The return of Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary who did not want to be silenced

Days before Salvatore Mancuso landed in Colombia after 15 years in a United States prison, Colombia’s defense minister told the press that he had arrived at a critical moment. “Salvatore Mancuso’s life should be protected,” he warned. The life of any Colombian should be protected, the minister seemed to be making clear. But this life can be especially dangerous.

Salvatore Mancuso, who is currently in Bogotá’s La Picota prison, was a combatant and still harbors many secrets about the armed conflict. He moved from upper-class pastoralism to lead paramilitary forces and went with brothers Fidel and Carlos Castano, founders of what he called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). With them he made military, political and business alliances with the most powerful men in the country. And he was a cruel man: he ordered massacres, killings, disappearances, kidnappings and displacements. He is accused of more than 60,000 criminal acts, including those he directly committed and for which he is accountable through the line of command. Castanos died before paramilitary demobilization, without facing justice or confessing to his crimes. Mancuso, however, is still alive. And, since he demobilized in 2004, he has confessed: he has confessed to hundreds of crimes and accused politicians, businessmen and the military of helping him. He is a man who wants to be very quiet. He is a man that many others want to hear.

“I have come to continue my commitments to the victims, as I have done relentlessly over the past 18 years, but at the same time, I have come to put myself at the service of a peace agenda that prevents Colombia from becoming a perpetual factory. “Of victims and collective suffering,” Mancuso said in a letter published on the landing. “I have the task of continuing to deliver the truth to the transitional justice system, only with responsibility for its effects on those implicated in the testimony, their families and victim communities, and I will do so under strict standards that allow for contradiction. And deciding that it is a worthy truth,” he adds.

“Stop saying things you shouldn’t say to the left of the JEP,” Mancuso said in a threat received in 2021. The JEP is a transitional justice court agreed between the government and the defunct FARC that is currently investigating major crimes committed by it. Old guerrillas and public forces. In a controversial move, the court granted the former paramilitary chief access to its jurisdiction, based on the fact that he has a lot to contribute to clarifying crimes committed by the military. Mancuso has, as he said when announcing those threats, “an unwavering commitment to the truth.”

Paralyzing Colombia came paramilitarism in the 1990s through Convivir, initially legal pastoralist associations seeking to protect themselves from extortion and attacks by guerrillas. Many of these groups financed and strengthened far-right paramilitary groups that already existed in some areas, but this new support (and money from illegal businesses run by drug trafficking) led to their spread and strengthening. “Convivir was the way in which illegality was given legitimacy,” Mancuso told the JEP. Currently, breeders are trying to revive a figure similar to Convivir. Mancuso’s arrival is a harsh reminder of a violent past.

In Mancuso’s mouth, the truth is usually explosive: he has said that army commanders ordered paramilitaries to kill social leaders, that some soldiers came to kidnap him, and that public forces did not try to stop several massacres that he had previously known about. had been done. . He has also spoken with his own names: he directed Jose Miguel Narvaez, the deputy director of the state’s intelligence department, to list people to kill, as allies of the paramilitary forces; to the former Vice President of Colombia, Francisco Santos, for requesting the creation of a paramilitary group in the capital; and emblematic companies of the Colombian economy such as Postbon, Ecopetrol and Bavaria to support the paramilitary forces. Most of those accused have maintained their innocence, although others, such as Narvaez, have been convicted in court.

But with whom he has been most explosive is Álvaro Uribe, president of Colombia between 2002 and 2010, and who in 2008 decided to extradite Mancuso to the United States. For critics of the then popular right-wing president, the decision was an attempt. silence the former commander; For Uribe and his supporters, a necessary sanction for a dozen paramilitary leaders who continue to commit crimes from prison. Mancuso has said that Pedro Juan Moreno, Uribe’s closest adviser as governor of Antioquia in the 1990s, helped create and strengthen paramilitary forces and was an intermediary for the president to order a massacre (in the city of El Arro) and an assassination (a human rights defender). Jesus Maria Valleni). He has also said that Uribe removed the security plan from the mayor of the municipality of El Robal, Yudaldo Díaz, knowing that the paramilitaries were going to kill him.

The former paramilitary leader has admitted that the AUC sympathizes with Uribe’s ideological approaches, and has confirmed that they supported the former president’s election in 2002. “I had direct orders from my commanders to support President Uribe, the presidential candidate at the time,” he said of that election. The former president has categorically denied all allegations in the media, social networks and in court.

In 2004, when Mancuso was demobilized, he was able to visit Congress. He gave a speech in which he stated that the paramilitary forces had created an “epic of freedom,” “legendary and heroic”. Twenty years later he no longer describes what he did so lavishly, and has apologized to some of his victims. In 2020, the Colombian Truth Commission published Mancuso’s public apology to the family of indigenous leader Kimi Pernea Domico, who was murdered in 2001 and whose body disappeared in the Sinu River. “We must never take action in war,” he told Pernia’s daughter. “I was wrong, I apologize for that, for my actions in the conflict,” he added.

In one of his many statements, Mancuso said that what he learned to do in the paramilitary groups was a “theatre of terror,” in which not only some had to be killed, but everyone left to live in fear. The man responsible for the terror has expressed a desire to continue talking about how he put the theater together. And above all, say who all the actors were.

Subscribe here EL PAÍS newsletter about Colombia and Here on the channel on WhatsAppAnd get all information keys on current events in the country.