Bogota., After almost two decades, two former opponents in Colombia met for the first time this Thursday: former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso and leftist president Gustavo Petro, who was part of the M-19 guerrilla in his youth and later, as a congressman, denounced to paramilitarism.
The meeting took place in the north of the country in Córdoba, the capital of the department of Montería, where the paramilitaries stripped hundreds of peasants of their land before beginning a collective demobilization in the early 2000s.
The government indicated that nearly 8 thousand hectares of land that belonged to several former paramilitary leaders in Córdoba will now be used to “reparate” the victims of the paramilitaries in the area.
“This is a historic moment. Today, not only the victims to whom I caused so much pain and suffering are present, there is also a president who was part of the armed conflict, who was in the insurgency, who was a victim and military objective of the self-defense groups,” declared Mancuso, former leader of the extinct United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that fought the leftist guerrillas.
Petro recalled on Thursday that the last time he physically saw Mancuso was in 2004, when the then former paramilitary chief went to Congress, in an episode later criticized for being an actor in the armed conflict who was barely negotiating peace.
“What I said at the time was that it did not seem like a peace agreement between enemies, but rather a political-military alliance, and I dedicated myself in those years to discovering the links between the political leadership of the country and what was called at that time the paramilitarism that had devastated Colombia,” Petro recalled.
But the scenario two decades later changed radically. Petro became the first left-wing president in Colombia in 2022 and appointed Mancuso as peace manager, a figure that allows him to collaborate in the government’s approaches to armed groups, especially of paramilitary heritage, that still continue to commit crimes.
The former paramilitary returned to Colombia in February after being deported from the United States, where he was extradited in 2008 and later sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for having directed the manufacture and shipment of more than 100 thousand kilograms of cocaine. In Colombia he was imprisoned for his outstanding debts with the justice system for more than 34,000 crimes—most of them by line of command—but in July a judge granted him freedom to serve as a peace manager.
Mancuso advocated for the installation of a negotiating table with the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC), also known as the Clan del Golfo, of paramilitary heritage and the largest active cartel in the country that is not yet part of the “peace” policy. total” with which Petro has promoted simultaneous conversations with various groups outside the law.
“Let’s speed it up, so that the procedures for the installation of all these dialogues and the table with the former self-defense groups, among others, for the search for assets that you requested of us, are an accomplished fact. “We are ready to install that table immediately,” Mancuso said.
In the past, Petro proposed to the clan a collective appeal to justice that would have a legal negotiation with the prosecutor’s office in order to dismantle their illicit businesses, which has not been publicly accepted by the illegal group.
In Thursday’s speech, the president did not talk about the Gulf Clan specifically, but rather proposed more broadly to reactivate the peace table that had been opened with the paramilitaries in the early 2000s, considering that “the process has not ended, given that “The goods that you handed over to justice, to the victims of violence, have not been delivered.”
After the demobilization of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the former paramilitaries appear before a special court of justice in which they receive criminal benefits and recognize crimes from the internal conflict.
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