A military checkpoint on Colombia's Atrato River. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

The United States needs to phase down its drug war and tighten the reins on its cooperation with local militaries and police in Latin America, according to a new report released here Wednesday by three influential think tanks.

Of particular interest is the increase in training deployments to Latin American and the Caribbean by the Special Operations Forces (SOF) – elite units like the Army’s Green Berets and Navy SEALS – due in part to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and drawdown from Afghanistan.

Over the past decade, SOF ranks have more than doubled to about 65,000, and their commander, Adm. William McRaven, has been particularly aggressive in seeking new missions for his troops in new theatres, including Latin America and the Caribbean where they are training thousands of local counterparts.

“You can train a lot of people for the cost of one helicopter,” Adam Isacson, an analyst with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told IPS.

He noted that the increased investment in SOF was part of a much larger Pentagon strategy of maintaining a “light (military) footprint” in countries around the globe while bolstering its influence with local military institutions.

The Pentagon, however, is much less transparent than the State Department, and its programmes are often not subject to the same human-rights conditions and do not get the same degree of Congressional oversight.

Moreover, McRaven has sought the authority to deploy SOF teams to countries without consulting either U.S. ambassadors there or even the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), making it even more difficult for civil society activists to track what they’re doing and whether they’re working with local units with poor human-rights records that would normally be denied U.S. aid and training under the so-called Leahy Law.

Last summer, according to Isacson, McRaven’s command even tried to work out an agreement with Colombia to set up a regional special operations coordination centre there without consulting SOUTHCOM or the embassy.

“What these developments mean is that the military role in foreign policy-making is becoming ever greater, and military-to-military relations come to matter more than diplomatic relations,” he said. “What does that mean for civil-military relations not only in the region, but also here at home?”

The 32-page report, entitled “Time to Listen”, describes U.S. policy as “on auto-pilot”, largely due to the powerful bureaucratic interests in the Pentagon and the Drug Enforcement Administration and their regional counterparts that have built up over decades.

“The counter-drug bureaucracies in the United States are remarkably resistant to change, unwilling to rethink and reassess strategies and goals,” said Lisa Haugaard, director of the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF) which released the report along with WOLA and the Centre for International Policy (CIP).

The report also noted that new security technologies, including drones, whose use by the U.S. and other countries is growing quickly throughout the region, and cyber-spying of the kind that prompted this week’s abrupt cancellation by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of her state visit here next month, pose major challenges to the security environment and civil liberties in the region.

Total U.S. aid to Latin America hit its highest level in more than two decades in 2010 – nearly 4.5 billion dollars – due to the costs of the “Merida Initiative”, a multi-year programme for fighting drug-trafficking in Mexico and Central America, and a major inflow of assistance to help Haiti recover from that year’s devastating earthquake.

But aid fell sharply in 2011 – to just 2.5 billion dollars – and is expected to decline to just 2.2 billion dollars in fiscal 2014, which begins Oct. 1.

Military and security assistance also reached its height in 2010, at 1.6 billion dollars, but has since declined to around 900 million dollars, largely as a result of the phase-out of Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative. Central America is the only sub-region in which aid, including non-security assistance, is increasing significantly.

But Isacson says dollar amounts can be deceptive, and while “big ticket” aid packages are down, “other, less transparent forms of military-to-military co-operation are on the rise,” in part due to the migration of many programmes’ management from the State Department, which has more stringent reporting and human rights conditions, to the Pentagon.

A troubling trend, according to the report, is that some countries, especially Colombia, have begun training military and police forces in their neighbours, often with U.S. funding and encouragement.

In that respect, these third-country trainers act as private contractors who are not subject to U.S. human-rights laws and whose cost is a fraction of that of their U.S. counterparts.

Despite their security forces’ own highly controversial human rights record, Colombian officers have been given major roles, for example, in Washington’s Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and the Merida Initiative, as well as in Honduras’ police reform, according to the report.

“Bringing the military into the streets can result in grave human-rights violations,” according to Haugaard who also noted U.S. involvement in poorly designed and heavy-handed counter-drug operations, such as one in Honduras last year in which four passengers in a river taxi were killed by a joint Honduran-DEA operation.

Washington’s record has not been all bad, according to the report, which praised the Obama administration’s insertion of human rights into its high-level bilateral dialogues with Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras and its emphasis on the importance of civilian trials for soldiers implicated in serious rights abuses in Colombia and Mexico.

The administration has also taken some steps to strengthen enforcement of the Leahy Law, which denies U.S. aid and training to foreign military units that are credibly accused of serious rights abuses, according to the report. It also praised Washington’s support for Colombia’s peace process and its defence of the Inter-American human rights system against recent attempts by Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia to weaken it.

Still, Washington’s own human rights record, including its failure to close the Guantanamo detention facility, its newly revealed extensive surveillance programmes, and a drone policy that justifies extra-judicial executions opens it to charges of double standard, the report noted.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Carlos Santos and Fabricio Santín alongside a papier-mâché sculpture representing a torture victim of the security forces during El Salvador’s civil war. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The Salvadoran army kept a detailed list of names and photographs of leftists detained or sought during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war. The report is the first official military document proving the armed forces’ direct involvement in forced disappearances and other abuses.

Activists told IPS that, besides serving as evidence of human rights crimes, the document confirms the links between the army and the death squads, since a number of the detainees on the list were later forcibly disappeared by the far-right paramilitaries.

The title on the cover of the list of 1,975 people described as “terrorist criminals” is “Yellow Book”. It was apparently written by the joint chiefs of staff of the armed forces, whose initials EMCFA – for Estado Mayor Conjunto de la Fuerza Armada – can be seen clearly printed on each of its 270 pages.

“The book proves that all of our denunciations were true – that the security forces and army were behind the forced disappearances, operating as death squads,” Guadalupe Mejía, the president of CODEFAM, an association of families of victims of human rights violations, told IPS.

The Yellow Book was found three years ago, hidden in a cranny in a house in San Salvador by someone who was moving house. IPS and the Mexican daily La Jornada have a copy of the report.

Carlos Santos, president of the Salvadoran Association of Torture Survivors (ASST), said the fact that some 250 victims of forced disappearance, whose cases were documented by the United Nations truth commission, are on the list confirms that at some point they were detained by the military or police.

“This provides new evidence that it was members of the army who seized the victims of forced disappearance. Everyone knew it was them, but the evidence (from the military) was lacking,” Santos told IPS.

The report, marked “confidential”, is dated July 1987. But it has names of people who were detained, killed or “disappeared” in the late 1970s and even earlier, which indicates that the date refers to the last time it was updated.

Death squads and the security forces are blamed for the majority of the 75,000 killings and 8,000 forced disappearances committed during the 12-year armed conflict, which ended when a peace agreement was signed by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the right-wing government of Alfredo Cristiani.

Many of the photos in the report were clearly taken in military or police installations, with the dishevelled and sometimes bruised detainees standing against a wall with an anguished look on their faces.

Other photos were apparently taken from the detainees’ identity documents, obtained by military intelligence from municipal civil registries. Yet others are surveillance photos taken by cameras with zoom.

Some of the people in the report were senior FMLN leaders, listed as “most wanted”. Others were leftwing intellectuals, trade unionists, rural community leaders and social activists, considered “subversives” during El Salvador’s civil war.

“The book is evidence that these people were captured by the security forces and then tortured,” Miguel Montenegro, director of the NGO Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, told IPS. “Files on them were compiled, and they were later ‘disappeared’ – in other words, killed.”

Santos said “after they were captured, their photos were taken to put in the file before they were killed; that means the document is clear evidence of the summary executions committed by the army, operating as death squads.”

One of the names in the Yellow Book is that of Abel Enrique Orellana, a 25-year-old medical student who is on CODEFAM’s list of victims of forced disappearance. He was seized on Aug. 18, 1981 by the National Guard.

Many other names are found in both the army report and on the lists kept by CODEFAM and other human rights groups, such as Ana Elizabeth Alvarado García, who disappeared in June 1982; Julio César Ávalos Hernández, in November 1982; and Felipe Oswaldo Ayala Portillo, in July 1983.

But some of the people on the list survived, like Cunegunda Peña, who is now 77 years old. She spent six months in a dark cell after she was seized Mar. 9, 1977 by members of the National Guard and the National Police – both of which were dissolved, along with the Treasury Police, under the 1992 peace deal because of their involvement in human rights abuses.

The agents, Peña told IPS, burst into her house that day in search of her three sons, who belonged to the Popular Liberation Forces, one of the five guerrilla groups making up the FMLN, which is now the governing political party of President Mauricio Funes.

“Since you’re sons aren’t here, we’ll take you,” the police told Peña. She was photographed after they took her to the National Police station, and her photo appears in the Yellow Book. She was released after six months.

“I heard screaming when I was in prison, as if they were dismembering people,” she said. One of her sons, Manuel Martínez Peña, has been missing since June 1980, and is presumed dead.

The activists who spoke to IPS complained that the amnesty signed in 1993, a year after the peace agreement was reached, protects human rights violators from being brought to justice.

Only courts in other countries have tried former Salvadoran military chiefs in connection with crimes against humanity.

Retired generals Eugenio Vides Casanova and José Guillermo García, who both served as defence ministers in the 1980s, were found guilty in 2002 by a U.S. court for the torture of three civilians by units under their command. The court ordered the two retired officers to pay 54.6 million dollars in damages to the civilians.

The current defence minister, General José Atilio Benítez, did not respond to multiple calls by IPS to ask whether the report could have come from any office under the Defence Ministry.

The doctrine of national security imposed by the United States on Latin America, which fostered the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, is making a comeback in Honduras where a new law is combining military defence of the country with police strategies for maintaining domestic order.

The law created the National Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence (DNII), a key agency in the security structure that does not appear to be accountable to any other body, and does not appear to be under democratic civilian control.

“This bill unites or fuses military defence and internal security, which is dangerous, because one of the aims after the Cold War was to separate these fields, due to the negative effects (their union had) on systematic violation of human rights” in the region, sociologist Mirna Flores, an expert on the issue, told IPS.

“We are back again with old national security concepts dating from the Cold War era in Central America, and the danger is that the former anti-communist rhetoric may be used against the ‘new threats’, such as allegedly criminal youth, dissidents against the regime, social protests or for the imposition of absolute powers,” she said.

The approval of the law on Jan. 14 took human rights organisations, civil society groups and academic bodies by surprise, because of the rushed nature of the legislation, the lack of consensus-building and the skipping of two of the three debates necessary for passing laws in parliament.

Sergio Castellanos, a legislator for the leftwing Democratic Unification Party, was the first to react when the bill was introduced. He asked for time for a fuller debate, but was overruled by the large rightwing majority comprising representatives of the governing National Party and one wing of the Liberal Party.

The law was passed amid a whirlwind of parliamentary activity, along with constitutional reforms and other laws that have engendered controversy in the country, such as mining regulations and suspension of all tax exemptions, pending review.

The Intelligence Law has some loopholes consisting of a lack of conceptual definitions, included in modern legislation in order not to allow room for discretionary interpretations or decisions.

Roberto Cajina, a civilian consultant on security, defence and democratic governance, told IPS that lack of definitions and limits in the text of the new law could give rise to “temptations” for abuse.

“It must be clearly understood what is meant by investigation, intelligence, strategic action, privacy protection, national security, special units, covert operations, special agents, special protection measures, secret funds and special risks, to cite just the most important definitions that are lacking in the law,” Cajina said.

Article 28 out of the 33 articles in the law says the DNII may recruit active members of the armed forces and the national police, Cajina said. This is “a very delicate matter and should be studied with care,” he said.

“As it stands, it is a dangerous precedent. One could warn of possible ‘piracy’ of the DNII toward the armed forces and police. What kinds of intelligence do each of them carry out?” he asked.

“If this is not clarified, problems and serious contradictions will arise, and the scenario will change radically. It is necessary to demarcate the boundaries of the fields of action of each of them,” Cajina emphasised.

Flores, the sociologist, and Cajina concur that another vacuum in the law is the lack of a chain of command subjecting the DNII to the control of any civilian institution or authority. It is not clear to what body it is affiliated.

The law compels private bodies to “cooperate by providing information required of them in order to support intelligence efforts”.

The experts said there should be a clearer description of the kind of information that private companies are required to give, because the current text leaves too much room for discretion. “The DNII director could, with very little justification, pick any organisation as a subject of interest which must provide the information (the DNII) demands,” they said.

“We are alarmed at this law that was tabled without ceremony, but also without debate, and furthermore, relying on old Cold War concepts,” activist Bertha Oliva, of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), told IPS.

Oliva said she was concerned by some aspects of the law, especially the power it gives the DNII to create “special investigation and intelligence units” and to cooperate with “other state intelligence bodies”.

“Does that mean there are more? Which ones? Why do we know nothing about them? I think there are many loopholes that could lead to abuses,” she said.

In the 1980s, members of the Honduran intelligence corps created the so-called Batallón de la Muerte (death squad), which was responsible for the forced disappearance of 187 people for political and ideological reasons, according to an official report.

This history raises fears that a similar body could be recreated, since the executive branch is giving the armed forces and police wide powers to run an intelligence corps which by law was supposed to come under the rule of the Commission on Public Security Reform, a civilian body working on structural reform of the police, prosecutors and the justice system.

But according to Matías Funes, chair of the Commission on Public Security Reform, its proposals do not have the ear of the legislative and executive branches. “It’s as if there were a parallel agenda,” and the institutional environment and democratisation of the country are not making progress, he said.

At 8 a.m. on Oct. 25, 1975, Brazilian journalist Vladimir Herzog voluntarily reported to the São Paulo headquarters of the government’s intelligence agency and was never seen alive again.

The facilities he had been summoned to were just one of the detention and torture centres that were active during Brazil’s last dictatorship.

Herzog was editor-in-chief of the news department at the São Paulo-based television network TV Cultura, and had been called in for questioning by the Information Operations Department of the Centre for Internal Defence Operations (DOI-CODI) for his alleged connections to the then-illegal Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).

He died under torture, but his death was made to look like a suicide by the military in an attempt to cover up the murder. A photograph released later showed Herzog hanging in his cell, but in a position that clearly revealed that the military’s suicide version was a farce.

The picture quickly became a symbol of the lies of the military regime.

Denounced by the Union of Professional Journalists of São Paulo, the death of “Vlado” – as he was called by friends and family – had profound repercussions, triggering a wave of protests and setting off a mass movement that played an instrumental role in bringing down the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

More than 37 years later, Herzog’s murder could be the case that finally sets Brazil on the path of investigating the crimes and abuses committed throughout its long dictatorship.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organisation of American States (OAS) accepted a petition to open an inquiry to determine the responsibility of the Brazilian government in Herzog’s death, understanding that the state has not fulfilled its duty to investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators.

The IACHR will submit a report with its findings to the central-left administration of President Dilma Rousseff and, if the government fails to implement its recommendations, it will bring the case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In 2010, the court issued a ruling condemning Brazil for its failure to open up criminal inquiries and prosecute the perpetrators of the “arbitrary detention, torture and forced disappearance of 70 individuals during the dictatorship, including members of the Communist Party and peasants from the region,” who were part of the Araguaia guerrillas, a group that operated from1972 to 1974 in Marabá, state of Pará.

Attempts to bring the perpetrators of human rights abuses committed during the past dictatorship have been thwarted by a 1979 amnesty law (No. 6,683) passed by the military regime that pardoned anyone involved in political crimes or human rights violations in the period between Sep. 2, 1961 and Aug. 15, 1979.

Despite this obstacle, the Rousseff administration made great progress in this sense with the establishment of a National Truth Commission (created by Law No. 12,528) in 2011, mandated with investigating cases of forced disappearances of political opponents during the dictatorship.

This law was enacted in 2012 and sets a term of two years for the commission to complete its mandate. According to the document “Direito à Memória e à Verdade” (The Right to Memory and Truth), prepared by the government, at least 150 dissidents arrested or kidnapped by repressive forces during that period are still missing today.

Their relatives continue to search for their remains or for any information on the fate of their loved ones.

The truth commission is not the only effort to reveal the truth of the dictatorship’s abuses, as an increasing number of committees are being formed by state representatives, students and workers.

“Every action seeking truth and justice organised by the younger generations, to learn about and fight for human rights in Brazil is a new blow dealt against the dictatorship and the state of emergency,” Maria do Rosário Nunes, the presidency’s human rights secretary, said on Jan. 19 at the launching of the Journalists’ Truth Commission.

“Brazil has been slow to join the debate on truth commissions, which is aimed at recovering (collective) memory and obtaining justice for the deaths and disappearances committed during the dictatorship, and it’s far behind other countries, such as Uruguay and Argentina,” Beth Costa, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told IPS.

“But the IFJ and the National and Latin American Federation of Journalists welcome this firm decision by the government of Brazil,” she added.

Costa acknowledged the government’s difficulty in countering historical resistances, which date back to the period of national re-democratisation.

“For years there was resistance from the military, which still has an impact through the seats held in parliament by the country’s conservative parties, many of which backed the military regime,” she said.

The members of the National Truth Commission face the challenge of filling in the information gaps that exist in the cases of disappearances and assassinations, and in the files that were put at their disposal for the investigation, which may not be complete despite the Data Access Act that Rousseff passed along with this specialised body.

“Some 25 journalists were killed during the dictatorship,” journalist Audálio Dantas told IPS. A former president of the Union of Professional Journalists of São Paulo, Dantas headed the protests to expose Herzog’s staged suicide.

Dantas, who currently heads the National Commission of Brazilian Journalists for Memory, Justice and Truth, detected major gaps in the government’s files, which he consulted as part of the research for his book “As duas guerras de Vlado Herzog” (The Two Wars of Vlado Herzog), published in 2012 by Editora Civilização Brasileira.

When he tried to access the case files, he was asked to furnish a copy of Herzog’s death certificate.

“This demand was not only absurd, it was disrespectful to Vlado’s memory. Meeting this request would have entailed accepting as true the cause of death recorded by the certifying doctor, Harry Shibata, a DOI-CODI collaborator, who signed the certificate without ever seeing the body, ruling it a suicide,” Dantas wrote in his book.

“The Truth Commission finally succeeded in having the certificate amended,” he told IPS. Now it states that Herzog’s died as a result of “injuries and abuses suffered while in the São Paulo second army facilities (DOI-CODI).”

Beth Costa believes that reconstructing the history of the journalists who were forcefully disappeared by the dictatorship will be a key step in rebuilding the country’s collective memory and in the process of re-democratisation of its institutions, especially at a time in which Brazil is listed among the countries with the greatest number of journalists murdered in the line of duty.

Freedoms such as the right to report freely and safely and the right to be informed are once again at risk. This was made patently clear when newspaper reporters André Caramante, of Folha de São Paulo, and Mauri Konig, of Paraná’s Gazeta do Povo, were forced to leave the country after receiving death threats for exposing police misconduct.

Dantas recalled that, in addition to guaranteeing the safety of all media professionals, the government must weed out certain elements from police forces, which were left over from the dictatorship and form extermination squads.

“It’s shameful that after successfully fighting off political repression we are now incapable of battling the repression that is a daily reality in the peripheries of our large cities and inside our police stations,” he said.

“The government is afraid to tackle this problem, perhaps because most middle and upper class people believe that seizing and executing without trial is an acceptable practice. It’s the country’s biggest shame today,” he charged.

“It’s awful to see people who are criminals treated as heroes,” said Dorila Márquez, one of the survivors of the El Mozote massacre committed by Salvadoran army troops in December 1981.

Márquez told IPS that she lost many members of her family in the three-day massacre of some 1,000 men, women and children from El Mozote and surrounding villages in the eastern province of Morazán, committed during the 12-year armed conflict between government forces and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas.

President Mauricio Funes, elected in 2009 as the candidate of the left-wing FMLN – which became a political party after a peace agreement put an end to the war in 1992 – recently announced the creation of a military commission to review the history of the army for the first time ever.

The new commission will verify whether the armed forces have fulfilled the recommendations of the peace agreement, and will identify the names of officers and troops implicated in human rights abuses during the civil war.

The officers who fought the FMLN enjoy the status of heroes in the eyes of the army and the conservative elites.

The creation of the new commission was announced by Funes on Jan. 16, the 20th anniversary of the signing of the peace deal, when he apologised in the name of the state for the El Mozote massacre and other crimes against humanity committed by the military.

“For the victims of the abuses and for organisations like ours, it was gratifying to hear the president’s announcement,” Miguel Montenegro, an activist with the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES), told IPS.

For years, he added, there have been attempts to cover up and silence the human rights violations committed by the military against the civilian population of this impoverished Central American country.

Analysts and academics are sceptical, however, that the president’s initiative will bring results, at least in the short term.

“The military will continue to be seen as heroes, and no one can prevent that,” Jorge Juárez, director of the Institute of Historical, Anthropological and Archaeological Studies at the University of El Salvador, told IPS. “That reinterpretation cannot be made by decree.”

One of the “heroes” is the late lieutenant colonel Domingo Monterrosa, the commander of the Atlacatl battalion.

It was Monterrosa who led the counterinsurgency operation that ended in the El Mozote massacre, according to the United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission created by the peace agreement to investigate the targeted political killings and other human rights violations committed during the war, which left 70,000 people dead and 8,000 missing.

Monterrosa and several of his officers were killed in October 1984, when the FMLN, in one of its boldest moves, blew up the lieutenant colonel’s helicopter.

The lieutenant-colonel believed that under his seat he was carrying a trophy: the transmitter of the guerrilla group’s radio station, Radio Venceremos, whose nightly broadcasts from territory that the army claimed to control in the province of Morazán were a humiliation to the military, which claimed the pirate station was in Nicaragua.

The FMLN had a spare radio transmitter, which they pretended they were forced to abandon during a supposed firefight with army troops. But they had actually stuffed dynamite in the transmitter, and the bomb was detonated by remote control when Monterrosa’s helicopter was on its way to a press conference to celebrate the “victory” over Radio Venceremos.

After Monterrosa’s death, Congress named him the “Hero of Joateca” (the place where he died), and the 3rd Infantry Brigade, which was based in San Miguel, in the east of the country, carried his name. The military have also written songs for him and have created a web site called “Monterrosa Vive” (Monterrosa Lives).

“I don’t understand how someone who caused so many deaths can be considered a hero,” Márquez said.

The army today mythologises the role that the military played in the civil war, saying they saved the country from communism, Juárez said.

But the academic questioned the fact that a military commission will be evaluating the history of the army, and warned about the risk of a lack of objectivity.

For his part, Carlos Cañas, a member of the Academy of Military History of El Salvador, said the president’s announcement was impertinent, and that Funes was taking for granted that the military participated in human rights abuses, even though they have not been found guilty in court.

Funes’s announcement “contributes nothing in a society where the presumption of innocence does not operate and people are condemned ahead of time,” Cañas said in an interview with IPS.

“The armed forces were on a campaign against international communism, and their field actions and tactics were seen as operations of legitimate defence of the national territory,” he maintained.

Both historians agreed, though, that greater citizen participation in the military commission announced by the president is needed.

They stressed, however, that although there is greater openness to the participation of historians and other academics, the effort will not have a great effect unless there is an official decision for the army to open up its files on operations during the war.

The archives must be opened in order to provide access to reliable documents that back up the work of the commission, Cañas said.

For his part, Miguel Montenegro of CDHES said civil society should closely monitor the work of the military commission, and that mechanisms should be established to ensure that it is carried out as objectively as possible, with the participation of civilians.

In El Mozote, far removed from the debate among academics and politicians, local residents have not forgotten the bloody events of 1981. But at least some say they are willing to forgive those who committed the killings.

“If I could talk to the people who killed my family, I would forgive them, but it would be good if they would first admit they had participated,” Márquez said.

“I hope the commission will bring results, because we always questioned that they kept saying that the people who killed our families were heroes,” she said.