Francisco de Roux: "Colombia knew what peace means and is not going to give it up"

Father Francisco de Roux, president of the Truth Commission, during the delivery of the final report, at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán theater in Bogotá. Truth Commission

"We bring a message of hope and future for our broken and broken nation."

Colombia has looked this Tuesday in the mirror of its war of more than half a century with the presentation of the long-awaited final report of the Truth Commission, chaired by the Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux.

The father, as everyone knows him, has made a call not to postpone reconciliation, a call to "build a great peace" that allows the country to heal, afflicted by an armed conflict that has involved guerrillas, paramilitaries and state forces with a balance of ten million victims.

"We call to heal the physical and symbolic, multicultural and multiethnic body, which we form as citizens in this nation," De Roux said in a moving central speech during the act called The Event, at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán theater in Bogotá.

In his words, he resorted to metaphors to review the suffering Colombian geography, the places hardest hit by the barbarism of all the armed actors.

A body “that cannot survive with a heart attack in Chocó, gangrenous arms in Arauca, destroyed legs in Mapiripán, a severed head in El Salado, a damaged vagina in Tierralta, empty eye sockets in Cauca, the stomach burst in Tumaco, vertebrae crushed in Guaviare, shoulders torn to pieces in Urabá, neck slit in Catatumbo,

The president of the Truth Commission, which emerged from the peace agreements sealed by the Government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) with the extinct FARC guerrilla, delivered the chapter that synthesizes his findings, conclusions and recommendations to the president-elect from Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who takes office on August 7.

“I receive the recommendations of the Truth Commission and I will comply with them.

Even the last family in the last corner of Colombia will know and have these recommendations, "replied the leftist leader.

The outgoing president, Iván Duque, is visiting Lisbon and did not attend the solemn act.

"We invited the president and offered to deliver the report to him before anyone else," De Roux explained to a loud whistle, which contrasted with cheers for his future successor.

The words of the father show how complex and extended the Colombian conflict is.

De Roux acknowledged that the document arrives at a time when the threat of violent groups has intensified in many territories.

"There is still a conflict of various actors that can take force again in another period of total confrontation if serious steps are not taken towards the construction of a great peace," he pointed out.

“We call for awareness that our way of seeing the world and relating to each other is trapped in a «war mode» in which we cannot conceive that others think differently”, he added.

“We cannot postpone, as we have already done after millions of victims, the day when “peace is a duty and a mandatory right”, as expressed in our Constitution”, De Roux cried out.

"What was won in the peace agreement is a reality," the father claimed, recalling that 2017, the year after the historic pact, was the most peaceful in half a century.

Colombia, he assured, "knew what peace means and is not going to give it up."

De Roux's call for reconciliation crowns the titanic task of the Truth Commission in a country that has made an extraordinary effort to turn the page on violence without avoiding the truth, painful but restorative.

The entity has worked non-stop for the last three and a half years, despite the ravages of the pandemic.

The commissioners have heard nearly 30,000 testimonies from victims, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, peasants, soldiers, members of illegal armed groups, politicians, businessmen, and even those of the five living ex-presidents of Colombia.

“It would take us 17 years to give each of the victims a minute of silence,” De Roux recalled in his speech.

Subscribe here