Julieta Lemaitre (Cartagena de Indias, 54 years old) has gone from academia to judicial work, but it is not completely noticeable. Magistrate of the transitional justice created in the Peace Agreement with the extinct FARC, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace or JEP, her office is that of a university professor, the function that she has played for the most years in the professional career of she. A large library, in which volumes on law alternate with those on anthropology, sociology or history; photographs of world travels on the walls that contrast with thick sentences stacked on her desk; a sofa to make guests feel comfortable.
It's not just the office. She is in charge of the judicial case for the around 32,000 kidnappings that, according to the Truth Commission, the demobilized guerrillas committed. In conversation about this with EL PAÍS, the lawyer from the University of Los Andes drifts again and again towards broader reflections. With a master's degree in gender from New York University and a doctorate from Harvard, she was a professor at her alma mater for 16 years. She has written about Law from the perspective of the social sciences, with topics such as Colombian legal fetishism or survival in parts of the country to which the State, as the title of one of her books says, “always arrives late.” .
She is the unit president of the JEP, the Chamber for the recognition of truth, responsibility and determination of facts and conduct, which initiates judicial processes. With five colleagues, she defines which serious and representative facts of the conflict deserve to open a macro case such as kidnapping. In it they already collected the versions of the main perpetrators and the regional specificities, since the seven blocks that the FARC had carried out the crime in a particular way. This Friday she heads the first of seven regional hearings in which the victims will make observations on these versions. The former Farian bosses who controlled the south of the department of Tolima will confront these responses in Ibagué, the capital, which would be different in other places. This is what Lemaitre clarifies, after nine years in the JEP: “What I learned is that war is geography.”
— On many occasions, the middle leaders of the FARC were natives of the place where they operated. Many times the victims locate them, identify them, tell them “I know who you are, I remember you.” It is another level of what a civil war is.
—Does that affect the process?
— Yes, it has helped, those appearing have collaborated because they knew the victims. In the rounds of versions we summoned those appearing who were the leaders of each region, and beforehand we told them: “we have these questions from the victims.” They would get together and sometimes say “look, I don't know this, the person who knows is so-and-so,” and they helped us find those who could tell what happened, help the victims know the truth. More than 200 signatories who were not summoned to help with the truth arrived voluntarily.
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To explain what they have achieved and what is coming, Lemaitre focuses on the pain of the victims, on the fears of the perpetrators, on how this transitional justice has adapted to the needs of healing the wounds and not on the traditional procedural rituals. .
—We inaugurated a modality that I found very moving. We have had a couple of private meetings between a signatory and the victim, who has a question that he wants to keep confidential. They have worked. There are things that people want to know, need to know.
Lemaitre keeps the victims at the center of his gaze. It is not surprising for those who have read it. In The State is always late (Siglo XXI Editores, 2019), rejects the usual identity of Colombians as violent, and focuses on the suffering due to that violence. “What Colombians are excellent at, what characterizes and marks us, is not violence, but flight,” he reads in the introduction. He seeks to move away from a paternalistic, pitiful view of these victims. “It is about fleeing in the heroic sense of civilians, in the sense of having the ability and strength to escape alive, to, at the right moment, know how to leave behind everything that has meant our lives and to remake them in another part”.
When explaining this Friday's hearing, he begins with the victims. He explains that there will be those who suffered kidnappings at the Prado River dam or for being rice farmers, crimes that the FARC used to get money or to exercise and demonstrate their territorial control. He remembers that the majority were not victims of a crime once, but rather suffered displacement, several murders of relatives, a kidnapping. Therefore, he explains, it is essential to support his emotional process.
— The victims are supported by psychosocial teams. After the first year, everyone at the JEP realized that they are needed. A large hiring of psychologists had to be made. Everyone, magistrates, victims and even those appearing [los presuntos responsables de delitos cometidos en el conflicto] We have that support.
—And how is that received?
— At first it seemed strange to me: I sat with a witness, and next to me the lawyer and the psychologist. And I thought, with that record he has, and needing that support…
Lemaitre's human gaze thus extends to the former guerrillas, the appearing either signatories in the jargon of this transitional justice. He explains that those from southern Tolima who will be in the audience are the survivors of a structure that had 1,200 combatants at the beginning of the century, and, at the time of signing the peace, was reduced to 150. “They weren't even the same, because many were recruited a few years before. The mortality was enormous,” he explains. And he goes on to relate the change that knowing his victims has produced in them.
— The name, kidnapping, is hard for them. [las llamaban retenciones], know the magnitude of the crime. It is especially hard for them to confront the victims and measure the damage they caused, understand it.
—That kidnapping policy was public…
— Yes. At the time they understood it as something justified, and they have now understood that there was no justification and that, furthermore, it affected their own people. This has transformed them, in part through the process of entering civilian life, for which the ARN [Agencia para la Reintegración y la Normalización] It has a globally recognized process, and in part because the victims demand the truth from them, they know them and they do not let them lie.
The judge says that so far all those accused of kidnapping have accepted their responsibility, and points out that they will eventually number between 70 and 100 former members of the FARC. Their work goes as far as charging them, since other instances of the JEP define the sanctions. For that, however, macrocase 01 still needs to reach that point. And there is more missing now, when the signatories are victims of dissidents, groups that include people who never put down their weapons, others who left them and took them up again, and many more, younger people, recruited by them.
This Friday's hearing, in Ibagué, is an example, as recalled in a public statement issued by those summoned this Thursday. “The necessary actions have not been taken by the corresponding entities (National Protection Unit and the JEP) to guarantee our safety and that of our families in this hearing, or after it,” they write. “We warn of the participation of people who deserted the guerrilla ranks and who did not assume commitments to the Agreement.” They ask that the hearing be postponed. “We arrived in Ibagué with the objective of participating in the public hearing and we are willing to resume participation in it, when the conditions are met and our lives and that of our families are valued in all their dimensions. May peace not continue to cost us our lives.”
— The biggest threat hanging over the peace agreement is the recycling of war. There are regions, such as the south of Tolima, where the so-called Central General Staff has unleashed a persecution against the signatories, especially those who are more visible due to the leadership they had in the war. Of the ten cited on Friday, five have a security measure.
—Why those threats?
—Partly it is because the new structures are interested in recycling middle managers, who know how to exercise command, 30 years of experience in war. You can't buy that, you can't get it. The other thing is that many are people who returned to their places of origin, who have leadership or skills that led them to be commanders, and are now leading projects for which international cooperation, the State, comes. That does not serve the armed actors who seek territorial control. Then they threaten them to join them and, if not, they end up displacing or killing them.
The magistrate, with a soft Cartagena accent, ends the talk by talking, again, about the victims. She remembers that the recycling of war affects the victims the most. An extortion, she claims, hits someone who has already suffered a kidnapping much harder. She generates terror, because she knows, or feels, that it is the beginning of a new cycle. Victims feel constant fear, many have post-traumatic stress. “It's awful. They are people who had a few years of peace, a hope, who even saw those who were their executioners telling them the truth, asking for forgiveness. It was a moment of hope in which they thought about what their repair would be like.”
Despite all this, Julieta Lemaitre remains enthusiastic about the process to which she has dedicated almost a decade of her life. ”I'm excited. Although I do not control what is going to happen in Ibagué, since people do not arrive prepared, I hope that things come to light that we already know and that have already happened in the process. “Let those stories be heard that show the greatness of the human being, the best of humanity.”
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