RIGHTS: Colombian State, UP Survivors Seek ‘Friendly Settlement’

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Feb 11 2004 (IPS) - ”What will be waiting for us when we go out this door? We have said a lot, and who can guarantee that there will be no reprisals?” asked a journalist who belongs to the leftist Patriotic Union (UP) political movement upon leaving a public hearing in Colombia.

”What will be waiting for us when we go out this door? We have said a lot, and who can guarantee that there will be no reprisals?” asked a journalist who belongs to the leftist Patriotic Union (UP) political movement upon leaving a public hearing in Colombia.

The reporter, who survived an attempt on his life and now lives in exile in Sweden, was one of the survivors of the systematic attempt to exterminate the UP who participated in this week’s public hearing forming part of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)’s attempt to bring about a ”friendly settlement” in the UP case.

A collective lawsuit filed by the UP against the Colombian state has been moving forward in the Organisation of American States (OAS) human rights system, which includes the Washington-based IACHR, since 1997.

The complaint filed by Reiniciar (‘Restart’), a non-governmental organisation that represents victims’ families and survivors of the attempt to annihilate the UP is aimed at holding the Colombian state accountable for the wave of murders.

But the right-wing government of President Alvaro Uribe insists on impunity for those who are blamed for 80 percent of the cases.

It was to serve as the tool for the members of the FARC to lay down arms after 20 years of waging war against the state, and to be reinserted into civilian life and legal political activity.

The coalition, which included the rebels and the Communist Party, created alliances with regional movements of a range of ideological leanings.

The new coalition was successful in its first elections, in 1986, placing 14 representatives in Congress, including two FARC commanders. The UP also won 18 seats on 11 regional legislatures, and 335 seats on 187 city and town councils.

But the peace experiment was cut short by a campaign to eliminate the UP, through mass killings, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances, which led the FARC to break the truce in late 1987. The guerrillas refused to demobilise and withdrew from the UP.

The leader of the UP, former judge Jaime Pardo Leal, was murdered in October 1987, and his successor as the party’s presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, met the same fate in March 1990.

By 1993 Reiniciar had documented 1,163 extrajudicial executions, 1,234 disappearances, 43 failed murder attempts, and 225 people receiving death threats.

Altogether, some 3,000 members of the UP have been killed.

A working group made up of representatives of the Colombian state on one hand and the Colombian Commission of Jurists and Reiniciar on the other began to function during the public hearings held Monday and Tuesday in Bogota.

The hearing was convened by Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos, and was attended by survivors of assassination attempts and torture, and by the widows and widowers, mothers, fathers and children of victims, from Bogota and the central department of Cundinamarca.

In the two-day hearing, the survivors and victims’ families gave testimony on the attacks and human rights abuses that they or their loved ones had suffered.

Many also emphasised that the attacks on the UP continue, and that members of the movement are still being killed.

Furthermore, as recently as 2002, the UP lost its right to participate in elections when the National Electoral Council announced the official annulment of the movement, saying it did not meet the legal requirements of obtaining 50,000 votes and representation in Congress in the previous elections.

On Monday, repeated complaints by those who testified, referring to the continued attempts to eliminate the UP, gave rise to a sensation that the bereaved relatives might pull out of the effort aimed at reaching a friendly settlement.

The risk of a rupture was again felt towards the end of Tuesday’s meeting, when it became clear that in the working group there was a huge gap between the expectations of the plaintiffs and the intentions of the state.

”This is a process that is getting underway amidst profound mistrust,” said Vice-President Santos. ”Only if results are seen will the mistrust diminish, and will the Colombian state and UP victims be able to reach a friendly solution and set an example for the world and for future processes.”

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Colombia was invited by both sides to accompany the working group in its efforts.

The aim is ”to get the state to assume responsibility and take the necessary measures to ensure that further tragedies are not triggered by what is awakened” in these hearings, said Michael Frühling, head of the UNHCHR office in Colombia.

”We must not forget that last year, more than 30 UP members were assassinated,” he underlined.

If the attempt to reach a friendly settlement is successful, seven more meetings will be held over the next year, followed by workshops aimed at clarifying the assassinations, administering justice and agreeing on reparations.

But if the attempt fails, the case will continue on its way in the IACHR, and could eventually be referred to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights based in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Santos expressed his determination to reach a friendly settlement before Uribe’s term ends in 2006. ”A friendly solution with the victims would do honour to the Colombian state,” he said.

But the case involves so many murders that the documentation is incomplete. Workshops have been held to compile information on the individual cases, and to rebuild the collective memory. ”Only the electoral map (of the murders) shows us where the victims were from,” said the head of Reiniciar, Jahel Quiroga.

Quiroga explained to IPS that in most of the cases, the only information that the group has been able to compile is the name of the victim, the place and date of the murder, and, in some cases, the name of the alleged killer.

Last year, Reiniciar held 25 workshops with survivors and victims’ families in 10 different regions in this South American country of 42 million to explain their rights within the legal process. ”It is they themselves who must identify the survivors, the families, and bring them together,” said Quiroga.

In a meeting with journalists, Frühling noted that ”international experience shows that large gaps created by amnesia breed and fuel impunity.”

A 1992 report by Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office found that 99 percent of the murders of UP victims had gone unsolved. One of the recurrent complaints heard from those attending this week’s hearing was that nothing had changed with respect to the impunity and failure to bring the perpetrators to justice.

”As always occurs when there is a crime of gigantic proportions, not even those who are directly affected have a grip on the real dimension of the tragedy,” said Iván Cepeda, an activist with the Foundation that carries the name of his father Manuel Cepeda, a journalist and UP senator who was killed in 1994.

Cepeda told IPS that ”the most important thing about these hearings is that they will help survivors understand that their coming together is the source of the strength necessary to get the UP case clarified.”

”This is a process in which it is possible for Colombian society to begin to understand the magnitude of the UP tragedy,” he said.

The leader of the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), Carlos Castaño, has publicly admitted on five different occasions that he was responsible for Manuel Cepeda’s murder, in which members of the military were also implicated.

According to Quiroga, 80 percent of the attacks on UP members were committed by the paramilitaries, who are now in the middle of negotiations with the Uribe administration in which they have agreed to demobilise in exchange for what basically amounts to an amnesty.

The UP case in the IACHR and the negotiations between the government and AUC have moved forward at a very different pace.

The UP case was initially filed under the government of Ernesto Samper (1994-1998), while the negotiations with the AUC, which were launched by Uribe in late 2002, could come to a conclusion this year with an amnesty that according to Frühling directly contradicts the values of truth, justice and reparations.

”We are talking about the fact that those who were responsible for these crimes against the UP, and continue committing them today, will be protected – which runs counter to a process aimed at reconciliation,” said the U.N. official.

Nevertheless, Frühling sees a ”positive link” between the two processes. In the search for a friendly settlement, ”antecedents will emerge that will be extremely important for other negotiation processes, whether with paramilitary or guerrilla groups, because we will all tell the state that it must be consistent.”

The U.N. official concurred with Santos that the search for a friendly solution is ”a positive example for other processes already underway or that should arise in the future.”

At the start of the hearing, a member of the Communist Party denounced the Feb. 6 murder of Lucero Henao, 44, a rural Communist leader in the central Colombian department of Meta, and her 16-year-old son David. The killings were blamed on AUC.

Henao, a head of household, left behind eight children ranging in age from four to 22. She and David were dragged out of their home and killed in the presence of the rest of the children, said a participant in the hearing with a voice choked with emotion, who pointed out indignantly that the murders were not even reported by the local press.