The Truth Commission presents its final 896-page report after three years of investigations and urges the incoming government to seek a peace agreement with the ELN guerrillas
“We bring a message of hope and a future for our broken and broken nation. Inconvenient truths that challenge our dignity, a message for all as human beings, beyond political or ideological options, cultures and religious beliefs, ethnic groups or gender. This is how the Jesuit Father Francisco de Roux, president of the Truth Commission, created in Colombia after the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016, began his speech when delivering the final report of a historic work in which it is intended to tell the country the truth about what has happened in 60 years of armed conflict. The data reflected in the document, which consists of 896 pages, are chilling. Between 1985 and 2016 there were 450,666 deaths, eight million forced displacements and 50,770 kidnappings. But the main victims were not combatants. They were civilians.
If the figures give goosebumps, Father De Roux’s speech is brutally harsh: “We call to heal the physical and symbolic, multicultural and multiethnic body that we form as citizens of this nation. Body that cannot survive with a heart attack in Chocó, gangrenous arms in Arauca, destroyed legs in Mapiripán, severed head in El Salado, violated vagina in Tierralta, empty eye sockets in Cauca, burst stomach in Tumaco, the crushed vertebrae in Guaviare, the displaced shoulders in Urabá, the slashed neck in Catatumbo, the burned face in Machuca, the punctured lungs in the mountains of Antioquia and the devastated indigenous soul in Vaupés».
The report makes it clear that those most responsible for such atrocities are the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, the Armed Forces, drug traffickers and the Police. The Truth Commission focuses its study on the period between 1958 and 2016, with which the tragedy experienced by the Colombian people is even greater and reflects a death toll that rises to 700,000, most of them young people and peasants, 110,000 people They were considered missing and only 1.5% died in combat. “We can talk about a genocide in Colombia,” assured Gustavo Petro, president-elect for the next four years, present at the event together with Vice President Francia Márquez.
The Commission places the most violent period of the conflict between 1995 and 2004, when 45% of the 450,666 murders were committed. The report assures that everything was due in part “to a strategy of terror in parallel with the time of greatest extension and territorial confrontation of the armed groups and paramilitarism, especially.”
At the same time, the Commission has recommended to the new Government to change the security policy, carry out an authentic rural reform and reach a peace agreement with the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrillas. In the words of Father De Roux, Colombia has to reject violence as a means of resolving its conflict: “We call for awareness that our way of seeing the world and relating to each other is trapped in a ‘war mode’ in which we cannot conceive Others think differently.”
In this regard, the final report specifies that the most widespread way of waging war in Colombia has been to eliminate all those considered “enemies”, and recalls the complete extermination of the Patriotic Union political group. “We are convinced that there is a way to build together in the midst of our legitimate differences,” said the Commission president hopefully.
UN backing
The study has been carried out after three years of work by the Commission in which the main key has been to put the victims at the center of the Peace Agreement to establish the foundations for reconciliation. The international community, including the UN Verification Mission and the United Nations High Commissioner’s Office, positively valued the report and invited Colombians to accept the truth, while announcing its unconditional support for the consolidation of peace and to guarantee the rights of victims.
The path of dialogue has had a high point this Wednesday with the meeting between Gustavo Petro and Álvaro Uribe, considered the man who has led the country in the shadows in recent years. Petro also met with Rodolfo Hernández, who was his opponent in the June 19 elections.
The head of the Army resigns for refusing to parade with Petro at the investiture
The commander of the Colombian National Army -Ejército de Tierra-, General Eduardo Enrique Zapateiro, has resigned from his post effective July 20, when the inauguration of the country’s new president, Gustavo Petro, is scheduled. The resignation after four decades of service responds to his desire not to march on the side of the leftist leader on the day of the investiture after his notorious disagreements. The last confrontation was in the midst of the campaign for the recent presidential elections, when Petro said that there were generals “in the payroll» of the Clan del Golfo. «I have not seen any general on television receiving ill-gotten money. Colombians have seen you receive money in a garbage bag,” Zapateiro blurted out then.
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