1. The Making of a Stereotype
In the spring of 1986, I was invited by the Catholic
Development Committee Against Hunger to take part in the Lenten celebration in
France. Before I began to speak, I asked members of the audience what kind of
images they associated with my country. Invariably, they associated Colombia
with drugs, coffee, cyclists (the annual Tour de France bicycle race is held
there) and volcanos (where the November 1985 tragedy of Armero took place, a
small town in Colombia that was almost totally buried by an avalanche).
There is no doubt that drugs are the first thing that
come to people’s minds when they think of Colombia. Some have attributed 80% of
the world’s drug trade to the Colombian cartels. Although I think the problem
has been somewhat blown out of proportion, given the fact that the clandestine
nature of the business makes accurate estimates difficult to come by, there is
no denying its magnitude. What is important is that this perspective has
resulted in the false conclusion that violence in Colombia is linked to drug
traffic. Is this simply a result of investigative laziness or are there other
factors involved? Consider the following. On January 30, 1993, a car bomb
exploded on a downtown street in Bogota killing 20 people. Almost immediately,
news of the bomb, which was attributed to drug traffickers, was circulated
worldwide by international press agencies. During the same month of January,
1993, our human rights data bank registered 134 cases of political murder and
16 cases of enforced disappearance in the country.
•
In 25 of the murders and 6 of the disappearances
all indications suggested that those responsible for the crimes were members of
the state (the army, police or government security forces);
•
And in 89 of the murders and 10 disappearances,
the evidence pointed to paramilitary groups which operate as auxiliaries to the
army and police. In other words, while a crime committed by drug traffickers
which claimed 20 lives was widely reported by the international news media, 130
victims of state or para-state violence were ignored outside Colombia; they
simply did not exist. Granted, these 130 cases occurred neither on a single day
nor in a single place, and thus did not “fit” into the parameters of
“international news.” But the contrast between what is considered news and
reported and what is not, helps explain the way false images are constructed.
Between May, 1989 and June, 1990, the period during
which the most drugrelated terrorist bombings were carried out, Colombian
non-governmental organizations registered 227 drug-related fatalities. During
the same period they registered 2,969 politically motivated murders, not
counting deaths in combat between the army and guerrillas. Thus drug related
murders were only 7.6% as high as those from political violence.
Indeed, between January 1991 and May 1992, drug
related deaths represented only 0.18% of the total number of violent deaths
occurring in the country. This stereotype linking violence in the country to
drugs that the international media have created has served the Colombian
government well. On the one hand, it has enabled it to present itself in international
forums as a “victim” of violence outside its control by drug traffickers and
the guerrillas, and, on the other, permitted it to neatly conceal crimes of the
state which exceed these others many times over but which are so rarely
mentioned in the international media.
Between 1988 and 1992, the Colombian armed conflict
between the army and guerrilla claimed a total of 6,040 victims, including
soldiers, guerrillas and civilians caught in the cross-fire. This figure
represents 4.7% of the country’s total violent deaths and 30.5% of the
politically motivated killings during the same 5 year period. 70% of these
latter killings must be explained in some other manner.
2. Counting the Victims: A
Painful and Controversial Task
In August, 1986, during its annual assembly, the
Conference of Religious Superiors of Colombia approved the following
resolution: “To promote, support and encourage the Christian prophetic signs
which are present in religious communities, through the creation of a
Commission of Justice and Peace which will channel and disseminate information
and protests throughout the country.”
The board of directors of the Colombian Catholic
Conference of Bishops, however, did not approve of this initiative and placed
obstacles in its path. Nevertheless, two years later a group of 25 Catholic
provincials decided to found the Intercongregational Commission of Justice and
Peace, subsequently adopted by the Conference as one of its official
commissions. The Commission’s first project was to gather and disseminate
information about the victims of human rights violations, the right to life, in
particular. To this end, we set up a data bank and began registering such
cases.
Our first difficulty involved agreeing on categories
for the different kinds of violence that we were registering. Convinced as we
were that the term “human rights,” for historical, philosophical, legal,
ethical, political and pragmatic reasons, refers essentially to the relations
between citizens and the state, we attempted to classify cases according to the
direct or indirect responsibility attributable to government agents. But this
proved impossible.
Beginning in the early 1980s, Colombians began to be
caught up in what we call a “Dirty War.” A vast network of armed civilians
began to replace, at least in part, soldiers and policemen who could be easily
identified. They also started to employ methods that had been carefully
designed to ensure secrecy and generate confusion. Because of this, witnesses
and victims of crimes are unsure of the exact identity of the individual(s)
responsible for committing them. This problem with identifying the perpetrators
is often insurmountable. At the same time, members of the army and police began
to conceal their identities, frequently wearing civilian clothes and hoods, to
drive unmarked cars and to take their victims to clandestine torture centers,
all in order to forego legal formalities in arrests. What has frequently
followed these abductions is intimidation or torture, enforced disappearances
and murder. They complement these practices with death threats against family
members, witnesses, lawyers and any other individuals likely to denounce their
activities. Frequently, members of the state or of paramilitary groups pass
themselves off as members of “guerrilla units” when they commit crimes, leaving
cryptic communiques at or near the scene of the crime. When reporting such
incidents, the media depend almost exclusively on official (government/armed
forces) versions of what has happened. This, in turn, reproduces and
consolidates the misinformation.
For these reasons, we chose categories which we felt
would permit us to differentiate between different kinds of violence that
existed in the context of a Dirty War. We began to consider the motives which could
be inferred from different characteristics of the crimes: the political and
social context of the region where the crime occurred, the characteristics of
the victims, their participation in union activities, campesino, community or
other kinds of political organizations, and their involvement in denunciations
or other kinds of protest activities.
•
Cases in which it is possible to infer a
political motive (repression of ideological or political beliefs) are
classified as political killings.
•
Cases in which the available information is not
conclusive but still suggestive of such motives are classified as presumed
political killings.
•
Many other cases are classified as obscure,
signifying that there is doubt as to whether or not the crimes were committed
by common criminals. Given the size and geographic complexities of the country
and the impossibility of maintaining systematic contact with many of its
regions, we obtain initial information of violent deaths from the study of 17
regional and national newspapers, after first attempting to strip accounts of
the frequent bias in which they are reported.
Soon, in spite of the repugnance its name caused us,
an additional category had to be created: social cleansing killings, referring
to the physical elimination of drug addicts, exconvicts, petty thieves and
criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, beggars and street children. Tragically,
such killings are a routine practice today, part and parcel of the generalized
expansion of violence in the country which began in the 1980s.
Although different interests are involved,
indications from a large number of these cases point to members of the national
police as being responsible. Anecdotes revealing how accepted this practice is
within the police abound. “It’s better to eliminate them because if they are
arrested and tried, they’ll just be freed in no time or there will be nothing
to charge them with, and, in a couple of days, they’ll be back again, a problem
for the police. ” Behind this abhorrent practice is a neo-Nazi ideology
prevalent within the police which legitimates the taking of human lives.
Beginning in 1988, we began to circulate a quarterly
bulletin containing a systematized analysis of the dimensions of the country’s
political violence. The statistics were, and continue to be, frightening.
Consider the following, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Chile
registered 2,700 cases of political murder and disappearances during 17 years
of brutal military dictatorship in that country. This number of cases, horrible
as it is, is far less than the number of cases our data bank has registered
annually in each year since it began operation.
Indeed, a number of religious communities and orders
were so horrified when they read the first issues of our bulletin that they
sent us letters asking us to stop publishing lists of victims, saying they only
depressed them. We didn’t heed their request. We feel that there should be a
historical record of what has happened and that the victims merit, at the very
least, a brief mention documenting their fate as a testament to the failure of
so many efforts to relegate them to oblivion and silence. In scores of cases,
these few lines are the only written testament to their human dignity.
The Colombian government, for its part, has become
more and more uncomfortable with our lists. As I was writing this in June of
1994, the Presidential Counselor for Human Rights invited me to participate in
an Indicators Workshop “intended to discuss and share criteria for the
elaboration of statistics about violence in general, political violence and
human rights violations.”
During the workshop’s final session, and in front of
delegates from all of the government’s investigative organizations, the
counselor lashed out at our interpretation of political violence. In
particular, he objected to the fact that we categorized cases as presumed
political killings, and argued that such a category blamed the government for
cases where responsibility for the crimes was unclear.
He also criticized us for considering “social
cleansing killings” to be the product of a neo-Nazi ideology which prevails
within certain government institutions. He insisted, instead, that such
practices were carried out by “isolated” individual agents; he was opposed to
our registering paramilitary crimes as part of official violence, and so on.
In my talk I attempted to defend our position by
insisting that we could not limit ourselves to simply registering cases in
which responsibility had been established because the “Dirty War” strategy had,
since the early 1980s, been refining and perfecting methods of secrecy,
concealment and impunity for those responsible. To register only cases in which
the responsibilty was clear would grossly distort the dimensions of what is
really going on in the country.
3. Scenes from the “Dirty
War”
It is difficult for people to really understand the
reality in Colombia, so different from their own, unless it is translated into
concrete individuals, places, dates and incidents they can identify with on a
personal level. Perhaps that is why global analyses, even when they refer to
dramatic human situations, tend to be distant and cold. For this reason, l have
chosen the following cases—from among several thousand—to talk about.
They are cases and individuals I have had close
contact with either because I knew the victims personally or because I shared
the pain of family members, friends and whole communities as they made protests
and embarked on the search for a justice that was not to be.
Caquetá Caquetá is a department in southern Colombia
and a region where peasant farmers have pushed further and further into the
Amazon jungle. During the 1970s, the department was the center of important
agrarian struggles, and, toward the end of the decade, home to the nascent M19
guerrilla movement. In 1981, in order to combat the guerrillas the army set up
an operative command post there (No. 12) which would later become the XII
Brigade. Caquetá was also home to a female missionary community which spent
over 10 years working alongside campesinos in an integrated community
development program based on Christian principles.
I will never forget the first week I spent in Caquetá
in April of 1982. The large number of denunciations of torture, disappearance
and murder that we had been receiving prompted me to travel to the region. When
I arrived at midday at the modest dwelling of several members of a religious
community and asked them if I could set up a meeting with family members of
some of the area’s victims, one of them looked at me and smiled. “Just take a
seat over there, Father. there are so many that come to tell us what has
happened to them and how they have suffered...well, just sit down for a
moment.” She was right, I spent the next four full days taking notes and taping
interviews, taking time out only to visit two nearby villages and talk to more
victims. When returned to Bogota, I took with me a macabre list of 144 murder
victims, some of them had been subjected to extreme cruelty, and 240 cases of
torture. In those days, there was no doubt as to who was responsible for these
atrocities; soldiers killed and tortured openly in front of numerous witnesses.
But it was impossible to identify them because, before committing crimes, they
removed the identification they were required to wear by law.
Among those hundreds of cases, here are a few that
stand out.
•
A young woman, with a confused and almost
hopeless air about her, answered my questions and spoke into my taperecorder.
She had been forced to join a military patrol and walk for 13 days through the
mountains, guiding the soldiers and carrying their knapsacks. Although she
witnessed numerous cases of torture and the destruction and burning of humble
campesino dwellings, it was the brutal murder of Jesús Pastrana which affected
her the most. I myself had met this campesino leader on one of his visits to
Bogota to attend meetings of the ANUC (a national peasants organization with
strong support during this period). According to the terrible details the young
woman gave me, Chucho, as Jesús was affectionately called, died a slow and
agonizing death on October 31, 1981. He was hung from a tree as psychopathic
soldiers cut off his ears, his fingers, hands, then arms and testicles and
finally shot him 21 times.
•
I was deeply moved as I listened to Florentino,
a young campesino who had miraculously escaped from his own grave. At 9 p.m. on
December 6, 1981, a group of soldiers dragged Florentino and his elderly father
from their home, tied their hands together and gagged them and took them to a
nearby military base where they were holding four other campesinos. At
midnight, the men were taken into the mountains and forced to lie face down
before an open grave that had been dug for them. Then, using knives and rifles,
the soldiers began to kill them. Although seriously wounded in the neck,
Florentino managed to feign death. One by one the bodies were thrown into the
grave and each was covered up with dirt shoveled in by the soldiers. Suddenly,
the killers were momentarily distracted by shouts from other soldiers standing
beside a nearby river. Florentino took advantage of their distraction, and,
after reaching out to his father’s now cold body and realizing he was dead,
fled into the nearby forest alone. Although the soldiers soon realized that
“one of the dead men had escaped,” they couldn’t make him out among the trees
in the darkness. Florentino made his way cautiously into the river and,
swimming as best he could, finally reached a campesino’s dwelling down the shore
whose occupants helped stop his bleeding and assisted him in making his way to
the city of Florencia (capital of the department).
•
I will also never forget the sobs of the young
catechism student as she told me of the martyrdom of Ernesto, a young member of
a Christian base community. For having gone, or having been forced to go to a
M19 meeting of the guerrillas, Ernesto and a number of other young residents of
his village, San Jose del Fragua, were tortured for 5 days on a military base.
After the torture, Ernesto was freed on the condition that he report back to
the army once a week. On these occasions, the base commander told him he had
three alternatives: he could join the guerrilla in which case the army would
sooner or later kill him; he could join a counterinsurgency unit and work as an
auxiliary to the army; or, lastly, the commander told him, the army would not
be responsible for his life and what might befall him. Although his friends
insisted he flee the area, Ernesto’s mother and family were financially
dependent on him and he decided not to abandon them. He categorically refused
to join the army, however, saying that would make him nothing more than a
murderer, using the words that are so very common among our campesinos: “I
don’t want to do any harm to anyone.”
•
March 25, 1982 was one of the days that Ernesto
had to report to the army base, but that day he was afraid to go. Before he
left, he told his mother, “BIess me, Mother, I think they are going to kill
me.” He was right. Members of the counterinsurgency group were waiting for him
outside his house and that same day Ernesto disappeared. His body, showing
signs of more torture, was found five days later.
Alvaro Ulcué Chocué Alvaro was an Indian priest. When
he was ordained in 1973, the ceremony made the national news because it was so
very rare that an Indian entered the priesthood. A theology student at the
time, I felt especially happy for him as I had always been particularly
sympathetic to the struggles of the Indians of the Cauca department, heroic
survivors of five centuries of oppression. I subsequently met Alvaro at
different national meetings of Christian groups. Humble and soft-spoken, he was
nevertheless totally committed to the liberation of his people. He took part in
different Indian organizations, visiting the territories of other ethnic groups
and was considered a leader by his people. It was not long, however, before
Alvaro’s decision to work and struggle alongside his own people put him
directly into conflict with the region’s large landowners whose interests were
in opposition to those of the Indians. After he suggested that his Indian
parishioners stop choosing wealthy white people as godparents for their
children, because landowners subsequently felt they had the right to demand
their godchildren work for free on their haciendas, Alvaro became the target of
the landowners. The army, too, had him in its sights, accusing him of leading
Indian protests and marches in the region and inciting Indians to kill
landowners.
By 1981, Alvaro was in the center of the storm.
Landowners continued reporting him to the army, and even to the Archbishop,
claiming he was inciting the Indians to violence. Soldiers continued abusing
the Indians in order to provoke them, and, when they responded by protesting,
increased their harassment. During one of these “incidents,” Alvaro’s sister
Gloria was killed and his parents were injured after members of an army patrol
attacked them as they were returning from a communal work project.
A communique made public in late 1982 by Christian
groups in Cauca announced that “Landowners have placed a bounty on Alvaro’s
head and only the love shown by those who surround him has so far prevented him
from being “disappeared.”
Two days before he was murdered, Alvaro met with
three army generals to denounce the constant abuses the Indians were suffering
and insist the army present evidence to back up their accusations against him.
After listening to him in silence, the generals told him they were as convinced
as ever that he was provoking the Indians into illegally occupying lands they
had no right to. On November 10, 1984, as he was preparing to officiate a
baptism in the small town of Santander de Quilichao, Alvaro was shot and killed
by two sicarios dressed in civilian clothes.
A witness who later identified both killers as
members of the F-2, the intelligence service of the police, was subsequently
harassed and received death threats. Soon after that, the case file of the
investigation “disappeared” from the prosecutor’s office. A mourner at Alvaro’s
funeral painstakingly copied the dozens of messages that mourners had written
on placards and banners. One of these, echoing a thought he expressed on
numerous occasions, said, “If I must die, I would like my body to be mixed in
with the clay of the forts like a living mortar, spread by God between the
stones of the new city.”
Nevardo When I think of Alvaro Ulcué, I cannot help
but remember another young man in whom he inspired a commitment to the poor and
the Indians and an individual, also like Alvaro, who paid the ultimate price
for that commitment. Nevardo was a restless youth. He wrote poems and songs
and, although he wanted to become a Franciscan priest, the road was not easy
for him. After spending two months with Alvaro Ulcué in Causa, Nevardo
interrupted his university studies and went to work in some of the poor barrios
in the city of Neiva, the capital of the Huila department. There, he taught
primary school and became involved, always with his songs and guitar, in
different protests and struggles. It was really only after his death, by
reading his diary and the many thoughts and notes he left in his notebooks and
Bible, that it became clear how these different experiences had all been
fragments of an intense personal search for the meaning of his life, in the
light of the Gospel.
Luz Stella was one of the young people who
participated with Nevardo in theater and Bible study groups, and, also like
him, became more and more committed to the struggles of a nearby Indian
community which, in spite of constant persecution and suffering, continued to
struggle for a small parcel of land that had belonged to their ancestors.
They were confronted by a number of wealthy
landowners who were armed with false land titles used to claim the Indians’
land. The landowners, allied with the police, had so harassed and threatened
members of the community that the Indians had been relegated to a small island
in the Magdalena River. The island flooded with the advent of each rainy season.
Arbitrary detentions and threats of Indians were soon followed by
disappearances and murders. The Indian Support committee, of which Nevardo and
Luz Stella were a part, decided to begin work alongside a campesino community
also struggling for land in another of the department’s villages.
On October 22, 1987, Luz Stella and Nevardo, together
with Carlos, the Indian community’s governor, and Salvador, one of its members,
set off to visit the community. As they were waiting for a bus in the town of
Campoalegre, they were picked up by the local police. When members of a
commission set up to look for them did so, police denied the party had been
detained.
But they were found shortly thereafter. Three days
later in Neiva, on a Sunday night, a thousand mourners joined the funeral
procession for the four victims, whose decomposed bodies, horribly disfigured
by torture, had been found earlier in the day.
All of the official investigations which were begun
at our insistence proved fruitless. During a meeting in Bogota with the
country’s Prosecutor General, we offered to set up a support group and
investigate the crime ourselves. Soon we had reconstructed the sequence of
events, step by step, that led to the murders. Several months after our
meeting, however, the Prosecutor General was assassinated. Several more months
passed and the investigations were “closed.”
I will never forget one of the young people who came
to Bogota from Neiva to attend that first meeting in the Prosecutor General’s
office. His name was Aldemar and he had been one of Nevardo’s closest friends.
With little understanding of the legal arguments and complexities of the
investigations, he was simply unwilling to leave things as they were and leave
the meeting until he had at least been assured that something concrete would be
done. Several years later, after Aldemar’s mutilated body was found floating in
the Cauca River near Cali, I was deeply moved as I read his diary and learned
of the personal process of spiritual and political radicalization that had
accelerated after his friend’s death. Aldemar had been deeply touched by
Nevardo’s life and death. On April 15, 1992, Aldemar and five other leaders of
popular, grassroots organizations were “disappeared” in Cali. Several days
later, their bodies, all showing signs of torture, were found.
I will also never forget that Sunday in October,
1991, when at the urging of his mother, we tried to unearth Nevardo’s remains.
In spite of the fact that great pains had been taken to ensure that his grave
would remain anonymous, six hours of digging a tunnel under another grave which
had been placed on top of his finally led us to Nevardo. There, we saw for
ourselves the cruelty that he had been subjected to: his skull had been
completely destroyed and there were huge blood stains over what were left of
his clothes.
Lucho One day in 1989, in the city of Bucaramanga
(capital of the department of Santander), a group of union members set up a
meeting for me with a young campesino they had helped escape from the neighboring
department of Cesar. At first glance, the man seemed normal in appearance. He
had a good sense of humor, and, if you spoke to him for only a short while, his
tragedy remained hidden from you.
When you spent more time with Lucho, however, you
learned of the continual nightmares which afflicted him and the screams that
awoke the others who slept in the same room; of his dislocated knee and
multitude of other health problems and his constant, agonizing headaches.
Lucho lived in a small town in Cesar, and, although
not himself a union member, he had always worked as a farm day laborer. He was
friends with several members and frequently spent time with them in their union
hall after work. That presence alone was enough for the army to label him a
“guerrilla auxiliary.”
Lucho planned to go home early that November
afternoon in 1988. He left the union hall with a friend but as they were
passing a corner store, a group of laborers they knew called and invited them
to have beer. The men drank quickly, both were in a hurry. But the group
insisted they stay and have another. Suddenly and without warning, the men saw
they were surrounded by soldiers. There was nothing coincidental about the
men’s presence there or the invitation; they had planned the encounter. There
was no escape. The men were forced into a house which stood opposite the corner
store and belonged to a well-known politician and member of Congress. To their
horror, they saw that the house also served as a training center for sicarios,
a torture center and an army camp. First, their identification was taken from
them; then, they were beaten and tortured until they lost consciousness. A
soldier watching the torture told the men they would not be permitted to leave
the house alive now that they had seen what really went on there.
Just before midnight, the two friends were told they
would die crucified on crosses. Outside, men began to load huge trunks of wood
and iron stakes onto a pickup truck that belonged to the politician. The men
were then tied together and forced up into the truck. In whispered undertones
they quickly agreed to try and escape at the first opportunity; being shot and
killed was better than crucifixion.
It was after one in the morning when the truck began
driving out of the town. Suddenly, a struggle began in the back, the driver
turned to glance back at what was going on and the truck swerved sideways and
hit the railing of a bridge. Both men jumped from the truck. One of the
sicarios fired, killing Antonino immediately. But Lucho, vomiting blood,
managed to get free from him, off the bridge and into the darkness. When lights
began going on and people began looking out of nearby windows, the killers
drove the truck back over Antonino’s body and fled.
For Lucho, the ghost of his dead friend became a
constant nightmare that never leaves him. More recently, another ghost, that of
one of the sicarios who was subsequently murdered, has also begun to haunt him.
The crowds of the big cities do nothing to dispel these ghosts; sometimes in the
entrances to large stores he sees the dead, in the bodies of the living,
pursuing him, as reality and fantasy mingle, confusing and hurting him. But it
is not only the dead that pursue him; members of that group of soldiers and
paramilitaries are also after him. His crime? Having been a candidate for the
cross and having seen firsthand what was hidden behind the door of the
congressman’s house.
Alfonso His voice broke when he told me that he had
cried. Alfonso was a campesino, one of the “duros” or “strong ones” as we
called them, a veteran of many struggles and he spoke from the heart. I think
he cried not only for the friend he had saved but also for the solidarity of
that campesino community and the creative spirit and force that had enabled it
to snatch individuals from death’s door. But even as he talked to me, Alfonso
was aware that it was a solidarity that was being slowly beaten down and torn
apart by the force of terror. It happened in 1989. Almost everyone had given
Alfonso up for dead. He had been taken away by an army patrol and his store,
the rural hamlet’s social meeting place, had been ransacked and destroyed.
Several days earlier, soldiers had picked up a man with the same first and last
name as Alfonso, torturing him for 12 hours before realizing their error. When
they captured Alfonso, his death seemed a foregone conclusion, inexorably
dictated by the laws of the “Dirty War.”
All our initials attempts to rescue him led us to the
same result; he was “disappeared.” After the army denied any knowledge of his
detention, our only option was to be alert for any unusual gathering of
vultures, a sign of the presence of a body dumped somewhere in the countryside.
The community, however, was unwilling to simply give
up on one of its own. Almost 100 of its residents set off for the city of
Barrancabermeja. There, they entered and occupied the Prosecutor’s office,
demanding the country’s Prosecutor General and other high-ranking government
officials in Bogota be notified of what had occurred. Local authorities asked
for assistance from the army’s high command. Finally, the army agreed to
release Alfonso and a group set off into the mountains to bring him back. After
10 days of torture, he was more dead than alive.
Some years later, Alfonso told me the details of the
hell he had been through. Dragged out of his house with his hands and feet tied
together, he was taken into the mountains and tortured, a shirt was forced into
his mouth and down into his throat; he was beaten in the face until his teeth
were broken, one of them pulled out with the roots; his eyes were burned with
cigarettes; his nose was filled with salt water until he lost consciousness and
he was beaten mercilessly about the neck, the abdomen and legs causing internal
hemorrhages and the inflammation of a number of organs. This orgy of cruelty
seemed imaginable only as a prelude to death.
His rescuers immediately took him to the hospital
where he began medical treatment which would last for several months. In order
to avoid further scandal, the mayor of Barrancabermeja agreed to cover all of
his medical and hospital costs.
Although Alfonso’s body and soul were permanently
scarred by the horrible tortures he was subjected to, for him the terror
continues. During the past few months (July/August 1994), both the army and the
paramilitaries have begun to harass him again. I have gone with him to numerous
meetings with government ministers, counselors and prosecutors, but we have
been unable to obtain a genuine commitment from them to protect him. The region
where he lives has been chosen as the center for one of the country’s most
terrible paramilitary projects. One consequence is that the terror has, in
large measure, neutralized the solidarity of the community. As I write these
very lines, l have received word that several of his neighbors are scrambling
to abandon the region, looking for somewhere to go before it is too late.
A Lay Worker from Casanare So pathetic was the story
I heard from a lay worker who worked in the eastern department of Casanare,
that I wanted to share it with you now.
It was such a very strange funeral procession, she
said, with feelings of terror, indignation and impotence perhaps even stronger
than the overriding sadness. A casual observer would be hard-pressed to distinguish
between scenes of a war and scenes of a funeral; as the procession carrying the
coffins of the two young people emerged from the church of that small village,
soldiers took up positions on either side of them, machine-guns pointed and at
the ready. It had all started when the guerrillas entered the village and
killed a soldier. Shortly afterwards, a contingent of 120 soldiers arrived and
told the townspeople that at least 120 of them would die as a reprisal for his
death. In the days that followed, soldiers entered and searched most of the
town’s houses and, before long, almost all of its young people had been
tortured. Then, one afternoon, the army gave the townspeople an order
forbidding them from leaving their houses after 6 p.m.
The next evening, one of the two young victims
hurried to a restaurant where he regularly ate supper. It was past 6, however,
and he was captured by a group of soldiers.
Minutes later, his brother was startled by soldiers
banging on the door of his house. Although his sister begged him not to go
outside, he told her that he “had nothing to hide and, therefore, nothing to
fear,” and opened the door. The soldiers dragged him outside and took him away.
The next day the brothers’ bodies were found; they had been horribly tortured
before being killed. The decision was made to hold the wake in the school;
after all, both boys were well-loved students. The townspeople would simply not
give in to the terror that was inundating the town or to the soldiers who had
arbitrarily labeled the two youths “criminals.” Yes, even with the soldiers’
guns pointed menacingly at them, the townspeople would celebrate their faith in
human dignity and show that justice could not be destroyed in this manner.
And so the school’s teachers and students, the parish
and the townspeople honored the two young people. Under the circumstances,
their act became an heroic one—and one which infuriated the soldiers who had
orders to humiliate them and trample their rights, all in order to satisfy a
perverse hunger for vengeance.
Nerves at the breaking point, fists clenched, words
and screams bottled up in throats with no escape and tears like rivers of
bitterness borne of pain, indignation and impotence, all combined to transform
that silent funeral procession, amid the soldiers, the machine-guns and the
fear, into an heroic tribute to life and human dignity.
San Vicente de Chucurí It was February 21, 1990. A
number of campesinos had arrived in Barrancabermeja after fleeing a rural zone
near San Vincent de Chucurí that had been bombed by army helicopters and
planes. I was in Barranca that day and, together with several members of the
local Human Rights Committee, decided to go to the zone where, according to
some of the campesinos, there were a number of wounded who needed medical
attention and dead bodies which hadn’t been identified.
The scenery as we traveled was breathtaking but then,
as we made our way up the hill known as the Cerro de la Aurora, we began to
notice pools of dried blood by the roadside, and craters that had been opened
up by the bombs and rifle shells. The stories we were told by some of the
campesinos who had stayed behind during the bombardment were chilling: the
soldiers had grabbed one boy, they said, in the presence of many witnesses.
Although the witnesses were subsequently forced into a farmhouse, all of them
saw the army helicopter arrive and take the boy away.
The discovery a week later of a mound of fresh earth
in a nearby hamlet alerted the campesinos. There, they found what was left of
his body; it had been ripped into small pieces and they had to use two plastic
bags to pick it up. Near that same spot, two elderly deaf mutes, perhaps they
didn’t hear the bombs and for that reason did-n’t flee the area, were savagely
tortured and murdered in their humble dwelling. When we entered we saw a puddle
of wet blood amidst the disarray of their meager belongings.
One campesino woman in particular impressed me with
her strength and acute powers of observation: “Father,” she said, “I have lived
in these mountains for fifty years and even from far away I know the difference
between the smell of a dead animal and a human being.” We went down with her
about sixty meters, walking off and away from the path through a grove of
trees. As we walked, the smell of death became more and more acute. As a few
rays of the early afternoon sun filtered through the trees, we saw provisions
scattered on the ground, evidence of a recently vacated army camp. Suddenly, we
were confronted with a macabre spectacle, a man lay on the ground with his arms
and hands extended and opened wide, his mutilated body looked as if it had been
crucified. We stood silently, holding our breaths as emotions welled up within
each one of us. I could think only of the “Requiem aeternam” and the verses
from Job 19 that the Christian tradition has intoned over so many millions of
coffins over the centuries, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end
he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my
flesh I will see God, I myself will see him with my own eyes, I, and not
another. How my heart yearns within me!”
The skin had been ripped away from his skull and it
had several bullet holes in it, His hands, however, had enough skin on them to
see that they had been burned in a bonfire; we found the ashes nearby. Ropes
were tied around his feet and we guessed he had been dragged to this spot. The
campesino woman who had guided us here pointed out something else, these were
not the calloused hands and feet of a campesino, she said. She was right. That
same night an investigative commission from the Prosecutor’s office arrived,
and, after taking skin samples from his fingers in order to identify him,
ordered him buried. Two years later, I learned that the man’s identity had been
positively established, Juan Fernando Porras, a doctor who had been
“disappeared” by members of the B-2 (the army’s intelligence unit) several days
earlier in Bucaramanga.
He had been accused of collaborating with the
guerrillas. Witnesses who were being held at the same cells of the army’s Fifth
Brigade later told of having seen him there under heavy guard.
The Campesino Hostel The Middle Magdalena region is
the valley carved out in parts of five departments by the Magdalena River as it
winds its way northwards towards the Caribbean. Rich in minerals and fertile
agricultural land, the Magdalena Medio is also a region where many different
types of violence have taken root: guerrilla organizations have been based in
the nearby mountains since the 1960s; the army chose the region to implement
many of its most brutal counterinsurgency methods and refine its “Dirty War”
strategy; and the paramilitary strategy which emerged in the 1980s has
established strongholds in the region. The city of Barrancabermeja (known
locally as “Barranca“) is at the heart of the region.
In September, 1988, I was invited to participate in a
human rights forum in Barranca. As we finished our expositions and discussions,
a group of families arrived to denounce their displacement from the countryside
around the neighboring municipality of Simacota forced by army bombardment.
They asked us for help in “taking refuge” in Barranca.
Several months earlier, I had visited a campesino
shelter near San Salvador and had thought then how urgently Colombia needed a
similar kind of temporary shelter. The homeless families now before us became
the impetus for us to take up the challenge. It was a challenge, however, which
proved no easy task For a number of popular organizations, the church and many
campesinos the first reaction when faced with such a proposal was fear. “But
wouldn’t such a place be a perfect target for more repression,” they said. With
little alternative, we had to give it a try, history would give us the only
definitive answer. All our attempts to obtain public land on loan from the
government were in vain. With help through international solidarity groups,
however, we were able to purchase an abandoned warehouse. In April, 1989, the
Campesino Hostel was opened.
During its first two months of operation, hostel
residents were the targets of threats and telephone terrorism. Guard shifts had
to be organized to watch the hostel at night in case of sudden attack.
Once again, it was as a result of international
pressure and a letter-writing campaign in which the “aliases” of many of the
individuals responsible for the threats (identified as members of the B-2 army
intelligence units) were mentioned, that the Hostel was able to begin
functioning again in relative calm. In mid-1991, however, the attacks began
again in earnest. (In two successive nights in June, 1991, the hostel’s walls
were the target of machine-gun bursts; in October, 1991, two massacres were
carried out just outside the hostel’s front door, and, although residents
themselves were not among the victims, subsequent telephone calls told them
that, “you may have escaped this time, but next time you won’t be so lucky.” In
March, 1992, a group of armed men forced its way into the hostel at 9 p.m. one
night and threatened terrified residents at gun point for three hours. In May,
1992, a young woman who had visited the hostel on numerous occasions admitted
to having been sent there by a paramilitary organization which operated under
the coordination of the army’s XIV Brigade. She said that she had been
blackmailed into working for the group and that it was planning another attack
on the hostel. Two days later, her disfigured body was found on a road leading
out of Barranca. We decided to temporarily close the hostel during April and
May, 1993, and pressure the authorities to investigate these attacks. Lengthy
meetings with officials from the offices of the Prosecutor General, the
Presidential Counselor for Human Rights and the Attorney General, however, only
confirmed my suspicions: at the very heart of impunity and the almost
impenetrable mechanisms which have been designed to maintain it, is a total
lack of political will to combat paramilitarism and stop the “Dirty War.”
Finally, in April, 1993, the Colombian Attorney General
invited me to a “dialogue” in his office with the Minister of Defense, intended
to discuss the situation and reach some kind of informal agreement about the
hostel. In spite of the voluminous evidence that already existed to the
contrary, the minister vehemently denied the armed forces had anything
whatsoever to do with the hostilities and attacks, agreeing only to send a
“directive” to the region’s army and police authorities asking them to respect
the hostel. This half-hearted commitment and the pressure of numerous displaced
campesino families with no place else to go, prompted us to reopen the hostel.
On the night of March 21, 1994, however, members of an army patrol attempted to
force their way into the hostel, firing once through the window. And, once
again it was the international community which expressed itself in strong
criticisms to the government and permitted the hostel to enter another period
of relative normality, in spite of the reigning impunity.
To talk to any of the hundreds of people who have
passed through the hostel is to come face to face with profound human
tragedies. And it is to begin to understand different realities which are bound
together by the terrible nature of crimes, enforced displacements and
disappearances, bombardments and paramilitarism, all of them existing within
the framework of impunity.
El Carmen de Chucurí One morning in October, 1990, a
group of people from another municipality in the Magdalena Medio, El Carmen de
Chucurí, arrived at our offices in Justice and Peace. Among them was Father
Bernardo Marín, El Carmen’s parish priest and the municipal ombudsman. Both had
escaped an attempt on their lives and feared they would never be able to return
to El Carmen.
Although we had received a number of protests about a
particular kind of paramilitary project that was being implemented in the El
Carmen region, it was when I accompanied these two survivors on the rounds of
different government and justice offices as they made their stories clear that
I began to understand the real nature and dimensions of this criminal
structure. Since its founding in the early 1960s, the National Liberation Army,
or ELN as it is called, has exercised a certain influence in and around El
Carmen. The guerrilla priest Camilo Torres was killed in combat nearby in 1966.
In the years since then, a considerable number of campesinos have at one time
or another come to “sympathize” with the guerrillas. Others who have not at
least become accustomed to living with their presence, and this situation has
enabled the guerrillas to impose their decisions, on occasion, in the region.
To the army, El Carmen is a region that has to be subjugated at all costs, and,
to this end, it has designed a cure much worse than the disease, a strategy
which entails forcing the region’s residents to participate in
counterinsurgency operations, killing those who refuse to take part.
A training center for sicarios which had been set up
by the army in a nearby village in 1981 was chosen as the headquarters for this
paramilitary project. As the project advanced through the countryside, rural
communities were told they had three options: join the paramilitaries, leave
the region or die. It soon became clear that the paramilitary project enjoyed
support in the highest echelons of government. Paramilitary bases were
constructed next to military bases, meetings with campesinos were called by
soldiers and run by paramilitaires or vice versa, census data and lists of
campesino families and properly owners elaborated by the army turned up in the
possession of the paramilitaries, and individuals detained by soldiers were
turned over to the paramilitaries.
Residents were obliged to pay special “taxes” to
support what became known as “la autodefensa,” to purchase arms and take part
in paramilitary patrols, even to turn over their young children for several
months at a time for training and patrols.
Our Commission began to systematize protests we heard
from El Carmen and we published two lengthy reports on the criminal project
being implemented there. According to the figures we compiled, since 1987 more
than 300 people who refused to join the paramilitaries or leave the region were
murdered. Dozens of other atrocities, tortures, disappearances, extortion, rape
and the destruction of houses and crops, with dates, places and exact
circumstances were also documented. Several thousand people fled the region and
today live in poverty, struggling to eke out a living in different regions of
the country. Father Marín, who had set up a network of base communities in
rural hamlets around E1 Carmen, saw first hand what was being planned for his
parishioners, and, for that reason, courageously insisted they resist the
paramilitary advance. In a 1987 meeting in the hamlet of Islanda, paramilitary
group members and soldiers concluded that one of the first steps that had to be
taken in order to take over El Carmen was to get rid of Father Marín and a
number of other influential individuals. They decided to kill them. On October
4, 1990, the army base commander in El Carmen ordered the police chief to
confine all of his agents to barracks at nightfall. Two sicarios had spent 20
days readying their plan and that night they would kill the priest. The police
commander, however, decided to listen to his conscience and disobey the army
order, and, with several of his agents, went to the site of the planned murder
to warn the priest. It was a warning that saved his life. Later that same week,
the police commander was “transferred” out of El Carmen to another region of
the country. Before he left, however, he urged Father Marín and several of the
other probable victims to flee the region, saying they would now have no one to
protect them. Grateful to him, they took his advice.
Our repeated protests did finally reach a number of
high-ranking government officials, however, and on March 29, 1992, after
compiling a thick dossier, they ordered the arrest of El Carmen’s principal
civilian paramilitary leaders. When a flotilla of helicopters arrived in El
Carmen to take the men into custody, however, the army and paramilitaries
provoked a riot in the town and the judges and other judicial employees who had
arrived to arrest the men were forced to flee for their lives, empty handed.
This aborted judicial mission resulted in a scandal that soon catapulted El
Carmen into national news. The quest for “justice” had gone “too far” this
time, it seemed, and would have to be neutralized.
Almost immediately the mass media began their
attacks, falling in step behind the army and accusing anyone who denounced the
situation in El Carmen as a “guerrilla collaborator.” We were victims of this
intense campaign for more than six months. The army, meanwhile, unable to
eliminate Father Marin physically, decided to destroy him morally by framing
him using the testimony of “secret witnesses” who went so far as to accuse him
of “having taken boxes of ammunition to the guerrillas.” The “faceless system
of justice” that has been set up in Colombia during the past several years, in
which secret witnesses, secret judges, evidence and testimony and “accusations”
made and paid for with large amounts of money are all integral parts, is an
excellent vehicle for these types of legal setups, especially when the army
itself has been granted wide-ranging powers to manipulate evidence.
Daniel Daniel was in the paramilitary. Born into a
poor family in the department of Valle, he did his eighteenmonth mandatory
military service in the San Mateo battalion in the city of Pereira. He then
accepted a job with the army as an “informant,” working much of the time as a
driver. Coincidentally, his brother Rubiel had been murdered while working at a
similar job.
In March, 1990, Daniel was given intelligence
assignments in the rural zone around the municipality of Trujillo. There, he
traced the movements of a guerrilla g roup and identified several houses the
guerrillas entered, passing the information on to an army major who was in
charge of counterinsurgency operations.
Between March 31 and April 1, 1990, in what became
known as the Trujillo massacre, Daniel was stunned to see the use the army made
of his periodic reports. Just before midnight on the 31st, a combined
army/paramilitary group dragged a large number of campesinos out of their
houses, took them to the hacienda of a well-known drug trafficker and brutally
tortured them, dismembering them with a chainsaw. The army major reserved the
most brutal of the tortures for himself. The last assignment Daniel carried out
for the army was to transport their headless torsos to the Cauca River and dump
them into the water. As he witnessed these atrocities, Daniel overheard the
name of one of the group’s next victims, Father Tiberio Fernandez, Trujillo’s
parish priest. Then he escaped.
Almost a year later in a conversation, Daniel told me
that that particular incident had left him confused. Until then, he said, he
had been convinced that to fight the guerrillas was to serve his country. But
after what he had seen, he began to ask himself: “Who are the bad ones and who
is the enemy now?” After the DAS (a government civilian security organization)
refused to protect him any longer, this confusion prompted Daniel to seek
refuge in the camp of a guerrilla group in the process of demobilizing its
members. He subsequently gave detailed testimony of the horrors he had seen to
officials from the Prosecutor General’s office and a number of judges; on May
5, 1991, during an ill-advised visit back to Trujillo to visit his father, he
was “disappeared.” I will not describe the incidents Daniel witnessed and
related in a coherent and detailed manner to national and international
investigative and humanitarian organizations because their cruelty is enough to
wound anyone’s human sensibility. I can only say that the tortures that were
carried out in that farmhouse were rooted in some of the worst barbarism in the
annals of history. Father Tiberio Fernandez, the clergyman Daniel had overhead
being discussed, was one of the victims of this unspeakable cruelty; his
horribly mutilated body was found floating in the Cauca River on April 24,
1990. Tiberio was born into a campesino family, and, in his youth, became an
agrarian leader and one of the first students at the Universidad Campesina,
founded by the Jesuits in the city of Buga. Tiberio’s enthusiasm for cooperative
work flourished during his school days, and, when he was named parish priest of
Trujillo, he began to organize what would in the next four years become a
network of 20 small-scale, community enterprises. Tragically, many individuals
who worked in these small enterprises were tortured and murdered along with
Tiberio; to the army and the drug traffickers, these and most other popular,
grass-roots organizations are only “fronts for the guerrillas.”
When the individuals responsible for the Trujillo massacre
were absolved by the Colombian justice system, we decided to take the case, on
behalf of the 63 victims we were able to identify, to the Inter-American
Commission of Human Rights of the Organization of American States. After two
years official, government replies and proposals and counter-proposals from us,
a September, 1994, meeting was set up in Washington and a proposal to seek an “amicable
settlement,” as permitted by the IACHR’s statutes, was considered. The
Colombian government proposed the creation of an extra judicial commission in
order to reexamine the case files and evidence and generate recommendations.
The fact that a broad-based commission of this nature, which included both
government and nongovernmental representatives, would come into direct contact
with the barbaric events of Trujillo, seemed to us a positive step, and, after
insisting on several conditions, we accepted the proposal. The Commission
finished its work in January, 1995, concluding that the Colombian government
was responsible, both for the crimes committed by members of the Colombian army
and police as well as for the deliberate suppression of the truth and
corruption of Colombian judicial employees. After receiving the Commission’s
final report on January 31, the president of Colombia, in an unprecedented
action, accepted responsibility on behalf of the government and announced plans
to compensate a number of the victims’ families. There were no determinations
made, however, about how to punish those the Commission concluded were involved
in the massacre.
They had already been absolved by the country’s
justice system, the absolute impunity which continues is as blatant a challenge
as ever to justice. The only possible solution, a trial by members of an
international tribunal, is a possibility the Colombian government refuses even
to consider.
The Putumayo Putumayo is another of Colombia’s
southern departments bordering on Ecuador, a zone of colonization where
peasants and their small settlements continue to encroach on the dense jungle
that surrounds it. In 1990, a number of parish priests insisted I visit the
region in order to collect evidence of atrocities they feared were being
relegated to oblivion. After several visits, I was completely frustrated;
people were terrified and no one dared speak out. “Anyone who opens his mouth
here is a dead man,” was the way the campesinos expressed it.
But by Easter week, 1991, in the words of one of the
local priests, it seemed that “things were about to explode.” He was right. A huge
procession through the town’s streets on Easter Wednesday seemed to confirm the
fact that the townspeople were no longer willing to look the other way and turn
their backs on the blood bath which was taking place around them.
Members of the anti-narcotics police, operating from
a base they had in the town, and a large group of paramilitaries had
implemented some of the “Dirty War’s” most ruthless tactics in the region; to
be between 15 and 30 years of age was synonymous with being a guerrilla and,
therefore, a legitimate target of disappearance and murder.
In a Registry of the Deceased in one of the area’s
parishes, I found a list of 280 individuals who had been shot and killed in the
preceding 5 years. Seventy percent of them were less than 30 years of age. I
was told later that for every one of these registered deaths, there were at
least 10 others that had gone unreported, simply buried quietly and secretly.
That Good Friday under a scorching sun, what seemed
like the whole town’s population walked slowly through the streets and the
Stations of the Cross. I waited for a campesino who, taking advantage of an
absence of military patrols along the water, had promised to pick me up on his
motorcycle and take me along the river’s shore.
After we got into a canoe and started upstream, the
campesino pointed out the places along the shore where bodies were regularly
discovered, many of them buried right where they were found. If a cross had
been erected at each grave, there would have been no room left between the
river’s shore and the beginning of the jungle. So many people dead and buried,
I cannot put into words the feelings that overcame me on that slow passage
along the river’s shore beneath the midday sun that Good Friday.
Further upstream a campesino on shore told us what he
saw at night as he looked toward the river from his small dwelling: at about
midnight, he said, a white car would drive up, open its doors and men would be
forced out. The men were then shot in the forehead, their stomachs were cut open
and filled with heavy stones and they were dumped in the river. In a hushed
tone, the campesino told us where we could find one of the survivors of these
nightly massacres.
Following his instructions, we headed into the
undergrowth, walking until we reached the shack of the young man named Arturo
who told us his story. He had been picked up and arrested as he was walking
past the anti-narcotics base. He was shut into a cell; later, several other
young men were brought in to join him there.
Hours later, at about midnight, as they were sleeping
on the floor of the cell, the men were woken up and taken outside to a white
car. They were driven to the river, pulled out one by one, shot and kicked down
into the water. Arturo was terrified. Feigning absolute naivety, he begged the
men not to throw him into the river as he said he couldn’t swim. Perhaps intent
on watching him struggle and drown before shooting him, the men were stunned as
Arturo suddenly dove as deep as he could into the river and swam under water to
the other shore. The men’s shots came up short and, by remaining motionless in
the darkness, Arturo managed to go unnoticed. The frame of a small boat
anchored near him served as protection and he was able to lift his head out of
the water from time to time to breathe without being seen by the men.
Getting Arturo out of the region and to the capital
so that he could tell what had happened to him and try somehow to stop the
blood bath was difficult and risky. The army set up checkpoints along the
river, the roads and at the airport. Tragically, in spite of the details of
Arturo’s story, justice was never served. The director of the national police
“transferred” the agents and police officers out of the region. But isn’t it
likely that they are simply doing the same thing in another part of the
country? And, today, all these crimes and the individuals who committed them
remain unpunished.
Riofrío On October 5, 1993, nightly television
newscasts led off with the story of a successful military operation which had
resulted in the deaths in combat of “13 guerrillas” in the El Bosque rural
hamlet, a municipality of Riofrío department of Valle. The next day, the story
was front page news in all of the country’s major newspapers.
Several days later, we established direct contact
with several of the survivors. A commission, including a delegate from the
Catholic Church and several nongovernmental human rights organizations,
traveled to the zone, visited the scene of the crime and interviewed a number
of witnesses. Some of these had talked to members of official government
investigative teams which visited the hamlet; others, however, chose not to,
preferring to tell what they had seen, in strict confidence, to members of the
NGO commission. The information this commission collected laid bare both the
army’s monstrous capacity to lie and the mass media’s complicitous role in
covering up such crimes.
In reality, the “13 guerrillas” were members of two
campesino families who had dedicated many years to making El Bosque a progressive
and united hamlet, fomenting a genuine community spirit among its inhabitants.
But to the army, all this organization was only a sign of the hamlet’s ties to
the guerrillas. Once again, the doctrine of collective responsibility resulted
in another horrendous crime: given the fact that members of a guerrilla group
passed through El Bosque from time to time, the families they visited were
“guilty” and thus had to be eliminated. In addition, a drug trafficker from the
Cali drug cartel had El Bosque’s land in his sights. He owned much of the
surrounding land and wanted to eliminate any possible resistance to his plans
of controlling the area. Just before dawn on October 5, members of the Ladino
and Molina families, leaders of El Bosque, were awakened and dragged out of
their houses by a group of armed men wearing army uniforms and civilian
clothes. The victims were taken up a path to the unoccupied house of one of the
Ladino sons who had left the day before on an errand. There, the massacre was
carried out, preceded by tortures and rapes.
Several of the survivors, some of them hidden among
the nearby coffee bushes and others (women and children) shut into their rooms
by the killers, saw soldiers arrive to relieve the armed group at about
midmorning. Both groups were in the same place at the same time. About noon
that same day of the massacre, the mother of the victims was visited by a
number of army officers. When she raised her head to look at the soldiers, she
recognized one of them as having been with the first group earlier in the
morning.
Colonel Becerra, Commander of the army’s Palace
battalion in the nearby city of Buga, claimed full responsibility for the
military operation. It had been a “combat,” he said, with an “extremely
dangerous guerrilla unit,” preceded by careful “intelligence” work which had
resulted in the “deaths” of 13 guerrillas. In spite of his repeated public
claims of having participated directly in the events which led to the 13
deaths, claims that were subsequently supported by Commanders of the army’s
Brigades and Divisions in Cali, the Prosecutor General’s office chose to accuse
Becerra only of “covering up” a mysteriously armed group which arrived at dawn
and carried out the massacre. Colonel Becerra had a dark past. When he was
accused of being responsible for the 1988 massacre of 20 banana plantation
workers in the Urabá region and a warrant was issued for his arrest, his
military superiors enrolled him in a “promotion” course for officers and sent
him to the United States. On his return to Colombia, with the arrest warrant
still outstanding, he was promoted from colonel to lieutenant Colonel by an
Advisory Junta from the Ministry of Defense made up of 26 Generals.
When we solicited an explanation of these mockeries
of justice from the Prosecutor General, he replied that the investigation for
Becerra’s participation in the banana workers massacre had been terminated on
April 20, 1992, and that an investigation against the generals from the
Advisory Junta who approved his promotion was in its “preliminary stage” (four
and a half years after the fact and six months before it could be legally
terminated).
4. The Internal Logic of
Colombia’s “Democra-tatorship”
The term “democra-tatorship” was coined by the
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano who was unable to find a word in the
dictionary to adequately describe a political system which combines democratic
formalities with features and characteristics of a dictatorship.
Colombia is frequently characterized as one of Latin
America’s “most stable democracies.” During the past 50 years, it has been
ruled only once, 1953-1957, by a military dictatorship and it was one of the
few countries which escaped unscathed from the era of the “National Security
dictatorships” which sprang up in so many other South American countries during
the 1960s and 1970s. Levels of political violence in Colombia, however, are
much greater than those in any of these other countries.
A brief look at several characteristics of the coun
try’s political history help explain the particularities of the Colombian model
and show how it has been able to assimilate so completely the main principles
of the Doctrine of National Security within the formalities of a democratic
framework These elements can be described as follows:
1) A political arena which was divided into two
compartmentalized spheres. First, there is the bureaucratic/administrative,
where the country’s political parties compete and bureaucratic and budgetary
spoils serve as an incentive for cycles of generalized corruption. The second
sphere is the country’s social conflict, which was turned over to the armed
forces for management. In order to facilitate this, legislation incorporated
into the State of Siege equipped the armed forces with rights to carry out
extensive repression. By definition, this is an exceptional and transitory
state of affairs during which the president can legislate by decree and suspend
individual and collective rights and guarantees. Its principal instrument is
the “fuero militar” or military privilege which permits members of the armed
forces and police guilty of crimes to be investigated and tried by their peers
in military courts, courts in which impunity has been all but
institutionalized.
2) It is difficult to imagine an internal guerrilla
conflict existing for as long as Colombia’s, more than 30 years, without the
existence of some kind of social legitimation and support in the country. The
development of eight guerrilla organizations during the past three decades in
Colombia led to the notion of the country’s “internal conflict” as being part
and parcel of the hemispheric conflict between the super powers. The country’s
guerrillas were considered the “enemy within the country.” Colombian President
Turbay Ayala (1978-1982) characterized the country’s armed insurgency as “the
national spearhead of the international advancement of communism.” Since they
were the enemy, it became “acceptable” to deny its members their fundamental
rights. The country’s media played, and continue to play, an important role in
this regard, legitimating and justifying the deaths of guerrillas that occur
outside of combat by suggesting that guerrillas can be legitimately
“disappeared” or tortured, for example, and maintaining that guerrillas have no
recourse to even the most fundamental procedural rights. The media have been
successful in this not by the logic of their reasoning or the strength of their
argument, but rather by the use of more subliminal methods, by manipulating and
distorting or simply failing to report “news” and by tacitly endorsing such
criminal practices.
Once these practices were legitimated and accepted
for “guerrillas,” it was not difficult to extend them to guerrilla
collaborators, a label that was imposed on virtually all expressions of the
country’s popular movement and political opposition. And it was even easier to
attach this label to inhabitants of the country’s so called “conflict zones“;
in these areas, the doctrine of “collective responsibility” was implemented.
Campesinos, indigenous people or individuals who simply live in areas where
guerrillas are active are considered guerrilla supporters or, at the very
least, responsible for their presence and, therefore, legitimate targets of
counterinsurgency operations.
3) During the 1980s, however, two cracks developed in
this model, the first, as a result of a growing public awareness of human
rights and the second, as a result of the progressive collapse of
“international communism,” which would eventually pull most of the ideological
framework out from under the Doctrine of National Security.
The first crisis was counteracted by the design and
implementation of the paramilitary strategy. The government was able to
successfully conceal its role in and evade responsibility for crimes by entrusting
much of the “dirty work” to armed civilian groups which began to operate under
the clandestine coordination of the army and police.
The support some paramilitaries subsequently received
from one sector of the country’s drug Mafia further confused the issue and
enabled the authorities to attribute almost any crime to “unknown individuals,”
individuals who were always conveniently neutral, called “narcoterrorists.”
In order to deal with the second crisis, the
country’s “internal enemies” were reclassified as “terrorists,” with the term
terrorism being defined so ambiguously in the Colombian criminal code that
today it can be applied to almost any expression of political opposition,
discontent or popular protest.
4) Both the paramilitary, “Dirty War” strategy and
the strategy of criminalization (or “terrorization“) of social protest in the
country, however, are vulnerable and open to being challenged in the legal
arena. For this reason, it was necessary to carry the conflict into the
judicial system. To do this, the new Colombian constitution designed a highly
politicized model of justice which permitted the Executive to exert an
inordinate amount of influence on many of the judiciary’s key appointments, and
in particular the office of the Attorney General, in which enormous
discretionary powers are concentrated. The constitution also permitted the
establishment of a parallel justice system for members of the country’s
political opposition, adopted as part of the country’s “ordinary” justice
system, which includes such abhorrent characteristics and procedures as secret
judges, witnesses and evidence, paid “informants,” arrests and imprisonment
prior to the initiation of any investigation, the acceptance of “military
intelligence reports” as legal evidence, the prolongation of jail terms without
trial or the existence of any sustainable evidence, etc. Today, this combination
of arbitrariness and impunity is one of the Colombian democratatorship model’s
most important elements.
5) And, finally, it is difficult to register so many
killings year after year without giving the impression that the government
shares at least part of the responsibility, if only for its indifference and
inactivity.
Surely the international community cannot help but be
concerned when Colombia has had the dubious honor of being the world’s most
violent country for the last decade. To counteract these worries and give the
world the impression that it has gone to great lengths to protect human rights
in the country, the government decided to take up the human rights “banner“in
name at least, and incorporate it into its political agenda. The new
constitution was crucial in this regard, entrenching almost all of the existing
international human rights declarations (all of them signed and ratified on
numerous occasions by Colombia) and creating a variety of official
organizations to protect human rights. The government, for its part, followed
the constitution by multiplying the number of official human rights committees
and organizations.
Those of us who make almost daily rounds of these
offices, however, experience firsthand the reality behind the rhetoric and know
only too well that while each fulfills its own limited function, in an endless
sending and receiving of documents and files, seals and official papers, none
of them has the power to actually solve any concrete problem. What they do do,
however, and admirably so, is add the one final cosmetic touch to the
democra-tatorship model.
5. A Society without
Alternatives?
Decades of suffering in many Latin American countries
have left scars which are frequently difficult to perceive. They are
overlooked, perhaps, because of the sheer number of reports and declarations
that have to be dealt with; because of the urgency of finding solutions to particularly
pressing problems; the desperate fight to obtain small victories and the
euphoria they bring when obtained or, perhaps, the hope that leads us at times
to take refuge in unattainable utopias as a defense mechanism against so many
frustrations. Today, a talk or an article which examines the kinds of
deplorable situations I have touched on here, without somewhere suggesting what
can be done to overcome them or proposing a solution, is considered incomplete.
But this kind of hope and optimism has become a social necessity. Society, too,
has erected its own defense mechanisms against desperation.
Before suggesting a solution, however, I want to
mention one additional point, the consequences that so many years of tragedy
and suffering have had on our society.
The struggle to convince victims of human rights
abuses of the need to denounce the crimes they have been subjected to in order
that they themselves do not become the promoters of impunity, is a scene that
has become commonplace in my office over the years.
Predominant in all cases is the instinct for
selfpreservation. Individuals who have been able to save themselves or their
loved ones do not want to put their lives into any more danger by denouncing
what has happened to them and demanding justice. And, of course, they have all
the reason in the world to feel this way. But it is precisely this attitude
that permits the abusers and the criminals to remain untouchable. Sometimes
when we talk of the need to fight against impunity, they seem to awaken with
the challenge and their eyes shine. And, yet, when it comes time to talk of
practicalities and where we can start, just as suddenly it all disappears. In
their eyes is a mixture of shame and skepticism, it is as if they are telling
me: “I made it this far. Now, the best I can do is wish you luck.”
It is very painful to witness the breakup of
marriages because one or the other partner can no longer stand the terror and
the fear that the path towards justice entails or because he or she sees there
will be no future for the children who are so often caught in the middle.
I was deeply moved one morning in my office by the
tears of a banana plantation worker, a man who had witnessed murder and torture
and received death threats, and yet had had the courage to denounce what he
saw. But he had to leave his job and his home and now he had been given an
ultimatum: in order not to lose his wife and mother, he would have to cut off
all links with any popular organization and distance himself forever from any
grassroots struggle or protest. His family could simply not stand the fear and
persecution any longer. He made the decision to cut off all links with any
popular organization and distance himself forever from any grassroots struggle
or protest, but it had cost him dearly.
Another incident which touched me deeply and left me
with a number of unanswered questions comes to my mind often. While
participating in a course with a number of workers in Barrancabermeja, a
campesino took me aside. He wanted to tell me about a difficult decision he had
made, it still worried him, he said, and he wanted to share his feelings with
someone. He told me that the army had set up a checkpoint in the countryside
where he lived. Each day they stopped the local farmers and searched them. When
campesinos arrived with fruit or vegetables, the soldiers scattered them on the
ground or simply destroyed them, accusing them of “taking food to the
guerrillas.” For several months, the campesinos secretly organized a march to
nearby Barrancabermeja where they occupied a local church as a symbol of
protest. The government sent a representative to meet the campesinos, and,
sympathetic to their plight, were given a signed agreement which stated the
government would not permit any further abusive treatment by the army. On their
return, however, the campesinos were stopped at the same checkpoint, searched
and abused as before. When they showed them the signed agreement, the soldiers
laughed and told them: “Those guys might be in charge in Bogota, but we call
the shots here.”
The campesino told me that it was at that moment that
he lost whatever faith he had had in the government and its institutions and
decided to join the guerrillas. A lump in my throat stopped me from saying
anything to him for a long while. Here was a man who had sacrificed a great
deal because of a belief that nonviolent methods could be effective. And now
his hopes had been irreparably dashed.
What alternative could I give him that he had not
already considered and found worthless? When I tried to tell him that failures,
suffering and discontent would also almost surely be part of his life as a
guerrilla, he said he knew that, but that all he wanted to do was die with
dignity. In any event, he said, they were going to kill him sooner or later.
Since then, I have often asked myself how many other combatants have decided in
similar fashion to join the guerrillas, embarking on a hopeless struggle
because somewhere or somehow they find in it a kind of ultimate hope and
meaning.
In this regard, I can recall a discussion with the
mothers from the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The contemporary political
situation in Argentina would seem to be proof that those years of brutal
dictatorship were successful, not only in exterminating one entire ideological
generation, but also in effectively conditioning, through terror, the one that
succeeded it. An implicit but irrevocable decision seems to have been made by
the new generation: never again to tread the ideological paths of the “disappeared,”
the tortured and the murdered. It is a kind of subconscious compromise to their
wish to live. These same thoughts came to my mind one morning as I read the
column of a well-known journalist in one of Colombia’s large newspapers: “Why
are we against having certain left- wing political movements participate in Parliament,”
he asked, “Aren’t they only a “controllable” minority? What are 10 or 20 votes,
after all, compared to more than 100 of the traditional parties? Doesn’t this
all enhance the Congress’s image as a democratic, pluralistic institution which
represents all of the country’s opinions?” There would be cause for alarm, he
concluded, but only if this minority grew.
The smugness of these assertions has its origins in a
situation not unlike that of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Democracy and
respect for fundamental human rights has a price: do not seek alternatives to
the existing system. When Presidential Counselors in Colombia tell the media
that there has been a notable improvement in the country’s human rights
situation, and point to a reduction in 100 or 200 cases among several thousand
total victims, many of us ask ourselves what price has been paid for this.
Aren’t there perhaps fewer people to be killed today than there used to be?
Fewer campesinos willing to join a protest march or fewer workers ready to join
a union and go out on strike? Couldn’t it be that t h e re are simply fewer
people willing to denounce crimes and demand justice?
I have mentioned these incidents and made these
reflections in the hope that they shed some light on a dimension and
consequence of repression that is frequently overlooked—the destruction of a
society’s moral conscience. When fundamental ethical questions cannot be
explored because social structures force the instinct for self-preservation to
prevent that from happening, the moral conscience of that society is being
destroyed at its deepest levels.
6. Impunity: The Key Element
Many sociologists maintain that there is no clear
relation between poverty and violence and that widespread violation of economic
rights does not ordinarily result in violence. Others insist that violent
reactions are more likely to occur when there is a large and obvious gap
between the rich and the poor. Whatever the answer is to this dispute, there is
a closer relationship between the violation of civil and political rights and
violence. Limiting or denying certain sectors the possibility of political
participation is more likely to result in the evolution of an armed insurgency.
Colombia is a case in point. Until the 1970s, the
country’s political arena was the exclusive territory of the Liberal and
Conservative parties; alternative political forces were considered illegal,
especially if they enjoyed authentic, popular support in which case they were
violently persecuted by the government and the targets of campaigns to
delegitimize and even “demonize” them. Perhaps this can help explain why eight
guerrilla organizations (and several other small and more fleeting groups) have
evolved in the country since the 1960s. The 1991 constitution, however, was
inspired by different philosophies. Although clearly falling within the liberal
tradition, it is nevertheless scarred by a number of clearly anti-democratic
features: the justice system, the “fuero militar“,” the states of exception and
a transitory article which permitted decrees passed under the State of Siege
between 1984 and 1991 to be converted into permanent legislation, in
particular.
Today, less and less of the Colombian “problem” is
situated in problems with existing law. That wasn’t always the case. I remember
participating in the country’s first human rights forums in the early and
mid1980s. In those days, our conclusions invariably called for the following:
the abolition of the law which permitted civilians to be tried in military
courts; the lifting of the State of Siege and a number of decrees which had
been passed under it, such as the Security Statute of 1978; the derogation of
the legal framework for the creation of paramilitary groups (Law 48/68); the
appointment of civilians as Delegate Prosecutor for the Armed Forces and
Defense Minister; the signing and ratification of certain international human
rights agreements, etc. Fifteen years later, all of these changes in the law
have been achieved. But violence and human rights abuses continue unabated, a
clear indication that the problem is centered in other areas.
The country’s different “peace processes” or
dialogues over the years between the government and the guerrillas have taught
us a lot in this regard. During the Betancur administration (1982-1986), an
Amnesty Law for guerrillas renouncing the armed struggle was passed (Law
35/82).
Almost immediately, however, it became clear just how
risky a proposition it was to depend on this law for protection as scores of
amnestied guerrillas were murdered, frequently only hours after legalizing
their situation. The Patriotic Union (UP) political party, another fruit of the
Betancur peace process, was founded in November, 1985. Since then, a UP party
member or supporter has been murdered every 53 hours. In the party’s first four
years of existence, this persecution was even more intense with a murder every
39 hours, and, in the run-up to elections, even more chilling, one every 26
hours.
As I write these lines, I think of the funeral of the
most recent UP senator, assassinated on August 9, 1994. The procession was not
nearly as large as others; but then to many, being a member of the UP means
living with a death sentence. In 1993, Colombia’s Human Rights Ombudsman was
asked by the country’s Constitutional Court to report on the progress of
criminal investigations into the murders of UP party activists. Of the 717
cases he examined (only a third of the total number of victims, the others
apparently did not merit an investigation), only 10 had resulted in a completed
investigation and sentence, 6 of them were acquitted.
We frequently put our faith in the justice system as
a possible way out of the crisis we are faced with. If it only worked, we
think, maybe the criminals would stop acting so wantonly and openly.
Successive Colombian governments have promised to
“strengthen the justice system” in order to solve the serious problems of
violence and impunity. In this regard, the European Union and the government of
the United States have contributed significant amounts of money to help
“bolster” the justice system. And yet levels of impunity in the country remain
scandalously high: in April, 1994, at the end of the Gaviria administration,
the Director of National Planning revealed that only 21 of every 100 crimes in
the country are reported to the authorities, and, of these, 14 result in an
incomplete investigation, only 3 of them leading to a sentence. This leaves a
rate of human rights abuse where 97 percent of the crimes go unpunished.
According to a June, 1993 report on the human rights situation from the
Prosecutor General’s office, the organization responsible for investigating and
sanctioning government employees, less than 10 percent of all the complaints
received (and relatively few are ever filed) are investigated; of them, 21
percent result in some kind of ruling. Of those in which members of the armed
forces are involved, 57 percent result in absolutory sentences.
Why doesn’t the Colombian justice system work? Most
people don’t believe in the system precisely because they know it doesn’t work
(a vicious circle?), choosing, instead, to seek forms of private justice or
simply resign themselves to impunity. In cases where crimes against humanity
have been committed, it is extremely difficult to convince a victim, a family
member or a witness to testify or become involved in the criminal proceedings.
To do so, they are certain, would be to sign their own death warrant or result
in persecution and a neverending series of threats against them and their
families. How is it possible to give them faith and s t rength when the list of
individuals who have denounced abuses only to be murdered or disappeared
continues to grow?
In spite of all this, however, there is a courageous
minority who will not resign itself to injustice and chooses to denounce
crimes. Even these rare cases, though, run hard up against the wall of
impunity. When the evidence is solid and irrefutable, cases are transferred out
of the ordinary justice system and into the military “justice” jurisdiction
where members of the armed forces investigate and try each other. Here, the
fusion of institutional (military) authority and judicial authority frequently
means that the officer who gave the order to commit a crime finds himself
presiding over the jury responsible for trying the soldiers who carried it out.
When cases don’t “fit” into the military jurisdiction
or are being investigated by the Prosecutor General’s office, the Dirty War’s
methods and clandestine mechanisms, refined and perfected now for over a
decade, see to it that they rarely make it out of the “limbo,” technically
known as “Preliminary Investigations.” This term, in practice, has little or
nothing to do with the verb “investigate.” Indeed, unless the victim, his or
her family members or a nongovernmental organization carry out the
investigation themselves, collect the evidence and take it personally to
government employees who rarely leave their offices, cases are almost always
closed and filed away, after a “prudent” period of time has passed.
But what kind of evidence can victims and their
families bring? Only a recounting or a testimony given by those who secretly
witnessed the crime or what ensued afterwards and are not too terrified to say
so. Such testimonies, however, have become less and less accepted by the
government. Sometimes their credibility is arbitrarily discarded, as was the
case in the murder of the Swiss layworker, Hildegard Feldmann, (September 9,
1990) in which investigators from the Prosecutor General’s office rejected 24
coincident testimonies, taken by different individuals on different days and in
different places. Instead, the Prosecutor General’s office chose to accept the
version of 4 soldiers; 3 of them had participated in the murder and the other
had not even witnessed it. This decision was based on the absurd argument that
“the interests of the offended party might result in a distortion of the
truth.” On other occasions, attempts are made to invalidate such testimonies by
using other contradictory ones. This was the case in El Carmen de Chucurí; the investigators
did not bother to check the veracity of events and incidents alluded to in the
original testimonies. In this instance, they could easily have double-checked
the more than 300 names which appear in the parish’s registry of the deceased,
for example. But they didn’t bother. And, of course, the country’s “secret
justice system” is well set up to buy just these kinds of contradictory
“testimonies.” (These purchases are in addition to the others it buys in order
to falsely accuse of being terrorists or guerrillas individuals who denounce
crimes or clamor for justice, such as Father Marín, El Carmen’s parish priest).
What, then, can be done? Here, I cannot emphasize
enough the importance of impunity in this whole scheme of things—it is the
principal key both to the democra-tatorship model itself as well as to the
disastrous consequences it has had on society. Impunity
•
leaves structures intact and gives implicit
assent to the behaviors which enable crimes to be committed, clearing the way
for them to continue;
•
legitimates conduct to society which radically
destroys civilized human coexistence;
•
breaks the laws which have been established
against such crimes and thus renders them invalid in practice;
•
destroys trust in the country’s justice system
and leaves its citizens unprotected in the face of crime;
•
encourages the search for forms of private
justice and the development of multiple forms of violence;
•
constitutes an additional affront to victims,
their families and all those who are touched morally by the effects of such
crimes;
•
erodes the credibility of the country’s
institutions, in particular, those most involved in the perpetration,
complicity and tolerance of crimes;
•
destroys the fundamental basis of legitimacy of
the State of Law;
•
creates an atmosphere of the fatalistic
acceptance of Crimes of the State in society which results in the exercise of
certain civil, political and social rights being considered highly risky
practices, rendering them inoperative in practice;
•
and finally, it conditions and determines social
behavior and ideological positions with a subliminal censorship of any demands
for justice or any position in favor of an alternative society.
Impunity hides behind the failings and inefficiencies
of the justice system; the calculated “silence” and indifference of government
institutions; the complicity of the “information” media; the sentimental
manipulation of public opinion and the intimidation and threats of criminals.
Some arguments used to legitimate impunity, and
absolve members of the army, police and government security forces who are
responsible for crimes, fail to withstand even the most basic ethical analysis.
For example, one line of reasoning posits the necessity of fighting crime with
crime. There is the notion that equates amnesties and pardons designed for
members of insurgent groups with those for members of the State who are guilty
of crimes against humanity, suggesting they be granted the absurd “right to
pardon themselves.”
Religious justifications, making use of an
illegitimate recourse to the Christian principle of reconciliation which
denaturalizes the Christian value of forgiveness, have also been used. But the
context of forgiveness is interpersonal relations—where its true Christian
nature is realized, as a risk, laden, creative, a free and spontaneous act
which seeks to overcome situations at the point of rupture by way of an act of
faith in the oppressor which “remakes” him as a brother. There is no
transparent translation of this concept of forgiveness to the judicial/political
arena in which human relations are mediated by structures that elude the very
dimensions that nurture forgiveness, gratitude, creativity and freedom.
The notion of “forgive and forget” is espoused today
by Episcopal conferences in a number of different countries. But it completely
overlooks the legacy that Christian theological tradition left in religious
teachings. This legacy attempted to extend the Christian value of forgiveness
to the “masses,” and, to that end, formulated its 5 classic conditions of
authenticity, examination of conscience, repentance, intention to make amends,
confession and atonement for harm or injuries.
A similar effort must be made in order to translate
the value of Christian reconciliation to the judicial/political arena. There
must be a public clarification and admission of guilt, an explicit condemnation
of the mechanisms, structures and doctrines which facilitate crimes, the
implementation of corrective measures to stop them from being repeated and
reparation to victims and society. These must all be dealt with head-on and
unequivocally. The very nature of a political community makes this imperative:
unless there is an explicit and profound social sanction of crimes,
internalized by society’s members and engraved in society’s “collective
memory,” such crimes are not truly delegitimated.
Without these conditions, the Christian value of
forgiveness becomes a perverse expression of its real essence: from a fraternal
and creative act to an act which covers up the institutionalization of crime
and destroys the barriers which protect human dignity.
7. An Urgent Appeal
Colombian non-governmental human rights organizations
believe that the struggle against impunity is crucial in order to stop the
systematic violation of fundamental human rights in the country, and that it is
a struggle in which the international community, through its solidarity and
intervention, has an important role to play.
The campaign, “Colombia, Human Rights Now,” which was
begun in mid- 1994, includes the following six points:
1) To lobby for the inclusion of Colombia in agenda
point 12 of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights which deals with “the
question of human rights violations in any part of the world” and for the
appointment of a special United Nations rapporteur to Colombia, to supervise
the country’s human rights situation.
2) To combat and dismantle paramilitary groups and
death squads.
3) To restrict the “fuero militar” (military
privilege) to military crimes, excluding acts which violate human rights;
create an independent commission to investigate clarify considered human rights
abuses; trial and punishment for the authors of such abuses and justice and
compensation for their victims.
4) To abolish the regional jurisdiction (secret
judges) and implement a reform of the country’s judicial system which will
ensure the independence of judges and guarantee the rights of all parties.
5) To guarantee the security of displaced individuals
for a voluntary return to the regions they were forced to flee, restitution of
their land and compensation for damages suffered.
6) To achieve an agreement between the two parties in
conflict in order to humanize and seek a negotiated solution to the country’s
internal armed conflict.
I thus appeal to Colombian solidarity groups outside
the country to request that their countries” governments, ministers of foreign
affairs and ambassadors at the United Nations vote in favor of the appointment
of a rapporteur for Colombia and that they demand the Colombian government set
up an independent commission to investigate and clarify crimes against
humanity, with the participation of international organizations.
At the same time, through letter writing campaigns,
visits to Colombian embassies in different countries, etc., you can help us by
insisting that measures are implemented in Colombia in order to:
•
dismantle paramilitary groups;
•
abolish the “fuero militar” for common crimes
and, in particular, for Crimes against Humanity;
•
abolish the “Faceless Justice System”;
•
guarantee a safe return and compensation for the
displaced;
•
achieve a political solution to the country’s
armed conflict.
Crimes against humanity are not characterized as such
because they violate a given national or international legal order, but because
they wound and offend the moral conscience of the human family. Questions of
national sovereignty, consequently, cannot be used to impede the intervention
of individuals or organizations of any nationality, race, language or condition
in the defense of life and human dignity or in order to denounce and morally
sanction what should never have occurred, in order that it never occurs again.
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