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Where did the honor of the Colombian military go?

2022-05-15T19:02:15.523Z


Duque will go down in history for being a president who was unable to exercise his leadership over the armed forces


The president of Colombia, Iván Duque, accompanied by high-ranking military officers and some of his ministers, in a statement on the extradition of the head of the Clan del Golfo, alias 'Otoniel'. Presidency of Colombia (/Presidency of Colombia/EFE)

In Colombia, neither the intimate life of the presidents nor what happens within the Armed Forces is publicly discussed.

The first has its logic, the second is an aberration that has allowed the military to get out of line, commit outrages and abuses of human rights almost with the consent or silence of the civil power.

In the Government of Iván Duque, the military have become even more autonomous and function as black boxes to which very few civilians have access.

Today reckless luxuries are given that had not been possible before.

Without much trauma they have become political activists and deliberative subjects, two things that the Colombian constitution prohibits.

It is surprising that this dangerous metamorphosis that breaks the constitutional order has had the consent of President Iván Duque himself who, to the misfortune of our democracy, has acted as if he were the subordinate of the generals.

This license of the military to cross borders hitherto insurmountable, was very well portrayed in the painful episode carried out a few weeks ago by the commander of the army, General Eduardo Enrique Zapateiro.

In an unprecedented event, the general was launched against the candidate Gustavo Petro and like any campaigning politician used his Twitter to whip him.

The general did not like that Petro had told a truth revealed by Otoniel, the head of the Gulf clan before he was extradited to the United States: that there were "some generals from the Colombian army" on the payroll of that powerful cartel.

In Colombia, the Constitution says that the military cannot be deliberative and that the presidents cannot intervene in politics, two prohibitions derived from the time of La Violencia, when nearly 200,000 Colombians died in a war between the traditional parties.

Reluctantly, presidents, including the unmanageable Álvaro Uribe, have complied with this rule that few foreign analysts understand.

With Duque that tradition was broken.

The president has been intervening in the campaign without shame and his example has been understood by the military as an invitation to violate the Constitution.

For this reason, General Zapateiro was not called to order by Duque nor has he been dismissed by the disciplinary bodies.

Instead, Duque supported him, arguing that the Petro candidate had interfered in the barracks and tarnished military honor.

This is how the Chavista Castro is the institutionality in Colombia.

Under the Duque Administration, the military has been able to function on its own.

They have no doctrine, because their historic enemy has disarmed, but they continue to resort to the "Search and Destroy" strategy, derived from the Vietnam War.

That was what they did a few days ago in a town in the department of Putumayo, located in the south of the country.

They came firing their weapons, massacred civilians and left.

The president neither rebuked them nor called them to order.

Duque will go down in history for being a president who was unable to exercise his leadership over the military and who preferred to be his pimp.

One of the great problems that the next president is going to have, whoever he may be, is that he is going to have to assume power with an army that for the most part has lost the notion of what military honor really means.

With all due respect to General Zapateiro and President Duque, military honor is not sullied by telling the truth.

And unfortunately it is true that there are officers in collusion with drug traffickers.

As it is also true that there are corrupt officials who use the reserved expenses for their personal expenses.

It is also true that there are generals with luxurious apartments and expensive properties who have become rich in the service.

And the most serious thing: the control bodies seldom dare to investigate and sanction them.

According to the definition, military honor "is a moral quality, linked to dignity" that drives the soldier to "carry out the strictest compliance" with their duties before others and themselves.

That is to say, military honor is based on moral and ethical virtues of the soldier that force him to fulfill his duty without any stain or blemish.

Within that concept of military honor there was no room for corruption scandals or impositions such as the one that was demanded of President Juan Manuel Santos the day before the peace agreement was signed.

In this trap, the military leadership made its support for the process subject to the inclusion of an article stating that the illicit enrichment of the generals during their service could be a related crime, subject to amnesty.

That day, the generals conditioned their support for peace to a shameful demand that tarnished military honor because it sought to cleanse their ill-gotten fortunes.

An army that one day before signing peace was thinking about its pockets is not an army that can speak of military honor.

They also failed their oath when they adopted without any moral challenge the heinous practice of false positives that caused the death of 6,400 Colombians at the hands of the Army.

Those who swore to defend the lives of Colombians with arms devised a plan to assassinate civilians and make them appear as guerrillas killed in combat.

That was his way to access benefits that ranged from a vacation to a promotion.

Several mid-ranking officers have gone to transitional justice to accept what they did and have apologized to the victims, but the vast majority of generals continue to deny their responsibility and have said that what they did was in compliance with orders, invoking again an arbitrary interpretation of what military honor actually means.

After almost ten years of uncovering the scandal of false positives, it has not been possible to know who gave the order to assassinate six thousand Colombians.

An army that is incapable of reflecting on its mistakes and violations of human rights is an army that is using military honor to cover up its ethical failures and to justify what it should never have done.

During the war against the FARC, the military and civil power constructed a narrative in which the uniformed men were the good guys and the heroes.

But after the signing of the agreement it has been discovered that the war was not that simple and that what there was was a collusion in which legal and illegal powers crossed.

When the abuses by the public force were impossible to cover up, the first to react were not the powers in Colombia, but the North American Congress that, with amendments such as that of Senator Patrick Leahy, confronted the human rights problem with much more determination. who had our forces.

The few advances in this area we owe more to NGOs such as HRW, and to several US senators, than to internal containment policies.

It is time to demand that the military act with their military honor in mind and to demand that the next president, whoever he may be, not be their pimp.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-15

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