Three years ago, when dozens of kidnapping victims came face to face -and in public- for the first time with former FARC leaders, the latter acknowledged <\/a>their \u201csavageness\u201d and \u201clevels of inhumanity\u201d. But although they were the ones who had approved and enforced what one indictee called \u201cthe damned policy of kidnapping\u201d, they were often unable to answer specific questions from their victims, such as what stories a father told about his child or where to find a relative they never released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, as it is the turn of commanders of regional guerrilla structures - also indicted as having been \u201cmost responsible\u201d of these crimes - to face their victims as part of the judicial process, their answers come closer to the suffering and experiences of those they kidnapped or their relatives. After all, they are the ones who gave concrete orders to abduct someone, who held them captive in their units or gave instructions over the radio about the fate that awaited them. There are still many unanswered questions, but this proximity is allowing for dialogues that victims thought impossible until just a few years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One by one, seven top commanders of the FARC\u2019s north-western bloc, which operated in the rugged mountains of western and central Andes, owned up to their role in a what the JEP termed a war crimes and crimes against humanity. In front of a hundred victims, first in the mountainous village of Caicedo and then in Medell\u00edn, they admitted to kidnappings to finance war, force the government to release imprisoned rebels, and assert territorial control. In other words, the three criminal FARC policies <\/a>identified by presiding Justice Julieta Lemaitre and her team in the macro-case dealing with kidnappings, one of the most emblematic crimes committed during an armed conflict which last over half a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI am guilty of having implemented these policies. I acknowledge all the damage caused to those we kidnapped: the mistreatment, the bad food, the truncated life projects, the many disappeared people who never returned to their homes. How many children were left waiting for their fathers or fathers waiting for their children, how many mothers who had to play the role of father and mother in order to carry their families,\u201d said Rodolfo Restrepo, who was a rebel fighter for four decades under the nom de guerre \u201cVictor Tirado\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through both prepared speeches and spontaneous answers, the seven indictees responded to the concerns and petitions of 15 victims. Some did so in a rather mechanical way, as if filling out a checklist of legal obligations: \u201cwe committed crimes that cannot be amnestied\u201d, \u201cthese were acts of the utmost gravity\u201d, \u201cI want to be emphatic in acknowledging my responsibility by line of command\u201d. Others, like Restrepo, did so looking at their victims in the eyes, owning up to such cruel truths as \u201cwe took many poor people, tortured them, made them and their families suffer, only to find out that they had nothing to pay, meaning we either had to disappear or release them\u201d. They spoke truths that are obvious to Colombians, but difficult for former FARC members to voice, such as that these crimes made them lose any legitimacy. As Cruz Vega would say, \u201cI reached this civility 40 years too late\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such public hearings are still an unusual scene in Colombia. It is only the fourth time that former FARC leaders or members publicly address their victims to acknowledge their responsibility for at least 21,396 kidnappings<\/a> committed between 1990 and 2015. Owning up to their crimes is one of the fundamental conditions - along with providing truth and redressing their victims - to receive a more lenient 5-to-8-year sentence in a non-prison setting<\/a>, rather than a jail term of up to 20 years. The first public hearing took place three years ago in Bogot\u00e1, when Rodrigo Londo\u00f1o or \u201cTimochenko\u201d - the last FARC commander-in-chief - said that \u201cI feel disgust of our actions\u201d. He was followed by ten former commanders of the Central Joint Command in Ibagu\u00e9 <\/a>in May 2024 and seven commanders of the Western Bloc in Cali <\/a>last November. Four more FARC regional structures have yet to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\t With a mixture of emotion and dignity, the fifteen victims were able to put into words the deepest fears and traumas left by their kidnapping. Luis Honorio Pacheco, a soldier who was held captive for three years, said that not all the letters sent by his relatives were delivered to him and that, two decades later, he still dreams that the FARC are going to kill him. Police officer M\u00e1ximo Quiroz said that they slept tied up next to minefields, and used the expression \u201cconcentration camp\u201d to talk about the physical spaces of captivity that the ex-FARC call \u201ccare commissions\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indigenous leader Dar\u00edo Arias Domic\u00f3 told how rebels accused his father Solangel, governor of the Embera Kat\u00edo reservation of Alto Sin\u00fa, of being a paramilitary collaborator before torturing and murdering him. Ironically, the paramilitaries had also accused him in their case of collaborating with the guerrillas and a year earlier had murdered <\/a>his brother-in-law, Kimy Pern\u00eda. Nicol\u00e1s Humberto Duque said that his wife had to \u201cnegotiate me as one would do for a bag of potatoes, not for the father of our one and three-year-olds\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beatriz Carmona recounted the triple tragedy that struck her family in July 1996, when the FARC kidnapped Reinaldo, Daniel and Albeiro Correa, three brothers who worked in a civil construction company in Mutat\u00e1. The eldest was 22 years old and the youngest, her partner, had just turned 18. The three men, who were dating three cousins, were weeks away from seeing their children born almost at the same time. Daniel had sown the cloth nappies they would use. \u201cI want to ask you with all the strength of my grief to clarify the location of the place where their bodies were left,\u201d pleaded Beatriz, who has only learned this year that they had been murdered on the day of their abduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These pains were all so intense, often private and, so far, little acknowledged by their perpetrators. In the words of policeman M\u00e1ximo, \u201cin my family we never discuss my kidnapping: it\u2019s, as Diomedes D\u00edaz sang, a wound that I carry in my soul and does not heal\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the case has moved down from the FARC national leadership\u2019s 2021 indictment and 2022 public hearing to charges against its regional commanders, what it has lost in media visibility, it has gained in closeness to the experience of victims at the local level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cruz Vega asked to speak in order to acknowledge that he ordered the kidnapping of truck drivers like Luis Eduardo Fl\u00f3rez to force them to carry armed rebels and weapons in their lorries. \u201cI acknowledge today that we forced them to do forced labour against their will and that this should have not happened. This brought them stigmatisation, because people started saying that they were collaborators of the guerrilla. I own up to the fact that I ordered it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were Mea Culpas <\/em>about kidnappings whose direct victims were not present, such as the famous case of police corporal Jos\u00e9 Norberto P\u00e9rez. The FARC held him hostage despite public pleas <\/a>for clemency made by Andr\u00e9s Felipe, his 12-year-old son who suffered from terminal cancer. He died without any response to his pleas and, three months later, the FARC murdered his father. At the beginning of the hearing, several former rebel leaders justified themselves by saying that they had raised his case with their superiors but that \u201cIv\u00e1n M\u00e1rquez\u201d - the rebels\u2019 chief negotiator in Havana who ended up abandoning the peace deal and taking up arms again - ordered not to release him. With more self-criticism, Jes\u00fas Mario Arenas \u2013 also known as \u201cMarcos Urbano\u201d - acknowledged that \u201cwe did not make a great effort to insist that he could leave, we carry that on us\u201d. After a pause, he added: \u201cthose immovable beliefs in war are what lead to tragedies\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The setting of the first day of the hearing was highly symbolic. Not only was it the first hearing held in a small municipality ravaged by war and now known for its culture of non-violence<\/a>, but it was where the FARC kidnapped state governor Guillermo Gaviria and his peace advisor, former defence minister Gilberto Echeverri, in 2002. The two men had come to the small bridge at the entrance of town as part of a peaceful march demanding that guerrillas allow peasants to use the road connecting the town with the rest of the country to sell their speciality coffee. After a year in captivity, the FARC killed them both along with eight soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cForty years too late\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA wound that I carry in my soul and does not heal\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Beatriz](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colombia_Beatriz-C-armona-testimony-Correa_@JEP.jpg\")
Fragmentary truths that emerge<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe mark of sexual violence haunts us\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Nicol\u00e1s](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colombia_Nicolas-Duque-FARC-kidnapping-victim_@JEP.jpg\")
![\"Seven](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colombia_JEP-7-infographic-map_@Justice-Info-540x360.jpg\")
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