Image taken from :Cubahora.com
Bogotá, March 15,2022
Today, a group of former guerrillas committed to peace in Colombia, with the accompaniment of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective and the human rights organization Lazos de Dignidad, met at the Special Jurisdiction for Peace to file the report: “War crimes and human rights violations committed by the Military Forces and State security agencies in the period 1964-2016.
The Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition, conceived by the Havana Agreement, and constitutionalized in Legislative Act 01 of 2017, provided that the SJP would hear all crimes committed in the framework of the armed conflict, and very specifically serious violations of IHL or serious war crimes. This is the case of the facts that we denounce.
The purpose of the report is for the State to recognize the violations of International Humanitarian Law against FARC combatants, taking into account that IHL instruments are applicable to the Colombian conflict in particular, those referring to Non-International Armed Conflicts and that compliance with these norms should be much greater with respect to the Armed Forces of the State because it was the State itself that expressly committed itself to comply with these norms. The facts denounced before the JEP are not crimes against guerrillas: they are crimes against humanity.
Among the multiple typologies of crimes against humanity, there are some emblematic cases. We are talking about extrajudicial executions, disproportionate use of force, recourse to illicit methods of warfare, torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, sexual violence, hostilities against family members and the civilian population.
The cases exposed during the day were: the execution of guerrillas in Cerro de Berlín in 2000; the execution of Rito Antonio Pico in 1997, known as Quimbaya of the José Antequera Urban Network of Barranquilla; the military aggression in Ecuadorian territory on March 1, 2008; the bombing of Martín Caballero; the bombing of Jorge Briceño; the execution of Alfonso Cano; and the torture and ill-treatment of FARC-EP prisoners. We ask that the JEP, as the competent judicial authority, investigate each case and determine those most responsible so that there is reparation and non-repetition.
Taking into account the above, we, the authors of this report, request integral reparation that includes a public act of recognition of responsibility and forgiveness; the production of a film on the subject that narrates the history of the guerrilla movement and the confrontation with the Armed Forces, with special emphasis on the war crimes committed against the FARC-EP.
Likewise, we request guarantees of non-repetition such as the abolition of the Military Criminal Justice, which we consider is not really a mechanism for the administration and application of justice, but is simply an instrument of impunity created for the benefit of State criminals; the purging of the Military Forces of all members who have been involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity; or who have been investigated by the Procuraduría General de la Nación; the structural reform of penitentiary policy, of the prison system and the respective purge of INPEC; and that the Colombian State withdraw from the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and NATO, considering that we are not at war nor do we promote war against any State. We present this denunciation on behalf of the thousands of insurgent victims, but for the sake of peace and democracy in our country. Never again war means never again war crimes, and truth and reparations for its victims. We demand that our perpetrators have the same gallantry with which we faced the conflict to contribute to the JEP in clarifying the facts denounced. Those of us in the FARC-EP will continue to do so.
For those of us who participated in the uprising in arms against the liberal-conservative oligarchy; product of the aggression that they carried out against humble peasants persecuted for exercising the right to defend their lives and those of their loved ones in the area of Marquetalia, Río Chiquito, El Pato and Guayabero, as well as the right to defend our small properties or possessions; and who participated in the harshness of war for many years of our existence; we consider it an obligation to present the experience lived during this long armed confrontation against the official military forces, their paramilitaries, troops and foreign mercenaries -mostly North American- and that have left indelible scars on our ex-combatants and their families.
The Colombian political regime compelled us to resort to the supreme resource of rebellion to protect our rights and seek social transformations. We incurred in the political crime, recognized as such in all the democratic systems of the world. Therefore, our political decision cannot be understood as irrational and unbridled violence. We accept and respect the essential norms of war, and therefore we validate that its infractions by any of the parties to the conflict must be sanctioned as crimes against humanity. That is the essence of this Special Jurisdiction for Peace, not the moral subjugation of the former guerrillas. We learned that the enemy who is defeated in combat or who is wounded must be cared for and his life must be respected. This is what we did with those who surrendered – such as General Mendieta – and we tried to carry out a humanitarian exchange for our combatants taken prisoner within the framework of IHL.
But the hardest thing we have learned in these years has been the practices developed by the military forces with our combatants, we have lost count of how many of our comrades were captured in a state of defenselessness when leaving the camps to carry out work for the organization or to be treated for illnesses, many of them disappeared by the army and of whom we no longer even have their pseudonyms, much less their real names, and there is no doubt that it will be impossible to locate them in the immense territory of the country; How many of our comrades who could not be evacuated because they died or were wounded were executed and their bodies disappeared or in the best of cases were reported as casualties in combat and buried as NN, with no possible identification and making nugatory even the right to claim their bodies. Our recourse to rebellion does not grant the State a license to violate our rights, neither before Colombian jurisdiction nor before international norms. We rebels continued to be subjects of rights and these infractions are war crimes.
We learned that in the development of hostilities the enemy was implacable and used all existing resources and the support of the United States and Israeli army to destroy us at any cost. The Colombian State used in its war against the FARC-EP perfidious means, which do not care at all about the existence of written norms of IHL, or of HR; as long as they achieve their purpose of the end of the end or “eliminating us from the face of the earth”, and that they bury even our memory and history; we cannot in this report fail to mention our commanders and the way they assassinate them violating every existing norm or every custom of war between civilized nations, the cases that we are able to outline give evidence of this, the cases of Martin Caballero, Jorge Briceño or Alfonso Cano more than demonstrate the treatment they gave us and the total contempt that this establishment has for us and that remains intact despite the time elapsed; the almost 60 years have not been enough for them to learn to respect the class enemy or the political contradictor whether he is armed or not.
For this and for many other reasons, it is our commitment to present this report and to rescue the memory of our fallen comrades in the struggle for social justice that is still pending to be achieved. Our commitment signed in Havana is to peace and truth, and this denunciation is part of it. To omit the truth of what has been perpetrated by the Colombian State against those of us who went into rebellion would be to fail to comply with what was agreed. We are not interested in winning applause from the gallery, but in contributing to the historical clarification and reparation of the thousands of victims left by this counterinsurgent war.
VICTORIA SANDINO SIMANCA
ISRAEL ALBERTO ZUÑIGA IRIARTE
BENEDICTO GONZÁLEZ MONTENEGRO
MILTON DE JESÚS TONCEL REDONDO
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Executive Summary WAR CRIMES(1)
