Salvatore Mancuso is free. This was ruled this Monday by Judge Luz Marina Zamora, who belongs to the transitional justice system created two decades ago to prosecute the paramilitary group in which the former rancher was head, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). According to the togada, the designated peace manager has complied with the three Justice and Peace sentences against him, in which he was sentenced to eight years in prison, so he deserves freedom . Justice will begin to organize his release from the La Picota prison in Bogotá, where he has been held since the day of his return to the country, on February 27. He will be on probation for at least four years.
Outside prison, there are fears for the safety of the former paramilitary leader, as he is one of the highest-profile warlords in the history of a country shaken by decades of conflict. When he arrived at La Picota, the previous week, he was wearing a helmet and bulletproof vest, and two police officers protected him with shields. Someone – or many people – may want to see him dead. The former rancher from Córdoba is accused of more than 60,000 criminal acts, including those he committed directly and those for which he is responsible as a former commander of the AUC. Among them, he directly directed 139 massacres in which 800 people were murdered, in addition to others such as displacements and kidnappings. After a peace process between the Government of Álvaro Uribe and the AUC, he himself has acknowledged his responsibility in hundreds of murders and other crimes, and many of the men he commanded have done the same. Among other atrocious acts, the members of the Catatumbo Block of the AUC, which Mancuso led for years, acknowledged having committed 12,427 homicides between 1999 and 2004 in Norte de Santander alone. In 2005, that department had a population of about 1.2 million people: 1% of the northern Santander population was murdered.
In 2005, when he demobilized, Mancuso seemed proud of the terror he had spread. In a speech he gave on a visit to Congress, he said that the paramilitaries had created an “epic of freedom,†“mythical and heroicâ€. Two decades later, he has changed his tune. In 2006, he entered Justicia y Paz, the transitional justice system created a year earlier by the Uribe Government, in which paramilitaries receive lower sentences in exchange for the truth they offer to victims and for committing to stop committing crimes. There, he quickly began to tell a version of the war that made many Uribistas uncomfortable: he accused the then president of being behind a massacre and linked him to two more homicides; he said that the military gave him lists of civilians to kill them, and accused several of the most important companies in the country of financing the paramilitaries and their bloody crimes.
In 2008, Uribe extradited him to the United States along with another dozen paramilitary leaders, arguing that all of them continued committing crimes from prison. For many human rights defenders, it was more of an effort by the government to silence Mancuso: he knew too much, and was clearly more than willing to talk. And, from an American penitence, he did exactly that. In 2014, Justice and Peace sentenced him to eight years in prison for more than 2,000 crimes committed in eight Colombian departments – in ordinary justice it would have been more than 40 years. There are still about 60,000 more crimes to go.
On Monday morning, hours before Mancuso's hearing, the former right-wing president referred to the former paramilitary leader. “Nothing terrifies me about Mancuso, when I think that he changed his self-defense group for murder and money theft,†he says in a video published on his X account. He then alleges that the former commander is allying himself with President Petro because The two are his enemies and, he says, Mancuso wants to “take revenge on the enemy he could not subdue.” The former president also addresses President Gustavo Petro's decision to appoint Mancuso as peace manager, a figure designed to manage agreements with illegal groups and which may involve the temporary lifting of arrest warrants. The president affirms that this decision “for some it is convenient and for others it is not. The reasons are more intended as a political threat than peace,†as he compares his case with that of other former AUC commanders who have not been designated as managers.
Mancuso's version of the armed conflict is very important for the Petro Government. The president made it clear last August, when he appointed him as peace manager. In November, Mancuso managed to be accepted by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), another transitional justice system, created in the peace agreements with the extinct FARC to process serious cases of the most widespread criminal conduct during the conflict. armed. The JEP admitted him as a “subject functionally and materially incorporated into the public force” between 1989 and 2004. This means that the court will focus on his role as a “hinge” between the paramilitaries and the high command of the force. public in the confrontation with the guerrilla.
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Already on Colombian soil, Mancuso has announced that he plans to continue telling his version of the armed conflict. “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 will prevent Colombia from being an eternal factory of victims and collective pain,†he said in a letter published the day he landed. “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 contrast and determine that it is a qualified truth,” he adds.
On February 21, when it was learned that Mancuso already had a Colombian passport to return to his homeland, the Minister of Defense, Iván Velásquez, declared that “Salvatore Mancuso's life must be protected (…) for the possibility of contributing to a greater extent to the truth in the country. It will be a difficult task with the former paramilitary commander at large.
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