongoing investigations into government corruption to false positives is inaccurate, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said Thursday.
The president argued that the corruption cases against government officials will not become false positives, as indicated by his predecessor, but will produce a series of concrete results.
Despite Uribe’s criticism, Santos pledged to continue his fight against corruption.
Uribe had suggested that the corruption proceedings against members of his former administration would become false positives, indicating that they are being conducted in bad faith.
Most Colombians reserve the term “false positives” to refer to the thousands of innocent civilians massacred by the military and disguised as guerrillas killed in action. The corpses were used to inflate the body count of enemy combatants.
The false positive scandal came to light during Uribe’s second term as president.
Members of Uribe’s opposition party, Polo Democratico, also criticized Uribe’s comment, stating that Uribe was trying to erase the scandal of actual false positives that occurred during his administration.
A spokesman for the Liberal Party agreed, expressing the party’s disappointment that the former president had chosen to speak in such confrontational terms.