The return of Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary who did not want to remain silent

A few days before Salvatore Mancuso landed in Colombia, after 15 years in a United States prison, the Colombian Minister of Defense told the press that he arrived at a delicate moment.

“Salvatore Mancuso's life must be protected,” he warned.

The life of any Colombian must be protected, the minister seemed to say the obvious.

But this life could be particularly at risk.

Salvatore Mancuso, who for now will be in La Picota prison in Bogotá, was a warlord and still keeps many secrets about the armed conflict.

He went from being an upper-class rancher to leading paramilitary armies along with the founders of what they called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the brothers Fidel and Carlos Castaño.

With them he made military, political and business alliances with the most powerful men in the country.

And he was a cruel man: he ordered massacres, homicides, disappearances, kidnappings and displacements.

He has been accused of more than 60,000 criminal acts, adding those that he committed directly and for which he is responsible through the line of command.

The Castaños died before the paramilitary demobilization, without facing justice or confessing to their crimes.

Mancuso, however, is still alive.

And, since he demobilized in 2004, he has been a confessional: he has admitted to hundreds of crimes and has accused politicians, businessmen and soldiers of having helped him.

He is a man who many want to keep quiet.

He is a man many others want to listen to.

Two helicopters approach the La Picota prison, on the night of February 27.

Mancuso is allegedly traveling in one of them.ANDRÉS GALEANO

“I come to continue with my commitments to the victims, as I have done uninterruptedly over the last 18 years, but at the same time, I come to put myself at the service of a peace agenda that prevents Colombia from being an eternal factory.” of victims and collective pain,” Mancuso said in a letter published upon landing.

“I have the task of continuing to provide truth to the transitional justice system, not only with responsibility for the implications it has on the people linked in the testimonies, their families and the victim communities, I will do so under strict standards that allow contrasting and determining that It is a qualified truth,” he adds.

“Stop telling the leftists of the JEP what you should not tell,” said a threat that Mancuso received in 2021. The JEP is the transitional justice court agreed upon between the Government and the extinct FARC that is currently investigating the major crimes committed by that old guerrilla and the public force.

The court admitted the former paramilitary chief into its jurisdiction in a controversial measure, which is based on the fact that he has a lot to contribute to clarify the crimes committed by the military.

Mancuso has, as he said when revealing those threats, an “unwavering commitment to the truth.”

The man whose return paralyzes Colombia came to paramilitarism in the 1990s through the Convivir, the initially legal ranchers' associations that sought to protect themselves from extortion and attacks by guerrillas.

Many of these groups ended up financing and strengthening the far-right paramilitary groups that already existed in some areas, but spread and strengthened thanks to this new support (and money from illicit businesses, led by drug trafficking).

“The Convivir were the way in which illegality was given legality,” Mancuso said before the JEP.

Currently, ranchers are trying to revive a figure similar to the Convivir.

Mancuso's arrival is a harsh reminder of that violent past.

Prisoners in La Picota prison try to see the arrival of the former paramilitary chief. ANDRÉS GALEANO

In Mancuso's mouth, the truth is usually explosive: he has said that Army commanders asked the paramilitaries to assassinate social leaders, that some soldiers accompanied him to kidnap, and that the public force did not try to stop several massacres of which he was previously informed. .

He has also spoken with his own names: he pointed out the deputy director of state intelligence, José Miguel Narváez, as allies of the paramilitaries, for giving lists of people to be murdered;

to the former vice president of Colombia, Francisco Santos, for requesting the formation of a paramilitary bloc in the capital;

and emblematic companies of the Colombian economy such as Postobón, Ecopetrol and Bavaria, for helping the paramilitaries.

The majority of those accused have defended his innocence, although others, like Narváez, have been convicted in court.

But with whom it is most explosive is Álvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia between 2002 and 2010, and who decided to extradite Mancuso to the United States in 2008. For critics of the then popular right-wing president, the decision was an attempt to silence the former commander;

For Uribe and his supporters, it was a necessary sanction for a dozen paramilitary leaders who continued committing crimes from prison.

Mancuso has said that whoever was Uribe's closest advisor as governor of Antioquia in the 1990s, Pedro Juan Moreno, helped form and strengthen the paramilitaries, and that he was an intermediary for the president to order a massacre (in the town of El Aro) and a murder (of human rights defender Jesús María Valle).

He has also said that Uribe removed the security scheme from a mayor, Eudaldo Díaz, of the municipality of El Roble, knowing that the paramilitaries were going to assassinate him.

The former paramilitary chief has admitted that the AUC sympathized with Uribe's ideological approaches, and assured that they supported the election of the former president in 2002. "I received direct orders from my commanders to support President Uribe, candidate for the Presidency at that time," he said about that election.

The former president has categorically rejected all accusations in the media, social networks and courts.

In 2004, when Mancuso demobilized, he was able to visit Congress.

He gave a speech in which he stated that the paramilitaries had created an “epic of freedom,” “mythical and heroic.”

Twenty years later he no longer describes what he did in such a grandiloquent way, and has asked for forgiveness from some of his victims.

In 2020, the Colombian Truth Commission published one of Mancuso's public apologies to the family of indigenous leader Kimy Pernía Domicó, murdered in 2001 and whose body disappeared in the Sinú River.

“We should never have taken action in the war,” he told Pernía's daughter.

“I was wrong, I apologize for that, for my actions in the conflict,” she added.

Mancuso said in one of his many statements that what he learned to do in paramilitary groups was “a theater of terror,” one in which not only had to kill some, but leave everyone who was left alive in fear.

The man responsible for the terror has shown a desire to continue talking about how he put together the theater.

And above all, tell who all the actors were.

The La Picota prison, where Salvatore Mancuso will live.ANDRÉS GALEANO

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