Gustavo Petro and Nicolás Maduro during their bilateral meeting in Brasilia.- (AFP)
Presidents Gustavo Petro and Nicolás Maduro agreed on Tuesday to search for the remains of Colombians disappeared at the hands of paramilitary groups on the Venezuelan side of the border of the two countries. "We are going to develop all the work we can with our experts in identification of corpses," said the president of Colombia after a bilateral meeting with Venezuela in the framework of the summit of South American leaders in Brasilia.
Hundreds of remains of victims of the so-called United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) are still buried in mass graves in Venezuela, former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso said earlier this month in a recorded message from a penitentiary in the United States at an event of the Colombian Foreign Ministry in the town of Juan Frio. in the border department of Norte de Santander. The emotional act of recognition and non-repetition took place in the ruins of one of the crematorium ovens in which the paramilitaries disappeared the bodies of their victims at the height of the war, a few meters from the Táchira River that marks the porous border line between the two countries.
Mancuso reiterated that same week in a hearing before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional justice system to which he has asked to submit, that "in Venezuela there were at least 200 missing people at the hands of the Catatumbo Bloc," which he commanded. The former paramilitary commander said that this is new and that he had not reported it before, in other court hearings. On both occasions he offered to go and identify the graves in the neighboring country.
"If Mancuso manages to detect the areas, if there are indeed bodies there, then the Venezuelan State would help us to return the remains and deliver them to their relatives," Petro said after meeting with Maduro. It is the fifth meeting between the two leaders in the ten months that have elapsed since the possession of the Colombian, amid the restoration of relations between Bogota and Caracas.
The inhabitants of the border have suffered the armed conflict with particular intensity since the paramilitaries arrived in September 2000 in Juan Frío, where they inaugurated the practice of burning bodies to disappear them. The AUC demobilized between 2003 and 2006. After taking advantage of the Justice and Peace process, Mancuso was extradited to the United States for drug trafficking. With that sentence served, he is waiting to return to Colombia, where he is accused of coordinating more than a hundred massacres.
Since the beginning of his government, Petro has put Colombian diplomacy at the service of peace, and especially his idea of total peace, with which he intends to implement more decisively the agreement with the extinct FARC, dialogue with the ELN and advance a policy of submission for criminal groups such as the Clan del Golfo. The Foreign Ministry, in response to the recommendations of the Truth Commission for non-repetition, has assumed a commitment to transnational victims.
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