During the third day of hearing, the Recognition Chamber addressed the pattern of kidnapping for territorial control purposes, Bogotá, on June 23, 2022. JEP
The proclamation of Gustavo Petro as the new president of Colombia dispelled the polarizing din of the electoral campaign.
Providentially coinciding with this kind of truce, the first public hearing of recognition of the last secretariat of the former FARC for the kidnappings perpetrated during the armed conflict was held in Bogotá.
The sessions, which were televised, lasted for hours and few things, I think, could be as timely as this particular hearing and the announcement that this very week the Truth Commission, a body born with the Peace Agreement, will present to the world its final report.
Already last March, the hearing related to "the so-called false positives" took place in Ocaña, the thousands of murders illegitimately presented by the State forces as FARC casualties that occurred in combat.
On that occasion the “appearances” —as the language of the justice of the peace calls the accused— were eleven soldiers.
To tell the truth, Ocaña's hearing left many with the feeling of something incomplete and failed.
The victims, central to this process, did not hide their deep frustration, since among the accused were not those who allegedly gave the orders.
Criticism pointed to half-truths and pacts of silence presumably concluded between the military high command and the government.
In the Bogotá hearing, the defendants were seven former guerrilla commanders, the heads of the last FARC secretariat.
Seeing the victims confront the ex-guerrillas (and the military) with their crimes is shocking due to its crudeness and one wonders if reconciliation and coexistence can really be achieved one day.
One victim, police sergeant César Augusto Lasso, was held captive by the guerrillas for more than 13 years, after surviving a three-day battle during which a small and remote police garrison withstood an attack by a force thirty times his size. in number.
After the station surrendered, Lasso was kidnapped along with 60 other people.
He wore to the audience the same chains with which he was shackled during most of his captivity.
In his vindication before the undaunted former commanders, Lasso affirmed that he had forgiven and that he trusts that these crimes will never be repeated.
However, his countenance and his voice showed him as a man forever wounded in his dignity.
He will not forget either, he said, the indifference and the silence that fell on him and other captives.
In a previous session of the same hearing, Sigifredo López, a survivor of another collective kidnapping, spoke of a taboo: economic compensation for the victims, something that, according to him, was not contemplated in the Havana agreements.
He referred directly to the money obtained criminally by the FARC.
López fell into the hands of the FARC in April 2002, when they stormed the Departmental Assembly of Valle del Cauca, in Cali.
López and eleven other deputies were kidnapped and taken to the mountains.
His kidnapping sought to force an exchange of hostages for imprisoned guerrillas.
The massacre of these eleven congressmen, executed after five years of captivity, in the midst of a never fully clarified confrontation with another armed group, generated such general repudiation that forced the FARC to issue outrageous statements that ended up covering them with ignominy.
That these crimes can today be addressed and judged together, forming what has been called "macro cases", is just one of the innovations brought by the Special Jurisdiction.
The Special Justice of the Peace has always been attacked as if it were a cover for leniency towards the former leaders of the FARC.
I have seen on the YouTube channel of the JEP a long and very illustrative interview with the magistrate rapporteur of this public hearing, Julieta Lemaitre.
The interview, conducted during the confinement forced by the pandemic, left me amazed at the complex and at the same time very sensible legal architecture that supports this jurisdiction.
Lemaitre's experience as a postgraduate professor, her knowledge and talent as a speaker, the flagrant humanity of the subject and, without a doubt, the need to finally achieve a lasting peace that is breathed today, make time fly by. .
The video, of friendly
homemade
quality , should be seen with a pencil in hand to take some notes because the moral philosophy that the architects of the JEP invoke is great and good and because it is war crimes and crimes against humanity that are judged.
If it is true, as Hernando Gómez Buendía affirms in his book
Between independence and the pandemic: Colombia, 1810-2020
(Public Reason, 2022), that the cycle of political violence has ended, the current one should be a great century for Colombia. .
And the final report of the Truth Commission is the first of its annals.