6,402 University students will lay down on the ground to represent the young men who were killed by the army in what is known as Colombia’s “False Positives Scandal” – where innocent people were killed extrajudicially by members of the Colombian army, and then falsely labeled as enemy combatants.

The victims tended to be poor young men; some had learning disabilities.

They had been lured to faraway places, on the promise of a job, by “recruiters” – people paid by soldiers to find possible targets.

Then they were murdered.

What lay behind the killings was a government policy that sought to defeat, at all costs, the FARC guerrilla movement against which it had been fighting for decades.

Since the early 2000s, the ministry of defence and the army had put out directives that prioritised body counts above all other results.

Aljazeera/Agencies.