{"id":79049,"date":"2021-06-24T11:18:03","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T09:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/?p=79049"},"modified":"2021-06-24T11:19:45","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T09:19:45","slug":"colombia-day-president-santos-asked-forgiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/79049-colombia-day-president-santos-asked-forgiveness.html","title":{"rendered":"Colombia: the day when president Santos asked for forgiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Friday June 11th, former President and Nobel Peace prize laureate Juan Manuel Santos appeared before Colombia\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ask for forgiveness for the extrajudicial executions that happened during his watch as Defence Minister between 2006 and 2009. A momentous occasion, that left many questions.<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am left with the remorse and deep regret that during my period as minister many, many mothers (\u2026) lost their children. This should have never happened,\u201d Juan Manuel Santos gravely stated. This was the end of an almost two-hour speech<\/a> in which Colombia\u2019s president between 2010 and 2018 detailed how he became aware that civilians were being murdered by military officials and unlawfully passed off as rebels killed in combat, and how he took steps to put an end to these atrocities. \u201cI acknowledge this and I ask forgiveness from the depths of my soul to all the mothers and the families who were victims of this horror. May this never, ever happen again,\u201d were the final words of Santos\u2019s remarks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he left the lectern and sat down, a visibly shaken Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chairman struggled to translate his emotions into words. \u201cIt is very rare for a president of the Republic to ask for forgiveness, to personally acknowledge responsibility, to feel moral responsibility and the pain of victims\u201d, Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A President before the TRC<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Santos, who was Defence Minister before his 2010 election, voluntarily went to the TRC to address his role during a tragedy that has appalled Colombians for over a decade and that became euphemistically known as \u2018false positives<\/a>\u2019. Behind that misnomer lays a macabre practice: at least 6.402 civilians were murdered by state agents between 2002 and 2008, according to recent preliminary findings by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the judicial arm of Colombia\u2019s transitional justice, which have sparked outrage in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though it was Santos who signed the landmark 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and has been a staunch defender of the transitional justice system stemming from it, it is still much rarer for former presidents and other civilian political leaders to admit their responsibility than for soldiers and former combatants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have come to tell you my truth\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Santos\u2019s speech, poignant at times and self-centred at others, illustrates his own complexities. As he said at the outset, \u201cI have come to tell you my truth.\u201d He also settled some political scores in the process, underscoring how different his views on the armed conflict were with then president \u00c1lvaro Uribe, his erstwhile boss and political godfather turned into his nemesis. He characterised Juan Carlos Pinz\u00f3n, his now estranged former private secretary and a vice-minister at the time, as having been in favour of denying all wrongdoing within the Colombian Army. While that may be true, it doesn\u2019t explain why Santos would later name him chief of staff, ambassador in Washington and, of all things, Defence Minister for four years \u2013 right during the peace negotiations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spotlight on corrective steps<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The brunt of Santos\u2019s appearance before the TRC was devoted to explaining, in painstaking detail, the corrective measures taken by him, his vice-minister Sergio Jaramillo and his team of advisors. In his words, \u201can account of how we investigated, denounced and put an end to false positives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A key aspect of the Colombian TRC\u2019s mandate<\/a> is to identify moral actions and positive transformations carried out by victims, communities and institutions during the conflict. This task was included in the peace deal in a bid to ensure that the commission would not only investigate wrenching episodes, but also document inspiring and empowering stories. Unfortunately, the TRC has so far made little headway on this, according to a recent congressional report<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over two hours, Santos described the different changes<\/a> that took place after he entered Uribe\u2019s government. First, inspectors were named in every single of the Army\u2019s divisions to facilitate internal investigations and the Defence Ministry\u2019s human rights office was elevated in rank. The first human rights and international humanitarian law policy for the military was drafted, bringing in operational legal advisors to counsel commanders during the planning of military operations. The Ministry also drafted Colombia\u2019s first ever operational law handbook detailing rules of engagement and overhauled incentives, scrapping body counts and favouring demobilisations and arrests over kills. The length of training and rest periods was reformed after being deemed insufficient. And dozens of military officers were ousted, including three generals and four colonels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Graph<\/a>
A peak of \"false positives\" was reached in 2007. Three of the JEP\u2019s primary database sources \u2013 the Attorney General\u2019s Office (yellow), the National Centre for Historic Memory (grey) and the coalition of human rights organisations (orange)
\u2013 reflect similar extrajudicial executions patterns over time. \u00a9 JEP \/ JusticeInfo.net<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Many of these changes were instituted with help from outside, most notably from the UN Human Rights Office and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), whose officials were allowed to tour military units to contrast information. This array of corrective measures - which in hindsight might have legally saved both Uribe and Santos \u2013 may explain why, as Colombia\u2019s special peace tribunal highlighted<\/a> in its prioritisation plan, there was a significant 92% drop in cases between 2007 and 2009. \u201cI genuinely believe that the fundamental goal of ending false positives was achieved,\u201d Santos said, at one point displaying the JEP\u2019s graph<\/a>, while admitting that \u201cdespite having done everything humanely and legally possible, we weren\u2019t able to end them at once.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsung heroes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A particularly poignant part of Santos\u2019s account focused on highlighting the roles played by persons who, far from public scrutiny, made great and often overlooked efforts to bring these crimes to justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of them was General Carlos Arturo Su\u00e1rez, who was tapped to lead a fact-finding mission that investigated several emblematic cases and whose findings \u2013 known as the \u201cSu\u00e1rez Report\u201d - laid the ground for reforms. One episode he detailed was the murder of a dozen youngsters<\/a> from the city of Soacha, who were duped with fake job offers by state agents and murdered 635 kilometres away from their homes, some of them deliberately targeted because they had mental health illnesses or problematic drug use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another anonymous hero was Luz Marina Gil, who in September 2006 became the first civilian \u2013 and woman - to lead the military justice system. The daughter<\/a> of a general, this former Defence Ministry attorney transfered hundreds of investigations into human rights violations to the ordinary justice, following a Constitutional Court ruling that had been rarely observed before.She was the first to enforce an order bringing in civilian judicial police investigators to process combat zones as crime scenes, before anyone else came along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, there is Carlos Franco, a former Popular Liberation Army (EPL) rebel who signed a peace deal in 1991 and who headed the human rights office in the Vice-Presidency. He managed to establish that nine of the Soacha youngsters reported as missing were presented as combat kills days later in northeast Colombia. His inquiries paved the way for the uncovering of one of the most disturbing patterns of the scandal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Santos left out<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Given Santos\u2019s focus on numbering scores of directives and decisions, many Colombians saw his appearance as somewhat staged and detached. For several observers, his reconstruction of corrective measures is very valuable, but fails to address the policies that rendered them necessary in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still finding missing pieces in this puzzle\u201d, says Mar\u00eda Emma Wills, a former National Centre for Historic Memory researcher. \u201cAny public policy has three key moments: when it is conceived, when it becomes ingrained within an institution and when it\u2019s monitored. Beyond the documents, who took part in discussions about such a discredited policy like body counts and how did they unfold? What were the arguments? Did anyone follow-up on its results?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Santos did mention some likely causes, including perverse incentives such as body counts and prizes, a sustained pressure to increase combat kills (which he dubbed \u201cthe original sin\u201d) and president Uribe\u2019s belief that the FARC had to be obliterated, instead of driven to a negotiation table. But \u201che only addressed the causes superficially. It\u2019s a fact that there was an exponential increase in these executions, which means something had to trigger it. Yet that something is still not clear,\u201d says Silvia Serrano, an international human rights law expert who teaches at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Santos\u2019s description of false positives as something \u201cinconceivable\u201d, is problematic in Serrano\u2019s view. In particular, she cites a 2018 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling against Colombia<\/a>, which determined that in five extrajudicial executions dating back to the 1990s, public institutions had warned about evidence of feigned combats. \u201cSaying that it\u2019s so hard to imagine this could happen that it wasn\u2019t believable, is not plausible when you\u2019re an experienced public servant,\u201d says Serrano, who worked for 14 years as an attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. \u201cThe contextual information was there: when Santos realised, upon arriving, that these incentives and pressure to increase combat kills existed, he should have known that they could lead to these consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWho gave the order?\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Santos\u2019s speech underscored how difficult it will be to meet many victims\u2019 expectations. A few have reacted negatively to his words. Luz Marina Bernal, one of the mothers of Soacha whose 26-year-old son Fair Leonardo Porras<\/a> was murdered in January 2008, described<\/a> it as \u201ca cold, calculating and imposed request for forgiveness\u201d only meant to \u201ccleanse his image\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d like him to explain how it can be that a widespread criminal practice that has been going on since the 1980s, denounced in Colombia and abroad, backed by court rulings, could in 2006 only be - in his words - \u2018rumours\u2019 supported by \u2018weak evidence\u2019,\u201d she said. Her organisation, the Mothers of False Positives, has been using the rallying cry \u2018Who gave the order?\u2019 and painting murals throughout the country, elevating the pressure to identify those most responsible for their sons\u2019 murders. In her view, Santos and Uribe should both be tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sorpresa matarife. \u00a1Aqu\u00ed estamos!
En la calle 80 con cra 30 estamos record\u00e1ndole al mundo que sabemos quien dio la orden. Te podr\u00e1s librar de la justicia de los hombres pero no de la justicia divina. \u00a1Mafapo no se rinde carajo! pic.twitter.com\/ct0FI1GkkA<\/a><\/p>— Madres Falsos Positivos de Colombia (@MAFAPOCOLOMBIA) March 5, 2021<\/a><\/blockquote>