About 20 years ago they wore camouflaged uniforms and committed state crimes. Today they are wearing trousers and a white shirt to create transparency and confess how they murdered 49 citizens and made them disappear and how they hid their bodies in a cemetery so their relatives could not find them. A group of eight soldiers publicly admitted Tuesday that they were primarily responsible for these killings. They did so in front of the relatives of the 49 victims who have been trying to find out about the past for two decades.
The confession came before the Special Court of the Special Judiciary for Peace (JEP), which has been trying and granting judicial benefits to top officials in the public power and the extinct FARC guerrillas since the signing of a peace agreement between these two sides in 2016 recognized for war crimes. The hearing is part of the macro case of false positives, given the military’s known killings of more than 6,000 civilians, claiming they were guerrillas killed in combat. Several generals have denied their responsibility in it, but several soldiers and colonels have admitted this. This is the case in Beiba, an emblematic case since the bodies of citizens murdered by the military were hidden in the cemetery of this Antioquian municipality. A sacred field became a mass grave.
“Anyone who dressed in black was a guerrilla,” retired Major Yaír Leandro Rodríguez Giraldo told Giraldo when speaking of one of those killed: Edison Alexander Lezcano Hurtado. The crime took place on May 18, 2002 in the rural area of the municipality, at a time when the army was fighting guerrillas in the area that controls the land route to the Gulf of Urabá on the Caribbean Sea. Rodríguez took a deep breath before recounting how they killed him: Anyone near the fighting, any farmer, could be a victim. “I didn’t think about the damage I could do, we had stigmatized the whole world,” he confessed. He called the battalion commander, who told him to kill the man who lived in that rural home.
“I became a murderer,” he told the farmer’s wife and mother. “I regret that Edison Alexander Lezcano Hurtado passed away and that he can’t sing vallenatos to his family in the mornings,” he added. The woman started crying when she heard the last sentence and there was a deep silence in the audience for a few seconds. The retired major was unable to speak, was moving, and his intervention, known in the JEP as Contribution, ended with this apology.
In addition to the eight top officials, several soldiers who were carrying out orders also spoke to the families on Tuesday. They gave other macabre details: They looked for vulnerable people in cities like Turbo or for drug-addicted street dwellers to lure them to Beiba, to murder them and to disguise their identities. As? Some were shot multiple times in the face so they could not be identified. Others had their citizenship cards burned so that no judicial authority could track them down. And they knew that if they considered confessing to these crimes in court, they could be killed.
“I should have denounced it,” said retired Colonel Efraín Enrique Prada Correa ruefully, who admitted responsibility for concealing the identities of several victims. “But if I had done it, I wouldn’t be on this side today, but on your side.” So not on the side of the perpetrators, but on the side of the victims. According to Prada Correa, this happened to Lieutenant Jesús Javier Suárez Caro, a soldier who was assassinated for fighting back false alarms. “If you want the same thing to happen to you or to your children as happened to Lieutenant Suárez…” others told him, such as Colonel Jorge Amor Páez, who has not admitted to the JEP that he was responsible for these crimes. “In that moment, I understood,” Prada said.
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The Dazuba case is also special because at least twelve people have received threats during the investigations by the JEP, which have been ongoing for several years. “We say to those who wanted to cover up these international crimes with impunity and with violence that their despicable methods will not intimidate the Colombian justice system,” said Judge Alejandro Ramelli, threatened by the paramilitary group Clan del Gulf. Another recipient of threats is retired soldier Levis Contreras, who has admitted responsibility for more than 40 murders in and around Beiba. When Ramelli asked him if he knew who was behind these threats, Contreras replied that he did not know, “but they are people who do not want this macabre event that happened here in this region to come to light .”
The JEP has received the support of the Government of Gustavo Petro. The audience was attended by Justice Minister Néstor Osuna and Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, as well as High Commissioner for Peace Danilo Rueda. The latter recognized the courage of the victims present, not only for having searched for the truth for two decades, but for continuing to do so today when criminal groups are present in the area that can threaten their lives. “We call on those who illegally control this area to stop the violence,” said Rueda, a spokesman for Total Peace Policy. Facing fears that public authority might try to obstruct the investigative process, the defense secretary assured that “we will not introduce restrictions” to allow a soldier to reveal the whole truth. “We are rebuilding collective dignity,” he added.
The high command was absent, as pointed out by their former colleagues, who have not admitted any responsibility for the crimes. Among them are Colonels Jorge Alberto Amor and David Herley Guzmán Ramírez, whose cases are tried in court without the benefits that the JEP offers to those who admit to war crimes – and the court seems to have no doubt that both are responsible for those crimes were responsible. murders.
The main absentee, however, is General Mario Montoya, who was the highest authority in the region two decades ago and has been described in several testimonies as one of the most responsible citizens, which he has always denied. At the end of the hearing in Dazuba, retired Sergeant Fidel Ochoa, who remembered Montoya, spoke. “This practice became systematic with the arrival of General Mario Montoya at the Seventh Division and then at Army Headquarters,” he said of the false alarms. Ochoa recalled General Montoya saying to every platoon leader on radio broadcasts, “I don’t need gallons of blood, I need tankers full of blood.” Blood spilled in the cemeteries.
The process of uncovering the truth about those responsible for admitting their guilt to the JEP has already enabled the identification of the remains of eleven victims at Las Mercedes Cemetery. But there are at least 38 more left. “With the Dazuba Cemetery, we are at the tip of the iceberg,” Judge Ramelli said. The idea of the JEP is to see the entire iceberg transparently and completely.
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