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.
In one section of the document, the former president referred directly to the problem of false alarms, indicating that he felt outrage and pain over the matter. “Proposing a democratic security policy to the country and taking on the task of building it was for me a patriotic dream, an ideal, a feeling rooted in my heart, ached by the experience and suffering of so much violence. It made me happy to see the compatriots on the streets, who happily resumed their activities and packed a soft drink in their backpacks for the soldiers and policemen stationed on the streets. And I ask myself with anger, who came up with the idea of murdering innocent people?
He added “The false alarms appeared to be a strategy to dishonor Democratic security and undermine a government that had won popular sympathy. The very name would give the impression of being concocted by the malicious minds of those who should have enjoyed the tragedy that has discredited our government and armed forces.”
This is Álvaro Uribe’s full letter on false alarms
In the case of false positives, the Army’s Truth Commission assigns institutional responsibility when many of its members were imprisoned for such crimes prior to the Havana Accords. The army itself conducted investigations and filed complaints. The institution must not be confused with the behavior of related persons.
About False Positives is my public interview with Father De Roux and other members of the Truth Commission, as well as an open document available to citizens on our networks and pages. Despite the fact that the murder of a person is serious and reprehensible, figures on these murders differ between the prosecutor’s office, the Observatory of Memory and Conflict (OMC) of the National Center for Historical Memory and those of some NGOs, mostly along ideological lines, contrary to democratic security, without sufficient evidence of facts which JEP unfortunately accepted in a political statement and which are inadequate for a judiciary.
(The JEP’s number, 6,402, is more than double the cases recorded by prosecutors and the National Center for Historical Memory’s Observatory of Memory and Conflict (OMC).)
The Truth Commission has failed to investigate joint criminal activity between members of the Public Force and people who appeared to have been murdered in the painful chapter of those false alarms. Although it is not necessary to revictimize families, analysis of these facts would have been necessary for truth. And it wouldn’t have been necessary to reveal names to avoid reliving the pain of loved ones.
The private version circulating in the armed forces, which they do not publicly support, is that many false alarms have been given to people who were in illegal groups and pretending to be innocent. The commission was not interested in investigating the matter.
When there are false alarms, I feel outrage and pain. Proposing a democratic security policy to the country and taking on the task of building it was for me a patriotic dream, an ideal, a feeling rooted in my heart, ached by the experience and suffering of so much violence. It made me happy to see the compatriots on the streets, who happily resumed their activities and packed a soft drink in their backpacks for the soldiers and policemen stationed on the streets. And I ask myself with anger, who came up with the idea of murdering innocent people?
The false alarms appeared to be a strategy to dishonor Democratic security and undermine a government that had won popular sympathy. Even the name would give the impression of being concocted by the malicious minds of those who should have enjoyed the tragedy that has discredited our government and armed forces.
The truth is that in 2010 Colombia had gained a lot in reducing violence, which would not have happened if there had been a policy of assassinations instead of the official design of security in relation to democratic values.