Timochenko and Mancuso ask for an audience to tell "truths" of the conflict

Former FARC leaders indicted for war crimes 0:38

(CNN Spanish) ––

Rodrigo Londoño, one of the former leaders of the demobilized FARC guerrilla and known by the alias of Timochenko, asked the president of the Truth Commission of Colombia, Father Francisco de Roux, a public hearing to that "the country knows the silenced truths about the armed conflict", as read in a letter published this Thursday on Twitter.

According to the letter, the petition is in the name of Timochenko and Salvatore Mancuso, a former paramilitary leader.

With it, they seek to convene "for an upcoming date a meeting of the Truth Commission in full, publicly, with the presence of national and foreign media, and with prior invitation to multiple local and international human rights organizations and world institutions of the highest ethical qualification ”.

According to the text, the "common intention" of Timocheko and Mancuso is "to make known as many truths as possible about the conflict.

Verifiable truths, some already known others not so much.

We aspire to do so openly.

Colombia deserves to know the perpetrators and the scope of numerous atrocities committed in its geography.

• Former chiefs of the demobilized FARC guerrilla for kidnappings in Colombia before justice

Shortly after the document was published, the Truth Commission said on Twitter, without specifying whether it was referring to the letter from Timocheko and Mancuso, which reiterated “their willingness to receive contributions to the truth from those who express their interest in doing so. privately or before the media and to facilitate the mechanisms so that their contributions are heard.

Timochenko and Mancuso

Rodrigo Londoño is the director of the Comunes political party, the name that replaces Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria de los Comunes.

In a plenary meeting of the now left-wing party, its members decided that the acronym FARC was related in Colombia to the excesses of an armed conflict of more than 50 years.

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Currently, Londoño and several of the former FARC chiefs –– who have repudiated the dissident sectors that want to return to the armed struggle–– are waiting for the Special Justice for Peace, JEP, to issue a sentence.

This after having accepted serious charges for the crimes of kidnapping and war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Mancuso, who has Colombian and Italian citizenship, has been in federal custody in the United States since March 2020. He was one of the leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group that the United States designated a terrorist in 2001. According to the US Department of Justice, Mancuso took advantage of his position to smuggle more than 100,000 kilos of cocaine into that country and other parts of the world.

After his extradition from Colombia to the US in 2008 along with other paramilitary leaders, he was sentenced to 190 months in prison in June 2015 by a US court.

He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in October 2008, the same year as his extradition from Colombia.

The former AUC leader received an 8-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity in Colombia in 2014. In 2020, when the US declared his sentence completed, Colombia requested his extradition, but as it was also demanded by justice Italian, Mancuso asked that it be sent to that country.

He is currently in a detention center for the undocumented in Georgia, waiting for the justice to decide whether he will be extradited to Colombia or Italy.

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The armed conflict

The National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH) of Colombia reported that in 60 years, between 1958 and 2018, there were 262,197 deaths from the armed conflict.

According to these figures, the year with the most fatalities in that conflict was 2002, with 24,105 among civilians and combatants.

"The vast majority of fatalities left by the war were members of the civilian population: 215,005 civilians compared to 46,813 combatants," says the CNMH.

Fernando Ramos contributed to this report.

Armed conflict Colombia Salvatore Mancuso Timochenko