“We staged a theater to show a supposed combat because of the pressure from the high command.”
Words spoken by the retired soldier Néstor Guillermo Gutiérrez in an appearance this Tuesday on the so-called false positives, the operation of the Colombian army during the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) who killed civilians to pass them off as combat casualties.
“It is not easy to be here in front of the victims . I’m not going to justify what I did. We murder innocent people, peasants,” Gutiérrez said before a hundred victims summoned by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional court that investigates the armed conflict.
As well as nine other former soldiers, Gutiérrez gave these shocking statements during an event in front of the victims of false positives in Catatumbo, in the east of the country.
“I executed, I murdered relatives of those who are here, leading them with lies, with deceit, shooting them, cruelly murdering them and putting a weapon on them to say that it was a combat, who were guerrillas, and tarnish the name of that family, destroy it, leave children without a father, leave parents without children,” said Gutiérrez.
It is the first time that ex-officers of the Armed Forces Armed Forces explicitly and in detail admit one of the most traumatic operations of the war in Colom bia. One that, according to the same JEP, left at least 6.402 dead civilians.
Being a transitional court product of the peace agreement with the guerrillas signed in 2010, the JEP does not issue criminal convictions, but it does issue reparation sanctions in exchange for contributions to the truth.
Former President Uribe has said that the false positives were not his knowledge. The generals accused of setting up the quota scheme that produced the civilian casualties also deny having ordered them.
In the midst of a frenetic electoral campaign, this year Colombians are experiencing some of the most tragic episodes produced during 60 years of war between the State and the largest guerrilla in the country, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Only a week after the probable second round, in May, the Truth Commission, a sister entity of the JEP, is expected to release the document that aspires to become the memory of the conflict, which left at least 220.000 dead.
“We planted weapons on the victims”
Major Daladier Rivera Jácome was another of the e xmilitary who, between tears, apologized to the victims for their participation in the false positives and acknowledged having “provided weapons that we planted on the victims to simulate combat.”
“Most of these weapons They were from a cove that I found in the second semester of 2006 so that false operations and false positives could be carried out,” he added.
Although it is not the first time that ex-military officers have recognized false positives, this degree of detail had not been disclosed to the general public; much less in a hearing broadcast on social networks.
In addition, the testimonies are released at a time when the ghost of false positives returns to the conversations of Colombians, after a army operation in Putumayo, in the south, will leave 11 dead, including three civilians who were initially declared combatants.
Not all Colombians, however, are satisfied with this type of mea culpa: there are a handful of victims who do not believe in the honesty of the testimonies of those who perpetrated State crimes, and there are the followers of Uribismo who see the peace agreement as a mechanism of impunity for guerrillas and soldiers accused of crimes.
The Armed Forces have reiterated that the investigations in the military criminal justice system have yielded or hundreds of convictions for false positives and that the execution of this quota scheme was not systematic, but ordered and carried out by a minority of “bad apples” within the army.
The results of the JEP investigations, in any case, are showing with increasing evidence that the State was one of the main perpetrators of the Colombian conflict.
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