Sexual abuse and rape. Permanent ill-treatment. Psychological torture through false executions. Rescue collection for corpses. Indiscriminate plagiarism, even of pregnant women and children. Forced labor. Murders and disappearances.
These crimes against humanity against victims of the FARC were documented by the JEP in the extensive dossier of Case 001, which put for the first time eight former members of the leadership to answer to transitional justice for the thousands of kidnappings perpetrated by this guerrilla for more than two decades.
With a historical document that collects testimonies of victims and demobilized, investigations by the Prosecutor’s Office and Justice and Peace and NGO reports, the JEP marks the beginning of the trials against the top officials of this armed organization who submitted to the their jurisdiction and complied with him in peace.
(Besides: A trip to hell: when the FARC committed political suicide)
Magistrates reconstructed how indiscriminate kidnapping was an orderly strategy from the highest levels of the FARC as “part of a policy that turned human beings into things the value did not lie in human dignity, but in the value of the exchange for the money they had and could bring back to the organization.”
While ex-commanders have claimed in their defense that the statutes of this guerrilla group prohibited indiscriminate “detention” (sic) and ill-treatment of captives, dozens of cases referenced by the JEP in its 322-page report prove otherwise. . Thus, the magistrates say, “the central organization (the Secretariat and the Joint Staff) focused on controlling expenditure, requesting detailed budgets and reports of expenditures and punishing those who mishandled money and they stole from it, not by disciplining those who mistreated captives or made “mistakes” in the selection of victims. ”
JEP calculations of the number of people abducted by the FARC reach 21,396 since the 1980s (The highest so far made by a Colombian authority). Of these, 1,860 are reported as victims of enforced disappearance and another 627, as murdered.
(In context: Kidnapping: one by one, the crimes that are imputed to 8 exits of Farc)
What the Special Justice for Peace says is that the order on all fronts was, no matter how, to get resources for the secretariat. “The Chamber determined, based on contrasting sources, that the front commander made the decisions relating to the selection of the victim and the decisions of the treatment of the plagiarized persons, as well as the decisions on the selection of the people they guarded, the negotiation of the releases and the outcome of the captivity “.
And he adds: “The operation of the FARC gave these commanders great discretion in these matters, as the interest of the organization at the central level was in the money and not the way it was achieved.”
According to the document, several fronts used to ‘negotiate’ kidnapped people for common offenders, and the ‘rate’ was between 10 and 15 per cent of the ransom obtained.
Raúl Medina Agudelo, a former head of the front, pointed out: “The secretariat never said to kidnap 10 people, but it told me: the goal must be met.”
Refusing to pay the ransom led to a single outcome: death, which in any case was “consulted in higher instances.” But information about the final disposition of the body and subsequent contacts with families remained in the hands of local chiefs. This gave rise to new crimes.
“Another particularly serious modality identified by the Chamber for this Block (the Oriental) is the collection for the corpse – says the document – (…) Some of the victims of deprivations of liberty carried out by the Front 22 go to narrate facts related to the collection of the payment to recover the corpse of its kidnapped and dead relative in captivity “. This happened with the family of Rafael Moreno, who was asked to pay 199.51 billion pesos for the body.
(You may be interested in: Bertulfo Alvarez died, ex- member of the secretariat of the CRAF)
The dossier includes allegations of ill-treatment and abuse committed by guerrillas: “Of the 1,480 incidents reported by accredited victims, 38 include sexual violence explicitly, with and without carnal access.”
Even former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt denounced to the JEP that “she was the victim of touching and obscene gestures that were not punished, but celebrated by the commanders.” She was also the victim “of blows to the head, with the butts of rifles and fists in different parts of her body.” Other hostages reported that, in order to land, the guerrillas faked false shootings.
The members of the secretariat and the General Staff are appointed by the JEP as the ones most responsible for the crimes committed by the men under its command.
Was it kidnapping or hostage-taking?
There has been controversy following the decision of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to change the name of case 01, which went from being called ‘Illegal detention of people by the FARC’ to ‘Hostage-taking and other serious deprivations of liberty’.
The decision, as explained by the judiciary of this jurisdiction, was given to set the legal term that receives the crime of kidnapping in the light of international criminal law. However, some voices expressed their rejection.
“The JEP cannot minimize the seriousness of what was the kidnapping by the FARC now calling it ‘hostage-taking and deprivation of liberty’, this is unheard of, when what there was was serious violations of dignity human “, wrote on her Twitter the senator of the Maria de la Rosario Guerra Democratic Center.
For her part, Senator Paloma Valencia said: “While it is included as a crime against humanity, I don’t like the name. They were extortion kidnappings, with which the FARC made more than $ 5 trillion in family resources “.
EL TEMPS consulted with lawyers who are experts in the subject, who agreed that, in exchange for the criticism, the name ‘hostage-taking’ raises the gravity of these facts. For Juana Acosta, professor of International Law at the University of the Savannah, the facts that are analyzed refer to serious deprivations of liberty, which in national law have traditionally been described as kidnappings. However, he explains, when these behaviors include certain elements of context such as being systematic and / or widespread, or are related to armed conflict, “they can and should be classified, not as national crimes, but as international crimes, of war and against humanity “.
According to the lawyer, given the seriousness of these crimes, if they are not investigated by the states themselves, they could be investigated by the International Criminal Court and could activate the exercise of universal jurisdiction by states other than Colombia.
In the same vein, Juan Felipe García, director of the department of Philosophy and History of the Law of the Javeriana, said that calling the case 01 hostage-taking, rather than kidnapping, “is not a reduction, but which broadens the spectrum of behaviors “.
Against the denomination of this crime in the system of Justice and Peace, by which the paramilitaries were demobilized, Garci’a assured that this jurisdiction “had the limiting one to limit its imputations to the language of the Colombian legal ordering”, for that reason the term of kidnapping stayed there. “One of the lessons learned is that it was necessary to give competition to the JEP so that its legal framework could be expanded. And it was extended to the language of International Criminal Law,” Garcia said.
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