The peace dialogues between the Colombian insurgency and the government have made the discussion on human rights a preponderant one in the framework of the creation of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth. In that sense, I approach one of the phenomena that should be clarified: forced disappearance. The General Assembly of the United Nations established that enforced disappearances are crimes against humanity generally committed by States against their political opponents.
Just in the days that spoke of the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the relatives of these managed to get President Juan Manuel Santos to sign the articles of Decree Law 589 of April 5, 2017, for the creation of the Search Unit of Missing Persons (UBPD). This normative body will investigate war crimes and establish guidelines for the search for the disappeared. However, the implementation of everything related to the Havana Agreement is being violated and other aspects are taking place at a slow pace. The good news is that this body was left from September 26 under the direction of human rights defender Luz Marina Monzón. For its entry into operation, legal recognition is required by the Constitutional Court.
General data
According to the Single Victims Registry (RUV), the forced disappearance in the last 32 years leaves a balance of 167,554 people affected (46,970 directly, 120,584 indirectly), being Antioquia (27,193 disappeared) and the eastern plains (21,498). ) the territories of greater scope. The existing information, mainly, comes from the declarations of the armed actors. Of the 60,630 victims of forced disappearance, there are only 8,122 news. A report from the Historical Memory Center adds that in 3,480 cases the body was found and in 3,658 there is no information on the location of the remains.
Camilo Torres Restrepo, assassinated by the National Army in 1966, is perhaps one of the most emblematic cases. General Álvaro Valencia Tovar died in 2014 without revealing what they really did with the body of the revolutionary priest. For its part, as in most cases, the State has shone by the lack of interest in finding the true whereabouts of its remains. In the same way happened with Omaira Montoya, disappeared in 1977 (being pregnant) by the extinct F2 (secret intelligence body of the National Police). This was the first event recognized as forced disappearance in Colombia.
Also, 423 indigenous victims, 421 blacks, 26 raizales and 3 palenqueros are documented, for a total registry of 874 people with some ethnicity. Only in 5,231 registered cases is the occupation of the victim known: 43.3% are peasants.
If we look at the data chronologically since 2002, when Álvaro Uribe took over the Presidency, a chilling reality is reflected. In 2002 alone, 15,260 people disappeared, while in 2003 there were 12,230 victims. Gradually the registry decreased, reaching in 2009 2,357 disappearances. In 2010, the year in which the first term of Santos began, 1,392 were registered. During 2015 and 2016, the most concrete period of the peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) and the Government, 73 and 54 respectively were submitted.
Although in the year 2017 the data have fallen to five disappeared (the lowest since 1985) it is clear that it is a phenomenon that does not arouse general interest in society, since no relevant efforts have been made to make the victims and their effective search.
From the known reports it is said that 51.4% of the total of the victims is not consigned to the responsible actor. 46.1% of the responsibility for these disappearances, according to the Historical Memory Center, belongs to the paramilitaries.
For decades they hid the data of the disappeared in Colombia. Until recently, official figures did not recognize more than 26,000 enforced disappearances. After the collection of photographs, court rulings, audiovisual reports and 102 social and institutional sources, the Victims Unit, in 2015, concluded that 6,570 exhumations carried out by the Office of the Prosecutor until June 1, 2016, were taken into account in mass graves of the entire country, of which 3,075 bodies have been identified, where 1,334 are victims of enforced disappearance.
Impunity of 100%: “We are in a grave called Colombia”
Gloria Gómez, director of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees (Asfaddes), said that impunity is almost 100%. He also indicated that “The commitment is to make visible the forced disappearance, to compromise the society in the repudiation and the rejection of this atrocious crime”. According to Gomez, “there must be a strengthening of the bank of genetic profiles that is very weak, there is not enough capacity in the universe of the disappeared and Legal Medicine needs to be strengthened to continue being a support in the processes of identification of people.” He also added that “the Missing Persons Search Unit needs to be surrounded by capabilities and resources to start the search effort.” In the same way, Hernán Jojoa, delegate president of the National Commission of Missing Persons, stressed that “the task is to find them and return them to their relatives.” Gómez adds that the Office of the Prosecutor, one of the entities charged with clarifying the facts of enforced disappearance, is the institution that has produced the least results in terms of investigation.
Around 15,000 bodies are fully identified, buried in hundreds of cemeteries in the country, however no one claims them. The forensic anthropologist Helka Quevedo Hidalgo says that in 99% of cases it is proven that there are no search protocols.
In the report “Bodily texts of cruelty” carried out by the Historical Memory Center, the records of the Missing and Corpses Network Information System (Sirdec) are contrasted with those of the Accusatory Oral Criminal System (Spoa) of the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation , verifying that there may be many more disappearances than the ones reported so far. In that sense, it is still a partial information, since it influences that many of the relatives do not report for fear of reprisals.
The forced disappearance, being a scourge that destroys the family and social nucleus of the disappeared, requires the commitment of the legislators to attend to the victims. The families allege the poor quality of the Victims Unit and the lack of psychosocial support that should be guaranteed by the Ministry of Health. However, the people who place the victims also put the human capacity for their own reparation, a situation that deserves to be asked about the lessons of history. Despite the circumstances imposed on them, supreme acts of solidarity, mutual support and organization persist.
Clarification of the Truth and the right to demand answers
The conformation of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV), sealed on April 5 by the Presidency of the Republic under Decree 588 of 2017, takes on a relevant role. This mechanism is part of the Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition (SIVJRNR), along with other devices that will be an instrument to achieve three objectives to guarantee both the right to the truth and the right to justice: i) contribute to clarify what happened in the last half century; ii) formal recognition of both victims and perpetrators; and iii) the promotion and execution of nonviolent coexistence plans in the most affected territories.
In this regard, different jurists of the country agree that the combination of judicial truth, extrajudicial and individual and collective initiatives, are the best alternative for comprehensive clarification. That is, an exemplary punishment for those responsible for serious crimes, in addition to citizen initiatives that contribute to the memory reconstruction process. For this difficult challenge, the CEV, consisting of eleven people (currently subject to a process of selection and citizen oversight), has a period of three years to complete an enlightening report.
However, the oldest institutions in the continent can not be worse. The executive branch is immersed in all kinds of networks of corruption and clientelism, so a reform of justice is not enough, since fundamental changes are needed throughout the political system. Without an effective search for Truth, there will not be a solid basis for the construction of a country in peace that guarantees the non-repetition of the barbarity carried out in more than five decades of conflict. The whole society must demand honest and expeditious justice, since the current justice system has links with serious crimes related to the armed conflict and corruption (for example, the former president of the Supreme Court of Justice is imprisoned). Transforming that scenario will be a key course for what they call post-conflict.
Different institutions of the State interpose without reservation to prevent that the agreed thing in Havana advances, between these, the Office of the Public prosecutor and the Congress. Néstor Humberto Martínez and the senators of the right-wing parties have radicalized the obstacles so that the backbone of the peace dialogues, that is, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), does not begin its work. Martinez and the followers of Uribismo also stand out for not supporting the newly formed unit for the dismantling of paramilitarism. This makes it difficult to lay the foundations for a serious process of reparation and attainment of the Truth.
With the experience of demobilization of the paramilitaries ten years ago during the Uribe government, it was shown that judicial truth as a single measure has marked limitations in terms of achieving an integral truth according to the idea of restorative justice, since the process it was based on the generation of sentences, subsequent decisions to the free versions of several paramilitary chiefs, most of them currently extradited and isolated, without the possibility of contributing to victims’ reparation processes.
Unlike the above, the CEV does not have merely punitive objectives (and can not have them, since it is an extrajudicial mechanism), on the contrary, from the reconstruction of the story of the past a report that must contain the connections of the different strategies originates of terror created during the war, that is, a truth as complete as possible, a process that will have to be different from the work carried out by the Historical Memory Center during the last six years.
The role of the CEV should contribute to generating a documentary archive of memory recovery and conservation and enforcing the right of access to information by victims. It is incumbent upon it to throw away information to reveal the savage facts of official repression, to denounce the violation of human rights and to influence the formulation of public policies that promote reforms so that fundamental rights are guaranteed for the most unprotected sectors of society.
To conclude, it is appropriate to bring up a speech on September 8, 2003 by Senator Alvaro Uribe when he served as head of state, during the appointment ceremony of the Air Force commander, this in order not to forget where The persecution of human rights defenders has come about: “Lawyers’ groups have appeared, and both spokespersons of terrorism and human rights traffickers have appeared, and they should once and for all take off the mask (…) General Lesmes: assume you the command of the Air Force to defeat terrorism. That the human rights traffickers do not stop him … ” The same script used a few days ago in social networks when he learned that the researcher Mauricio Archila could join the Truth Commission: “the writings of Mauricio Archila, member of the CINEP and the Truth Commission are slanderous and apologists for terrorism” . These words are accompanied by the country’s institutions, without fissures, to the point of configuring a true State policy that remains in force, either because of the permanence of the structures of violence and impunity that fuel such practices, or because of the silence with which which is accompanied by the tragedy of mass forced disappearances in Colombia.
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