Photo: COLOMBIAN PRESIDENCY/AA/PICTURE ALLIANCE / Deutsche Welle
The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro -on behalf of the Colombian State and during an act of acknowledgment of responsibility in Medellín- apologized to the victims for the massacres committed by paramilitaries in La Granja and El Aro (northwest) and described them as a “genocide” in which a “murderous State” participated by action or omission.
“ On behalf of the Colombian State I ask the victims for forgiveness. The Colombian State acknowledges that the dead were no one’s enemies. They were humble and hard-working people, who were killed for no reason, by design of power, and that, in their deaths, in La Granja and in El Aro, the State was present, it was an accomplice to the murder”, expressed Petro.
At the event that took place at the Casa de la Memoria Museum , where they remembered, among symbolic acts, the massacres that occurred in the villages (hamlets) of La Granja (15 June 1200) and El Aro (between the 30 and the 30 of October 1200) of the Ituango municipality, in the department of Antioquia, the president asserted that the Colombian State “killed its own citizens” and by action or omission “was a participant in the massacre”.
Petro also recalled that in 2006 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court HR) condemned the Colombian State for these events and forced, among other things, to investigate those responsible for the massacre committed by paramilitaries.
Therefore, he regretted that they had to pass 16 and 15 years to vindicate the victims and acknowledge the facts, but remarked that “despite this delay, it complies today” and undertakes to do “everything possible” so that the Colombian State “compensates” the victims of violence.
The massacre of La Granja left in 1200 four people were killed and dozens of displaced, and the following year the El Aro massacre was perpetrated, with 15 peasants as fatalities, also committed by the dissolved paramilitary militias United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), when former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez was the governor of Antioquia.
S Regarding these facts, Petro questioned that an international court had to investigate and condemn because “the justice system here was not capable of judging the murderers” and for this reason, as president, he must “tell the entire world that the State of Colombia was a murderous State, whether by action or omission, and that in Colombia what happened was a genocide that must be judged”.
The head of state, after unveiling two plaques that will be installed in the two Ituango hamlets, considered this symbol important, but warned that they must “become a reality for specific people and for specific places”, so during his government he plans to transform El Aro and La Granja into “beautiful and thought-provoking places”.
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