In the processes of legalization of paramilitary gangs, they inculpate the executors of crimes, while covering up the elites who determine them, a reality interrupted by confessions such as that of Mancuso, the paramilitary chief, who points out those responsible for the dirty war against the people.
In the well-known 1962 Report “La Violencia en Colombia”, by the masters Guzmán, Fals and Umaña, we read: “how impunity was enthroned, that nothing was done and the “Condor” continued doing his business and the prosecutor had to resign to save his life and his decorum”. The “Condor”, head of “Los Pájaros”, hitmen in the Valley and other departments, ordered the murder of more than four thousand liberals in the fifties. After being detained for only five days, he was released by Rojas Pinilla, who awarded him the Cross of Boyacá, a decoration for his help to the Army. When his false death was announced, more than two hundred people who celebrated it ended up murdered. This famous paramilitary ended up executed by a relative of one of his victims.
In this book, a truth appears clearly: the existence of gangs that threw themselves into crime; “they fulfilled the appointment that others” indicated to them from the centers of power; “the real professionals who, later, would fully enjoy” the plundering of millions. “Their privileged position achieved total impunity for their underhanded criminal actions, invigorated by the easy economic and political triumph”.
In 1962, the gringo general William Yarborough headed the mission ordered from Washington to structurally reinforce the paramilitary strategy that already had national experience, indicating that it should be used to exterminate the leftist political opposition in Colombia. The Armed Forces were raised under that tutelage, suckled on the National and Hemispheric Security Doctrine projected by the United States (US), grew and developed until today with the premises of the Internal Enemy and total war.
More than sixty years later, before a court of the state apparatus, another “Condor” reappears, today defenestrated or deposed. His last name is Mancuso. His biography is already known. Responsible for thousands of murders, disappearances, tortures, massacres, he testifies and confesses from a prison in the USA. In front of victims and officials of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), he has made revelations that are not entirely new, but this time they go into detail, ratifying part of what has already been proven for at least fifteen years when under the Justice and Peace Law crimes were investigated, mass graves were pointed out, the full coordination of paramilitaries with the Armed Forces and the state espionage agency, DAS, the knowledge of crimes and their sponsorship. Today Mancuso formalizes important additions, mentioning of course Uribe Velez, Pastrana, Samper. Not only to presidents, but confirming what he said in 2007: how former Vice President Francisco Santos ordered the creation of a powerful narco-paramilitary structure Bloque Capital, as well as other politicians and businessmen from different regions.
There are three fundamental observations resulting from an analysis of structural impunity. First, the most important, is that these are not isolated cases or disconnected epochs, but a continued genocide, that is to say, historical, organized and organic. As the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal ruled in 2021. Second: in correspondence with its prolongation, a system of denial of full justice has been configured, composed by normative gears and by the very alignment of the political and judicial operators inserted in a logic of concealment and reward, whether to maintain themselves, to be promoted or to save their lives, like the prosecutor threatened by “El Condor” 70 years ago. Third: although the same Law of Justice and Peace (975 of 2005) and even more the Havana Agreements with the FARC in 2016, were conceived to dose with extreme calculation the truth, so that the impunity of the Genocide was assured, protecting political bosses and promoters of narco-paramilitarism, it is true that in the very operation of these washing machines it has not been possible to completely cover the blood left by the policy perpetrated by the regime.
Academics Fals, Umaña and Guzmán wrote in 1962, that impunity reigned in this Santanderist country of “doctors of laws”, in which “the birds”, “chulavitas”, and today “paras” or other denominations, were “institutionalized” in joint activity with the state armed forces. They pointed out, and this cost them threats, that there were “intellectual authors” (professionals of violence of privileged economic and political position), “members of the traditional political ruling classes of the city, [who] suffered in the flesh the violence that many times they consciously promoted and exploited”.
The architecture of the impunity of class violence and of the dominant power induced to functionally decompose the country, to brutalize thousands of people obsessed by the mission to annihilate the Internal Enemy, is not going to collapse because of the serious assertions that Mancuso has poured out in pieces, belatedly, even if these serve a little to the relative truth that can be rescued. Something barely wobbled for a few moments. And nothing more. Those at the top continue unscathed, sending to kill.
The recurrent and concurrent purpose of the pacification model implemented by the regime for thirty years, which has pursued the demobilization and disarmament of the insurgents, has been to promise or design simultaneously a few propagandistic, palliative or decorative measures against narco-paramilitarism, which have been totally ineffective. The source continues to be within, in the conception of the Armed Forces and agencies of foreign governments that indoctrinate to mount again and again different forms of narco-paramilitarism and mercenarism, through gangs of different acronyms, such as those carried by Antonio Medina and other “Birds” like those of the Gulf Clan and other mafias. A wise saying tells us that “the fever is not in the sheet”.
The ELN is committed to the truth for all, for everyone, and for that reason, both in our legal framework and mandate for dialogue, we oppose any pact of immunities and cover-up that buries responsibility for Crimes against Humanity. We established in the Mexico Agreement of March 10, 2023, which is our only agenda and charter of obligations to be fulfilled at the Roundtable with the government, to build on the memory of the lives and struggles of all those affected, for guarantees of non-repetition and non-forgetting, seeking “The eradication of all forms of paramilitarism so that it will not be repeated” (point 5.3.).
The proposal of Total Peace should hopefully not be from where impunity for the elites, money laundering linked to Genocide, ethnocide and ecocide, as well as the recycling of contemporary “Chulavitas” who may in a few years, already in decline, appear before new courts, without changing anything, while those who have designed these structures of death, and have benefited from them, remain untouchable. Impunity has not been removed. “Nothing was done and the “Condor” is still in place.
From: https://eln-voces.net/la-violencia-en-colombia-2-0/
The National Liberation Army (ELN) is Colombia’s largest leftist guerrilla group, formed in 1964 following the decade of Colombian civil war, from 1948-1958, known as La Violencia.