Four years after the signing of the peace agreement with the Marxist guerrillas, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has just indicted eight former guerrilla commanders for “War crimes and crimes against humanity”. This first indictment, announced in Bogota on January 28, relates to some 20,000 kidnappings of which the armed movement was guilty between 1990 and 2016.
Former guerrilla leaders have a period of thirty days to recognize their responsibility and benefit from the reductions in sentences provided for in the peace agreement, or to reject it. Supporters of the peace agreement celebrate “A historic judicial decision”. She detractors, who have repeatedly denounced the supposed laxity of the JEP towards the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), are deprived of their main argument. Franco-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, who was hostage to the guerrillas from 2002 to 2008, approved the “Severe indictment which eliminates any possibility of impunity or amnesty for former FARC leaders”.
In a 322-page report, the JEP describes in detail the horror of kidnappings and hostage-taking. The document describes “A systematic policy of the organization to finance itself and put pressure on the public authorities”. The figure of 21,396 victims is much higher than all past estimates.
More than a thousand victims and 257 guerrillas were heard
The text recalls that women and young children were kidnapped, that hostages remained prisoners for years (one of them for fourteen years), sometimes caged or chained, that more than 10% of captives did not never returned, that families had to pay to recover the corpse of their loved one, that human dignity was systematically violated. “Never has a judicial decision revealed so many truths about the practices and cruelty of the ex-FARC”, underlines the lawyer Rodrigo Uprimny.
Author of the report, magistrate Julieta Lemaitre summed up the 322 pages in one sentence: “These are not mistakes that were made, they are war crimes and crimes against humanity. ” Homicides, enforced disappearances, cruel treatment, sexual violence, forced displacement: the ex-guerrillas were also guilty of crimes related to kidnappings and hostage-taking. “There were crimes against humanity because there was an intention to attack the civilian population in a systematic and generalized manner”, specifies the magistrate. More than a thousand victims and 257 guerrillas were heard by the court.
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