Former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso has been admitted this Friday to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional justice system created in the peace agreements with the extinct FARC to prosecute serious cases of the most widespread criminal conduct during the conflict. armed. “You could see a person with a different attitude than the one that Colombians saw in the Congress of the Republic in 2004. [Está] willing to dignify the victims, to recognize their agency and to offer them a full truth,” said Judge Heydi Patricia Baldosea, in charge of reading the decision.
The JEP has considered that the former paramilitary leader, who followed the hearing by video call from the United States, has shown his ability to provide privileged and novel information. “It was evident that he has knowledge of different repertoires of violence deployed jointly with leaders of the public force,” the court declared. It was also appreciated that he had recognized his responsibility and shown a willingness to participate in reparation actions. “There were exhaustive recognitions about the repertoires of violence displayed and the stigmatization suffered by peasant communities, political leaders, ethnic peoples, women and LGBTI people,” the JEP highlighted.
The court has also reported that it will admit Mancuso as a “subject functionally and materially incorporated into the public force.” Baldosea has indicated that it was “the criminal alliance woven with senior officials of the public force” that allowed him to be sheltered in illegality.
Mancuso, a landowner from Montería (Córdoba) turned warlord, is accused of directing 139 massacres in which 800 people were murdered. Detained in the United States, in May he delved into the links between the paramilitaries and the State as part of his strategy to access the judicial benefits of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). “What Uribe did was take away the security scheme and we killed him,” he commented in reference to the murder, in 2003, of the then mayor of El Roble, Eudaldo Díaz. “They gave us lists and then we went and beat the houses and killed them because they told us they were guerrillas,” he said about his role as leader of a group made up of police and members of the Army.
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