At the beginning of the century, Álvaro Uribe and Salvatore Mancuso were at their peak in the media and power. The first had won the 2002 presidential elections with 54.5% of the votes—until then an unprecedented record, which he himself would surpass four years later—under the promise of pacifying the country, which between 2001 and 2002 recorded 3,896 extortionate kidnappings. . And the second was commander of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group made up of more than 15,000 men, which was related to businessmen, ranchers and politicians. The current situation of both is different. After two decades of multiple events, their image contrasts with an energetic past, in which they monopolized press headlines and their names were on the lips of millions. However, transitional justice placed them back on the agenda, in an episode that may go down in history, due to statements by the former paramilitary chief.
On November 17, Salvatore Mancuso managed to be admitted by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), a court created by the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Government and the extinct FARC to process serious cases that occurred during the armed conflict. The former paramilitary chief was received as a “subject functionally and materially incorporated into the public force,” so it is expected that his testimonies and evidence will focus on demonstrating how the AUC operated jointly with the institutions in their war against the guerrillas. . The court noted that Mancuso, in sessions prior to his admission, provided “present, effective, sufficient and novel elements regarding facts that were already known or have been investigated by the Colombian justice system.”
Mancuso has mentioned Uribe on several occasions, but not with the forcefulness of now. His entry into the JEP gives the appearance that he has evidentiary material to support his accusations, which would be a substantial difference from his past statements. In 2012, before Justice and Peace judges, the alternative sentencing system that was created with the demobilization of the AUC seven years earlier, the former commander admitted that the armed group sympathized “with Uribe’s ideological approaches and policies.” In May of that year, being interviewed by Caracol Radio, he declared that money from the insurgency financed the re-election of the then president in 2006.
Previously, in a hearing before the Supreme Court of Justice, in 2010, he confessed that they also supported him in his first presidential aspiration. “At that time, in 2002 and even since 2001, we held a national self-defense conference where we agreed, within that meeting of commanders, to cease actions with multiple objectives because that harmed President Uribe’s campaign.” Later, he added: “I received direct orders from my commanders to support President Uribe, candidate for the Presidency at that time.” His words were rejected by the former president, although they coincide with the statements made by former paramilitary chief Freddy Rendón Herrera, alias The Germanin 2009 before the radio station La FM.
Although Mancuso’s incriminations have not yet been validated by justice, in the JEP they have taken on a different caliber. The former AUC commander directly linked Uribe to the El Aro massacre, perpetrated in October 1997, and to the murder of lawyer Jesús María Valle, which took place in February 1998.
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El Aro is a township in Ituango (Antioquia) and the cruel massacre occurred over four days while Uribe was governor of that department. Fifteen peasants were murdered. Mancuso referred to this event before the JEP magistrates, as revealed by the portals Maelstrom and Change. He said that the massacre “was also a request directly from Governor Uribe, through Pedro Juan Moreno,” who was his Government Secretary, and that it was carried out to unleash fear among the civilian population of the area, which was under control. of the guerrilla. “One puts into practice not only a theater of operations, but the staging of a theater of terror, as horrible as it sounds (…). You have to scare them so much that either they stop supporting the guerrillas, or they leave the area or they shoot themselves. As crude as it sounds, that’s why those operations were punishment, terror was imposed and then we left the area,” he commented.
Mancuso recalled that the military incursion was carried out jointly between the AUC and the Army, whose uniformed men were in charge of surrounding the township to prevent the entry of the Red Cross and other institutions. The Government of Antioquia, he assures, provided logistical support with a helicopter. He asserted that he visited El Ubérrimo, a farm of the former president, where he saw the then governor face to face. “Uribe has met with me. I met with Colonel Raúl Suarez, commander of the Córdoba Police, and he took me to meet at Uribe’s farm, with Governor Uribe at that time. “Uribe was always aware of the El Aro operation.”
![The son of Modesto Munera, murdered in El Aro, during an act of public apology from the Government, on November 30, 2022.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/St1l-BriWVAKC4YSiI4Fr1Xaiqo=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/5YY2VRZHLNDWJNSK7ACA6YRT3I.jpg)
That barbarism was the main cause of the murder of Jesús María Valle, four months later, when Uribe had completed his term as governor. Valle, who was originally from Ituango, was a human rights defender and before the massacre he asked the authorities, including the Government and the Army, to protect the inhabitants of the area. Mancuso maintained that the former president was involved in the crime. “Peter Juan [Moreno] He basically asked that this action be carried out because the human rights defender was frontally attacking both Uribe and him, and General Carlos Alberto Ospina and another general that I do not remember at this moment.
The homicide, Mancuso said, was coordinated between Carlos Castaño, the top leader of the AUC at that time, and Moreno. Valle’s public denunciations, which held the outgoing governor and his right-hand man responsible for what happened in El Aro, were possibly his death sentence. The execution was entrusted to three hitmen. “Peter Juan [Moreno] It comes precisely from Uribe and the generals that I am telling you about, precisely because he was attacking them directly, he had even denounced them judicially and publicly.” In 2006, estranged from his former boss, Moreno died in a plane crash along with his son, while promoting his candidacy for the Senate for the Conservative Party.
Mancuso once again referred to the financing of paramilitarism in Uribe’s electoral aspirations in 2002. He reported that he met with a campaign manager in Córdoba to give him money. “I gave him 2,000 million pesos for the campaign directly. This has not been told, these are new, dangerous things.” And he reiterated that military activities ceased so as not to affect the chances of the then candidate in the elections: “Pedro Juan Moreno came to us before the elections to ask us not to carry out multiple actions, massacres, because that was harming the campaign of the president, Uribe candidate at that time.”
Given the revelations, Uribe asked the Prosecutor’s Office to allow him to give a free version of the El Aro massacre and the Valle homicide. The procedure was scheduled for this Monday. On his
What Mancuso said could be the turning point in Uribe’s alleged relationship with the paramilitaries or pure smoke. The former paramilitary chief delved into his accusations and his admission to the JEP is an indication of seriousness, but it remains to be seen how convincing the evidence he provides is.
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