For decades, the Colombian government and international media framed the civil war primarily as a struggle against guerrilla terror, casting the FARC and ELN as the central perpetrators of violence against civilians. Statistical analysis of the conflict eventually challenged this narrative in fundamental ways. Data compiled by Colombia's National Center for Historical Memory revealed that paramilitary groups were responsible for the majority of civilian massacres throughout the conflict, accounting for nearly 59% of all documented mass killings. State military forces were implicated in thousands of extrajudicial executions — including the infamous "false positives" scandal, in which soldiers murdered civilians and dressed them in guerrilla clothing to inflate body counts and secure promotions. Guerrilla groups, while responsible for significant violence including kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations, were found to have committed a smaller share of total civilian killings than either the paramilitaries or the state. The numbers did not absolve any faction — they complicated a story that powerful interests had spent years trying to simplify.