Francisco de Roux: "Those who continue in war mode will have problems accepting the truth"

Father Francisco de Roux (Cali, 78 years old) has heard the most atrocious stories one can imagine.

In the last four years he has toured Colombia to prepare the final report of the Truth Commission, a document that aims to clarify what happened in the war and discover how and why hundreds of thousands of people were killed, many of them innocent. .

It will be presented on June 28, when a new president has already been elected.

In the process, the religious Jesuit and philosopher, who has interrupted combats in the middle of the jungle between paramilitaries and guerrillas with his mere presence, has discovered that Colombian society was anesthetized, indifferent.

De Roux is surely the most respected personality in the country.

This Friday, in the library of the Jesuit curia in Bogotá,

Ask.

How to overcome everything seen and heard?

Response.

I could not live otherwise as a Colombian.

We are a body as a nation and we have no other way to be free and gain dignity if we do not understand the whole body.

A body with a shattered face in Machuca, a broken heart in Chocó, burnt legs in El Salado, torn off arms in Magdalena Medio, a burst stomach and liver in Nariño, a shattered vagina in Tierralta, spirit and soul of the devastated people in the Vaupés Indians and in the Embera Indians.

How is it possible to live peacefully as a body when there is all this pain between us?

Such a beautiful country, a country of tamboras, vallenatos, cumbias, all of that has been deeply penetrated by fear, by pain, by uncertainty.

That is why Colombia, after 60 years,

continues in an internal armed conflict, where many boys died in battles as guerrillas or paramilitaries without having any idea what they were fighting for.

This is not the war between Russia and Ukraine, this is a pointless fight.

It's not a fight over religion, it's not exactly an ethnic war, it's absolutely irrational.

Q.

How do you seek forgiveness?

R.

You cannot ask anyone for forgiveness, it is an individual, free decision.

It implies giving before receiving anything.

I believe that in the Christian tradition of this country forgiveness is understandable.

People are asking for the truth to be told, which is part of the Catholic ritual of forgiveness.

And more profoundly, we are for reconciliation.

First, build on the truth, second, make the decision not to kill each other again, third, make him feel that 'I understand you, I put myself in your shoes and I respect you'.

Fourth, build together even though things were so hard.

But we are not going to forget, precisely so that it does not happen again.

We are going to fill this country with places of memory to save the dignity of the people who died.

P.

Do you feel that you have become desensitized after so much horror?

R.

No, but it does surprise me how desensitized Colombia was.

He made it natural to live in the midst of so much human suffering, it became normal.

In the year 2001 we opened the television and the first thing that came out was the massacre of the day.

Today there are still small massacres, but then almost every day there were 100, 80 people.

And the country continued as if nothing was happening.

It is a tremendous thing.

Merchants sold knick-knacks, businessmen continued with their businesses, academics giving classes, priests saying mass.

A brutality.

Why didn't Colombia react?

More than 80% of the dead were unarmed civilians, they were not combatants.

And this happened for 50 years.

We shattered our own dignity.

That is why I am impressed by this Swedish girl in the face of global warming -because I feel the same indignation-, when she says:

[how dare they?] How dare they believe they are human if they allow this to happen?

De Roux is the president of the Truth Commission in Colombia. Camilo Rozo

P.

In these almost four years you have done hundreds of interviews with victims and perpetrators.

Which one can't forget?

R.

They are very hard.

When the perpetrator told how he had killed my friend Alma Rosa Jaramillo, that she came to work with me in Magdalena Medio, 22 years ago.

The paramilitaries took her and she was alive, they sawed her hands, then her arms, her legs and when she died, they cut off her head and threw her into the river.

I was also very impressed by the clamor of the mothers in the municipality of Argelia telling a FARC guerrilla why she had taken the boys and girls when she was the commander.

And when I saw her naming those she had taken and saying that she had killed children because they did not comply with the rules of the guerrilla... I was also impressed to hear a child recount how they took him to war on one of these fronts paramilitaries and, a week after being there,

they brought another one who wanted to escape and in front of them the paramilitaries cut off his head.

They had the 30 or 35 kids that were there pass it around amongst themselves.

Two girls fainted and then the paramilitary chief ordered them to take off their dress and with their bloody heads run over their bodies.

From there they were taken to eat.

The stories are beyond all proportion.

P.

Have you cried a lot?

R.

Yes, yes, yes... and above all I have felt a lot of internal commotion in my heart.

P.

It takes four years of work.

How does it get to the end?

R.

We arrived with the hope of saying something very serious to the country, which will help us understand the depth of the humanitarian crisis experienced by Colombia.

Although the Havana agreement produced peace between the armies, society was tremendously divided and the confrontation has continued.

We hope to present a report in which we Colombians understand what happened to us, why we were involved in this tragedy, how very diverse responsibilities were involved in the conflict and how we are going to build together moving forward.

Q.

What does the final report mean to you?

R.

It means a hard experience, of confrontation with the truth.

And at the same time a call to hope.

It lasts because we have gone through very deep things, we have traveled this country again and we have met a multitude of raped and abused women.

The more than 30,000 children taken to war, who today tell how they were dragged into the conflict, how they were raped, how they forced women to have abortions.

We have found many kidnapped people from the more than 27,000 kidnappings that took place.

More than 1,000 families of false positives from the army.

We have been in the massacred towns.

And I could go on.

That is the reality of pain.

Also the soldiers without legs, with their faces burned by anti-personnel mines.

The immense pain everywhere.

Colombia has to stop at that and move forward.

Q.

Are you overwhelmed by responsibility?

R.

It is overwhelming because the expectations are very high in Colombia and in the international community.

But above all there are the expectations of the victims.

We have 10 million victims in Colombia and they say 'they haven't heard us all yet'.

If we dedicated a minute to each victim, it would take us 17 years working 24 hours a day.

De Roux has been a mediator in various spaces during the peace process. Camilo Rozo

P.

In recent days the only commissioner of the Armed Forces resigned.

How does leaving him affect you?

R.

I am sorry that he has gone and of course I asked him not to go.

For us it is important to have the contrast of the different points of view.

But frankly it doesn't bother me at all.

I consider it as part of this difficult construction of peace based on truth.

Q.

Are there soldiers who are not prepared to listen to the truth?

R.

All those who in Colombia are involved in the war mode - not all the military and not only military - will have many difficulties to accept the truth.

The mode of war is the need to see the internal enemy everywhere, on both sides, the suspicion about what they are doing, the plot.

Q.

Do you think it is possible for the military to interfere in the electoral field?

R.

I hope that Colombia continues to live in respect for the decisions of citizens in elections.

It would be disastrous if that didn't happen.

But I would like to say that the Truth Commission is not in the political debate in any sense.

We are going to deliver the same report to whoever is president and we hope that he will accept these recommendations with moral high ground and courage.

Q.

Is the report very harsh on the Armed Forces?

R.

It is very harsh with the war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed within the Armed Forces, but it is also very harsh with the FARC and all those who have responsibilities in the conflict.

Responsibilities are understood as responsibilities that arise in very complex contexts.

It's not that here it occurred to someone to go out one morning, take a machine gun and kill people.

The things that happened, which are terrible, are born within where political, economic, military decisions, personal interests play.

Human beings acting in collectives.

Q.

What reaction do you fear the most once the report is published?

R.

I do not care about criticism.

We do not think that what we are doing is an end point, we want to unite the country in a conversation, that we continue to delve into what we have found.

What we build will remain at the service not only of Colombians, but of humanity.

An open file that you can return to to discuss what happened and add more.

I'm not afraid of being pointed at.

I am not afraid of the danger of life.

It scares me that we won't be able to convene the country to understand what has happened to us and to build from our differences.

It's so difficult that I don't know if we're going to be up to it.

Q.

How to get rid of the fear of being killed?

R.

I am convinced, although I cannot prove it scientifically, that human existence does not end with death.

What does that mean?

We do not know.

The men and women who were serious in love and freely gave themselves for us, as Jesus or Buddha did, do not end with death.

Human life lasts very little: 100, 70, 80 years... they go like this (chas).

That gives me great peace of mind.

P.

Do you believe the allegations of a plan to assassinate Gustavo Petro?

R.

These types of complaints in Colombia are very delicate.

I am not involved in the campaign, but I do give them credit and they demand a lot of care from the State.

P.

How do you leave behind that violence that still continues?

R.

Here the weapons were put into politics and Colombia has not managed to get out of it, it is still in war mode.

Security is not provided by weapons, it is provided by trust, the faith that we have in each other.

That is the great social capital.

Francisco de Roux Rengifo is a Jesuit priest, economist and philosopher. Camilo Rozo

P.

The elections are approaching.

Do you trust both Petro and Fico Gutierrez, the two candidates with the most options?

R.

Frankly, I do not see with panic that one of the two remains president.

I feel that in the country there is a feeling that we are facing the abyss and I don't have that feeling.

Colombia has to make very serious changes and hopefully the president who arrives will make those changes and we will stop floundering.

P.

What is the first problem of Colombia?

A.

Drug trafficking.

As long as there is drug trafficking, I don't see it possible for us to get out of war mode.

P.

Is the country better today than in 2016, when peace was signed?

R.

The year that I liked the most, having been in this peace thing since 1982, was the year 2017. When we saw the guerrillas go down from 350 places.

The army and the police accompanied them.

They slept together.

In the country there was a feeling that a future was being built.

It was a very beautiful year.

I have the feeling that the country has tasted peace and that it is not going to let that go once it has tasted it.

Peace is not going to let itself be defeated, it will be retaken with great force.

Q.

And what happened afterwards?

R.

That much remained to be done.

Q.

What did you want to be as a child?

R.

I thought about being a doctor.

But from a very young age, close to the beginning of adolescence, in that beauty of the Cauca sunsets, watching the sun go down, behind the Cali cliffs, I had a very deep impression that behind all this there was a very deep mystery of love. great, very deep, that regardless of any spiritual or religious history put us all in this existence, in the midst of the extraordinary evolution of the universe.

That moved me and I set out to find what was there.

At the age of 16 I entered the university of the Jesuit fathers.

It's that simple.

I became a priest following Jesus.

P.

What would you like to do when you finish this work in the commission?

R.

If I can, rest a little, reflect and write about what has happened.

But a few months, then I'll come back to this.

You can't get out of this in the rest of your life.

You can't get down from here.

Q.

Would you enter politics?

R.

Not at all, never.

I'm not interested in politics, or money, or prestige.

Q.

Is there anything you would have liked to do in your life that you haven't done?

R.

It would have seemed nice to have children and a partner.

I don't regret my life of celibacy, but the opportunity to have a family with a person you love and who accompanies you in the fight seems wonderful to me.

Q.

What is the meaning of celibacy?

R.

I remember one day that in Micoahumado, a town over there in the mountains of southern Bolívar, they had to go out to stop a fight between the ELN guerrillas and the paramilitaries, it was December 24.

People didn't know what to do.

I told them: “Look, I'm going to get into combat and no one will come, because I don't have a wife, children, or girlfriend”.

There are missions that can put a person on the horizon of being able to give their whole life to a cause.

But I do not agree with forced celibacy, it seems very serious to me.

Q.

Have you ever fallen in love?

R.

On the path of life one has had to go through many moments.

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