Twenty years earlier, almost to the day, her partner Terence Freitas was kidnapped on a rural road in Cubar\u00e1, an isolated village in Colombia\u2019s north-east near Venezuela. A 24-year-old biologist and environmental specialist, he\u2019d been accompanying the U\u2019wa indigenous people\u2019s struggle against plans by US oil giant Oxy to drill in their ancestral territory for two years. FARC rebels stopped the truck driving him and two colleagues, Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa, a leader of the Menominee people of Wisconsin and the indigenous rights Four Directions Fund, and Lahe\u2019ena\u2019e Gay, a Native Hawaiian and founder of the NGO Pacific Cultural Conservancy International, to the airport in Saravena where they would begin their return journey to the United States. A week later, the bodies of the three were found on the other side of the Venezuelan border. The case, known as \u2018the case of the American indigenistas\u2019, caused a national commotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe email sat unread in my inbox. It was from Colombia. I knew what it said, but also knew that I couldn\u2019t open it without more support.\u201d These are the opening words of Truth Demands<\/a>, the poignant new book in which Abby \u2013 an environmental lawyer of Filipino origin and an expert in community resilience projects<\/a> at the University of California, Irvine \u2013 that tells the story of Terry, the idealistic young man she\u2019d dated for months and with whom she had just moved into a shared flat in New York that he never got to. She also recounts her 25-year-long quest for the truth, which led her and Julie Freitas, Terry\u2019s mother, to become the only foreigners and non-residents of Colombia to be accredited as victims before the JEP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her story shows how the participation of victims in Colombia\u2019s transitional justice, even in cases where the truth that emerges in the investigations is partial and within a system whose logic is to uncover patterns of macro-criminality rather than to address case by case, has had intangible effects such as helping them continue processing their losses and intimate pains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At first, Abby felt confronted by the invitation. \u201cThe timing was uncomfortable\u201d, she wrote. \u201cI sat on the couch in the tiny rental [in Oakland, where she\u2019d arrived to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Terry\u2019s death] thinking, who are they kidding? The FARC murdered our friends and destroyed our families. The Colombian government waited twenty years, and now <\/em>they\u2019re asking for our questions?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a while she read the letter again. One paragraph particularly caught her attention. \u201cYou can send us the questions you have about your case \u2013 truth demands \u2013 so we can ask the ex-combatants about this in the context of the voluntary versions\u201d, Ana Mar\u00eda Mondrag\u00f3n had written to her. Perhaps it also helped that Abby sought advice from Astrid Puentes, now UN special rapporteur for the environment, who coincidentally had been Mondrag\u00f3n\u2019s boss at the environmental law NGO AIDA, where both had worked on the U\u2019wa case before the Inter-American human rights system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the letter, Mondrag\u00f3n explained that there were two ways in which Abby could participate: she could send a report recounting her experience \u201cin her own words\u201d, as well as any material that could be useful to them in the investigation; and she could ask to be recognised as a victim of the FARC in the so-called \u2018case 01\u2019. She also explained the peculiarities of the Colombian model: if those considered most responsible for the criminal policy of kidnapping acknowledged their responsibility and provide the truth, they would receive a more lenient 5-to-8-year sentence in a non-prison setting. If they failed to do so, their case would move to an adversarial track in which, if found guilty, they\u2019d go to prison for up to 20 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A week later Abby wrote back. \u201cI want to participate in both ways you describe\u201d, she wrote, adding that Terry\u2019s mother also agreed and asked to be represented by her before the JEP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were practicalities that soon became a challenge. To be credited as a victim, proof of a family relationship was required. Julie could provide her son\u2019s birth certificate but in her case, Abby explained to the assistant magistrate, \u201cwe were 24 years old and were not married, what proof may I offer?\" she asked. \u201cWe just have love letters.\u201d Mondrag\u00f3n reassured her: the letters would suffice. They would prove what Colombian law calls \"a direct and legitimate interest to be recognised as a victim\". On Julie\u2019s side, she\u2019d have to open the boxes of Terry\u2019s memories she kept untouched. On her side, she\u2019d have to revisit a little wool bag in which she had deposited the love letters she hadn\u2019t touched in two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The JEP officials may not have realised what they were already stirring in Abby. Or perhaps they did, but they attributed it to the flood of mixed emotions of many victims after being sought by the nascent transitional justice system. Mondrag\u00f3n herself, in charge of designing the participation method for kidnapping victims and of searching for dozens of them who left for Costa Rica or Florida, was not aware of the date she chose to write to her. Asked six years later, she remains silent for almost a minute, visibly shocked. \u201cI had no idea. What a beautiful coincidence, what synchrony.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months later, Julieta Lemaitre, the justice presiding the case, told Abby that two former guerrillas who participated in the events had been identified. She asked her what she wanted them to answer, but also \u201cwhat would justice mean for you in this case\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t a simple question. Julie replied that nothing could bring them back, so for her justice would be \u201cthe U\u2019wa getting to live in peace, without interference from oil companies, men with guns and the state, [and] being able to recover their lands and waters, and assert their traditional ways of life throughout their territory\u201d. Abby agreed with that vision. In her words, \u201cjustice for us has never been about the petty agents of the extractive economy\u201d, but about \u201cmaking visible the lines between harm on the ground and the command centres, statehouses and boardrooms that issue the often tacit orders to act\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the JEP\u2019s request, they also relayed ideas for possible sanctions, including former rebels being assigned to mothers who were deprived by the FARC of their children, to be useful to them in their old age. It was a satisfying exchange for Abby, after years without seeing progress in the ordinary criminal justice, albeit one she describes as \u201cmoving through molasses\u201d and in which each message plunged her into \u201ca fresh wave of sobbing, stomach and lower back clenched\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\t In April 2019, Abby and Julie \u2013 now accredited as \u2018special interveners\u2019 \u2013 sent their \u2018truth demands\u2019 to the JEP. This was the concept that psychologist Lina Rond\u00f3n coined to identify kidnapping victims\u2019 specific needs to know and the anguish that the crime left them with, as distinct from their demands for acknowledgment from FARC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Terry\u2019s mother and partner sent a list of 36 questions that Abby describes in her book as \u201cone part corporeal, three parts political\u201d. Many of them inquired about the conditions of their captivity and their last moments \u2013 common questions among kidnapping victims which the six indictments issued by Lemaitre\u2019s team since early 2021 extensively document<\/a>. Did they sleep and were they fed, did they wear shoes on the walks forced upon them, were they always tied up, were they physically harmed before they were killed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n They also wanted to understand the motivations behind the abductions, including how they learned of the presence of the three US citizens in the area, whether anyone pointed them out to them, and whether they considered demanding a ransom in exchange for their release. More than half of their questions sought to understand if the triple kidnapping and murder was related to the work they were doing with the U\u2019wa and whether any companies were involved. Who decided to kill them? Did they receive any payment for these crimes? Did they talk to any US company or citizen about them? Did rebels ever provide protection services for Oxy\u2019s machinery? Why did FARC continue to persecute U\u2019wa leader Berito Cobar\u00eda, winner of the Goldman<\/a> Prize or \u2018environmental Nobel\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n They closed with the most personal questions, perhaps the toughest ones. Julie wanted them to explain why he was shot 10 times. Why 10 bullets? Abby had two concerns: did Terry pronounce her name? Did they, the FARC, know her name?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In mid-2021, Abby sat at her computer in a cabin she\u2019d rented for the summer in Vermont. Accompanied online by several JEP officials and her lawyers, she watched the video testimony of one of the few FARC survivors who participated in Terry\u2019s kidnapping and murder. His name was Reinel Guzm\u00e1n, his nom-de-guerre \u2018Rafael Guti\u00e9rrez\u2019 and his role, local commander of a unit in the guerrilla\u2019s Eastern Bloc. He was the one who\u2019d issued the fateful order. \u201cKill them\u201d, he\u2019d instructed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this \u2018transfer\u2019, as the JEP calls providing victims with access to the extended accounts of perpetrators and the only one done so far in a language other than Spanish, fragments of the truth that Abby longed for emerged. Not regarding why it had happened, her primary interest, but about how. It was, in her words, \u201ca timeline of events between the kidnappings and the executions that I had never heard before\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s account, his men kidnapped the three US citizens and took them to Venezuela on the orders of Germ\u00e1n Brice\u00f1o Su\u00e1rez, aka \u2018Grannobles\u2019. It was an atypical situation because he was not that unit\u2019s commander, but he was brother to the feared \u2018Mono Jojoy\u2019, top commander of the Eastern Bloc and a historic member of the FARC Secretariat until his death in 2010. Guzm\u00e1n said that on 28 February 1999 he asked \u2018Mono Jojoy\u2019 for instructions by radio, but that it was his brother \u2018Grannobles\u2019 who replied in the afternoon with the order to kill. Despite his boss\u2019s silence, Guzm\u00e1n said that he relayed the order to his men. The next morning, two hours after they reported having carried it out, \u2018Jojoy\u2019 finally appeared. He asked them to wait and mentioned a \u201cdiplomatic situation\u201d. \u201cTake care of them\u201d, was his evidently belated instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The revelation came as a shock to Abby. \u201cIf this one man could have slept on it, could have exercised forbearance over one night, our lives could have been so different\u201d, she wrote in her book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Abby spotted, however, contradictions in Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s account. The former FARC leadership has maintained before the JEP that \u2018Grannobles\u2019 acted alone and without authorisation from his superiors, including someone as important in the organisation as his brother, because of suspicions that they were CIA agents. At the same time, Guzm\u00e1n pointed out that \u2018Grannobles\u2019 referred to them as \"indigenistas\" from the first day of the kidnapping, which for Abby undermines the theory that they were intelligence agents. Who benefits from these inconsistencies, asks Abby in her book. Possibly Oxy, she wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Could the JEP clarify whether the oil company had any connection to the crimes that took place 25 years ago? There was a problem: the 2016 peace deal with the FARC provides for the special tribunal to investigate, judge and sanction people who had \u201cactive and determining participation\u201d in collaborating with or financing those who committed atrocities. However, Colombia\u2019s Constitutional Court limited the JEP\u2019s mandate on \u2018civilian third parties\u2019<\/a> and determined that it cannot summon them, but that they could come voluntarily, under the same conditions and incentives as other actors. That decision limited the Colombian transitional justice system\u2019s scope of action over civilians, giving rise to what legal NGO Dejusticia and academic Sabine Michalowski called<\/a> its \u201crestricted competence\u201d. This is why only a handful of civilians have reached the JEP, most of them already convicted in the ordinary justice system. The court has no jurisdiction over companies, something that for Abby means \u201ca gaping hole in the possibility of truth\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end, Abby feels that \u201cthe JEP process surfaced minor clarifications at best about the material circumstances of the kidnappings\u201d, but that most of her questions remain unanswered. \u201cMy access to truth about what happened remains fractured. I still hold only fragments\u201d, she says. Still, she values the \u201cattentive anticipation\u201d of the \u201cimpactful human rights lawyers\u201d at the tribunal and felt it was worth participating in the transitional process. \u201cFor the first time, I felt like I was in charge of the terms of engagement\u201d, she reflects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That perception may still change. The JEP included the kidnapping and murder of the three US indigenous rights activists as a serious and representative case in its indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity<\/a> against the former FARC leadership over their kidnapping policy, which is still pending sentencing<\/a>. According to the special tribunal, it illustrates \u201cthe particular vulnerability of foreign nationals<\/a> who were considered suspect by the organisation\u201d. It\u2019s likely to appear in greater detail in the accusation against former Eastern Bloc members deemed as being most responsible of such crimes, one of the two remaining indictments in this macro-case (although \u2018Grannobles\u2019, now believed to be in a dissident group<\/a> that broke away from the peace agreement, cannot be charged).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Abby\u2019s journey in search of truth and justice, stalled for years, accelerated on another front. On 20 December 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the Colombian state<\/a> for violating the rights of the U\u2019wa indigenous people by allowing oil exploration in their territory without their consent. With that milestone, after another three-decade legal struggle, Abby\u2019s book ends. \u201cWe won\u201d, she wrote.<\/p>\n\n\nUncomfortable timing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Abby](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/Abby-Reyes.jpg\" "\\"Abby")
\u201cWe just have love letters\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The face of justice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
36 truth demands<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A former rebel leader\u2019s tale<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Former](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colombia_FARC-testimonies_@JEP.jpg\" "\\"Former")
No accountability for companies<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How they won<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Will](\"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/Colombia_Drummond-coal-mine_@Drummond-540x360.jpg\")
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