In a document, former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez reacted to the final report of the Truth Commission through his experience and as a witness of the armed conflict. The former president denied several points in the document presented by Father Francisco de Roux, which said that “the truth is missing”.
The answer should be presented this Sunday at the II Summit of Patriots organized by the Democratic Center. However, because the President had connected to the event via Zoom, a connection could not be made to hear his statements and the official launch was eventually postponed.
The counter-report, divided into five sections, explains various points of the final report from the perspective of the former president. According to the document, the story does not aspire to be absolute truth.
“This writing with tired keys makes no claim to absolute truth, which does not exist. The dogmas of faith are absolute, the truth is relative and its degree of approximation increases through debate. We want to make our contribution to this,” says the former President in the counter-report.
According to former President Uribe, “The audacity to write stems from the audacity of the truth commission not to tell the truth in many cases.” He affirms that he is doing so in exercise of his right to freedom of expression and is repeating his point of view to the citizenry.
First, the former president assures that the truth commission has an “anti-democratic origin” since the “no” won the referendum for peace.
That citizens’ mandate was “unknown” to Juan Manuel Santos’ government, which “made some superficial adjustments and got Congress to approve it with a proposal,” Uribe said.
“This damage to democracy was endorsed by the Constitutional Court, which accepted that a people’s verdict would be ignored in this way. The government has skilfully built into the constitutional norm, with express consent, that if a referendum is lost, it can be changed through a democratic process and then decided in favor of the Congress proposal,” explained Uribe.
Uribe reported that when he won the position against the peace deal agreed in Havana, the Democratic Center proposed a National Pact to change the text. In this way, the narrative claiming that Uribismo did not want peace is false, since there was a willingness to agree on an alternative.
“We called the President, we asked for an appointment, we met with his government and it was all to no avail. They preferred pleasing the FARC, Cuba and Venezuela to making an thematic pact with this party, just over half of Colombia, which said ‘no’ in the referendum.” Indian.
Uribe, on the other hand, asserts that there was no such “intransigence” on the part of the Democratic Center when it came to expressing its opinion on the agreement. “For example, we have proposed that those responsible for heinous crimes should not attend Congress until they have served the alternative sanction,” Uribe said.
The party dropped its argument that prison is necessary to draw attention to the seriousness of crimes, enforce non-recurrence, deter crime, and accompany the restoration of justice and reparations for victims. Despite the will, “nothing important was accepted from us”.
“To date, the FARC have been in Congress for almost five years and have not received the alternative sanction. There were more drug trafficking groups, an increase in micro-trafficking, underage recruitment and more violence,” Uribe said.
He also emphasized that the “ideological inclination” of the members of the truth commission is notorious. This with the exception of Major Carlos Ospina, “an impassive person whose assessments were unknown”.
The former president is also defending what he and his party said ahead of the referendum, which the Santos government called a lie.
“But the accusation of the official vote was against us, it was excused that they lost the referendum because we lied,” he added.
As a first objection, Uribe criticizes that the “violation of democracy” was not taken into account by the truth commission.
“This omission is not surprising, the Truth Commission, whose mission was to record events independent of political leanings, Instead, it acted as a body in service of strengthening the agreement with the FARC,” he said.
Secondly, the ex-president criticizes that the truth commission in the JEP does not have its own and impartial space for the Bundeswehr. In the document, he highlighted the role they play in strengthening democracy in Colombia.
“The members of our armed forces have not been the beneficiaries of impunity, on the contrary, they have been convicted of criminal acts. They have also been victims of often unfair accusations from ideological organizations and prejudice against the institution.” highlighted.
According to the former president, the truth commission failed to analyze that the Havana Accords put the armed forces “on an equal footing with those who committed acts of terrorism but ended up being disadvantaged.”
“I say the above because both are required to admit crimes in order to be free or have alternative and token sanctions. However, for the member of the FARC, admitting a crime means accepting his duty, for the member of the armed forces, admitting a crime that he has broken the law means that he has acted against his duty. This is very serious for our democracy because it harms the military man to lose his freedom and his family wants him at home, a shameful way of which is to accept the crime even if he did not commit it“, he remembered.
Regarding false alarms, the Truth Commission blames the army for false alarms, when many of those responsible were prosecuted before the peace deal. “The army itself has conducted investigations and made complaints. The institution must not be confused with the behavior of close people,” he said.
It also challenges figures from the Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition, which suggest there were more than 6,402 false positives during Álvaro Uribe’s government.
“Despite the fact that the murder of a person is serious and reprehensible, the figures on these murders between the prosecutor’s office, the Observatory of Memory and Conflict (OMC) of the National Center for Historical Memory and those of some NGOs diverge mostly along an ideological line , which runs counter to democratic security, without sufficient elements of accreditation of facts, which JEP unfortunately accepted in a political statement and is inadequate for a judiciary, “he said.
In addition, he asserted that the Truth Commission “failed to investigate joint criminal activities between members of public power and individuals who appeared to have been murdered in the painful chapter of these false alarms.”
“The armed forces circulate the private version, which they do not publicly support, that many false alarms have been given to people who were in illegal groups and who are pretending to be innocent. The Commission was not interested in investigating the issue,” the former President added.
In the following, the ex-president addresses the allegations made against him that he allegedly did not recognize the conflict with the FARC: “In truth, I have always maintained that the issue cannot be treated as a conflict, but as an action by terrorist groups, or groups that have committed terrorist actions, and the response of the state, which in the presidential exercise that matched me, the Democratic security was. “
He asserted that the word conflict came from an evolution of the language and that he didn’t use it because he didn’t want to “legitimize the actions of the violent.”
Fourth, the President made assessments of the governments of Colombia. “I do it across all political differences with the sole intention of presenting my testimony to the public, and that differs from the published conclusion of the Truth Commission.”
According to former President Uribe, when the institution asserts that “the state is responsible”, the institution justifies “violence, terrorism, murder, kidnapping, rape, recruitment of minors, destruction, backwardness and poverty all the years for the violent groups”.
“Some of us think quite the opposite, we believe that the state has essentially invested in the generous search for peace that appears as a common element of the government trip,” to express.
In the face of allegations against former President Iván Duque of alleged lack of will to comply with the agreement, Uribe defended him.
“As for me, I have reiterated that the Truth Commission is illegitimate and biased. I have already said that it arose out of ignorance of the referendum and outrage against democracy. In addition to his biased integration, the omissions and deviations from his account reinforce his bias. They ignored Major Carlos Ospina, a fair representative of the armed forces,” he said.
Regarding his government, the former president defended himself against several allegations: “The Commission abused it not to keep repeating that it is lying by claiming that our government has tried to link the entire left to terrorism. Opposition leaders enjoyed full protection, as did pro-government leaders. Opposition corporados, governors and mayors were protected and supported, particularly those of Bogotá. I am grateful that the opposition leaders have recognized this.”
He also assured that the institution lied when referring to the process of his re-election. “Please, if anything influenced the draft constitution of 1991, it was the creation of the organs of Havana, like the Truth Commission, which after the catchy word ‘peace’ destroyed participatory democracy, for example the referendum included in the constitution,” he added.
He also assured the commission that everything about the Uribe government “appears bad”: “Plan Colombia, Plan Patriota and other actions that helped bring some peace of mind to Colombia. They blame us for my city’s soldiers who have allowed military service in the area with more dedication, vigilance and transparency. They put us in charge of the criminal gangs that have grown since 2010.
Given his government’s account, what happened during the conflict he observed, and the actions of the Democratic Center described by the Truth Commission, former President Uribe hopes his story has “some relevance in the period analyzed”.
This is how former President Álvaro Uribe, without pretending that it is understood as absolute truth, shows his version of the conflict in the face of the Colombians. There is no date for the official start yet, as it was postponed due to internet connection problems in the auditorium.