In January 2008, Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal — a 24-year-old man with cognitive disabilities who could not read or write — left his home in Soacha, Colombia, answering a promise of work. The man who made the promise lived a few streets away. He put Leonardo on a bus, handed him to soldiers at a roadside stop 750 kilometres from home, and was paid $50.
Four days after leaving Soacha, Leonardo was shot thirteen times, dressed in a guerrilla uniform, and thrown in a mass grave. The Colombian military photographed his body and reported a successful combat kill.
His mother Luz Marina Bernal spent 252 days searching for him before she saw his photograph in a morgue. A prosecutor told her: "Your son was a narcoterrorist leader. He died in combat."
She knew it was a lie. What she didn't yet know was that she was not alone. When the mothers of Soacha found each other — meeting in a park every last Friday of the month, white tunics, photographs of their sons around their necks — they began to understand that their sons had not died in isolated incidents. They had been hunted, recruited under false promises of work, transported hundreds of kilometres from home and killed to order. Under President Álvaro Uribe's Democratic Security policy, the Colombian military operated a reward structure — soldiers paid per combat kill. There were 6,402 cases exactly like Leonardo's.
Luz Marina Bernal has spent the seventeen years since proving it — in courtrooms, on stages across Colombia and the world, in the streets, and at the Havana peace negotiations. She is a founding member of the Mothers of Soacha, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and a theatre artist who has performed Leonardo's story under some of Colombia's most important directors. Last year she completed a university degree, her thesis a theatre production built around his murder. The man who handed her son to his killers for $50 is free — released on parole by Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
Boots on Backwards follows Luz Marina as she retraces Leonardo's last journey — from Soacha toward the territory in Norte de Santander where he was killed. Travelling with her is Selene Cruz, Colombian cultural producer, who translates not just language but everything language carries. The camera is Irish — a filmmaker shaped by a decade inside Portlaoise Prison working with men whose lives were defined by a different state's version of the same practice. When he first heard the false positives story his reaction was shame. Not sympathy. Shame that he had never heard about it.
The territory around Ábrego remains beyond full state control. To reach the place where Leonardo died we may need to negotiate with the armed gangs the military used his death to invent. The road may not reach its destination. That uncertainty is the film.
Palestine has changed what the world is willing to see. The architecture that killed Leonardo — manufactured evidence, inverted reality, bodies presented as proof of their own guilt — is the same architecture operating in Gaza, the same that operated in the north of Ireland for thirty years. The false positives are not history. The boots are still being thrown in bins.
This is the moment for this film.