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It must be said very clearly: the victims of violence in this country and their families seek justice and seek truth; justice and truth. One is impossible without the other, because a justice done with lies and cover-ups is not at all and because it is also a re-victimization of those of us who have spent years waiting for the reasons why they killed or disappeared our people to be clarified.
In the case of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, my father, murdered in Bogotá on November 2, 1995, a perfect example of what impunity is in Colombia is configured; the absolute lack of justice and truth. And it is still very painful and paradoxical, since justice was one of his main flags and obsessions in his political life, to the point that in his last presidential campaign in 1990, his motto was: ‘Don’t kill the people’ .
I know perfectly well that when I say this, what always comes next is a discussion about political violence in Colombia and about the sectarian past of our parties. It tends to be a very sectarian discussion too, full of inherited prejudices and hatreds that only perpetuate a narrative of good guys and bad guys in which Álvaro Gómez usually plays the role of the latter. So it was all life.
That is a valid discussion, and historians, with the passage of time, have an increasingly serious and rigorous vision of what that tragedy was. My father was a party man and was a fierce defender of his ideas; and without a doubt, in many moments of his youth he participated in the sectarian spirit of that time, as did all the protagonists in both parties, the Liberal and the Conservative.
(Read also: The political center: an ’empty shell’?)
But my father was also a tireless defender of peace when the National Front was created. And he was always a standard-bearer of democracy and the debate of ideas; his political initiatives in that sense are countless, and include the popular election of mayors, for example. He rejected all his life the use of violence as a legitimate means in politics and said that the country does not have to get used to hearing only the voice of submachine guns.
Álvaro Gómez was one of the architects and signatories of the 1991 Constitution, and there he coincided, which vindicates his credentials as a democrat and a man of peace, with his hijackers from the day before, the M-19. With them and many others, he helps to conceive that letter that for him was an agreement on what is fundamental: a pact of coexistence and a story of a much more just, democratic and inclusive country.
He also said after 1991 that the problem in Colombia was not in the Constitution, recently reformed and written with a generous and impeccable text, but in the corruption of the whole system, in a kind of immoral and shady monstrosity that he called the Regime and which is nothing but the theft and distortion of the public and the State by the power mafias that turn it into a business.
That is why Álvaro Gómez said that Colombian politics is no longer governed by the supreme value of solidarity, but by the dark bond of complicity. That was precisely what he said when Colombia was experiencing a moral crisis of elephantine proportions, if I may say so, when it was found that drug trafficking had paid for and bought the presidential election of Ernesto Samper Pizano in 1994.
(Further: Piedad Córdoba asks for the truth about the murder of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado)
Samper maintains that this event was behind his back, which constitutes, at least, a memorable milestone in the universal history of crime, since it would be a secret conspiracy to bring him, behind his back, to power. Ah poor thing! The only beneficiary of such an intrigue who never knew why or how he won those elections, the result of which was what it was, thanks to the money of the mafia. Colombia owed Ernesto Samper.
That and no other was the context of the murder of my father, whose voice was one of the most critical and forceful against the illegitimate government of Samper. His editorials in the newspaper El Nuevo Siglo gave no respite against the immorality that raged from the Casa de Nariño, and in one of them, shortly before he was killed, he said: “President Samper does not fall, nobody is knocking him down. But he can’t stay either ”.
And they killed him for saying that, the Regime killed him. And there is evidence that the DAS secret police followed him daily. To an impeccable politician, but above all to a journalist and a professor who was assassinated in the exercise of those two wonderful jobs. And from the beginning what took place in his case was a fraudulent and deliberate effort by the Prosecutor’s Office, with its successive attorneys general, to divert the investigation of the assassination.
Álvaro Gómez was kidnapped by the M-19, due to the pressure exerted and the negotiations carried out at that time, he was released, two months after being detained.
What a sad paradox! Álvaro Gómez was the one who proposed in the constituent the creation of the Attorney General’s Office, with the idea that this country would finally have a tangible, prompt and lasting version of what justice and the clarification of crimes is.
His remains in the most absolute impunity, after exactly 25 years of grotesque and malicious deviations.
To whom do these deviations suit? Who have been the bosses and beneficiaries of the justice operators who, instead of fulfilling their constitutional mission, dedicated themselves to concealing the true intellectual authors of the crime? That needs to be investigated. My family has requested it, as they also request that the indications that link Ernesto Samper to the assassination of my father be investigated.
But as if this story of impunity and injustice were missing some gruesome elements, now there is one more that is worth clarifying and discussing. Mrs. Piedad Córdoba, a well-known friend of Ernesto Samper, not to mention her other members of Unasur, says that He has proof that Álvaro Gómez was killed by the FARC. An old and absurd thesis that does not have the slightest evidence base.
Piedad Córdoba, a well-known friend of Ernesto Samper, says that she has proof that Álvaro Gómez Hurtado was killed by the FARC. An old and absurd thesis that does not have the slightest evidence base
Why now, after so many years, does Piedad Córdoba go out to shake such a delirium? Is it not up to every good citizen to go to the authorities, in this case the Attorney General’s Office, when they have information about the motives and authors of a murder? But there is an option, and that is that my father’s crime ends up in the JEP. There, one of the members of the Farc, the unimpeachable ‘Tirofijo’ or Senator Timochenko, could be accused and sentenced, and the case of Álvaro Gómez res judicata, also in the context of the transitional justice agreed in Havana and designed almost to the measure to guarantee impunity for guerrilla crimes.
One of the foundations of all justice, whether transitional or not, is the truth, not the lie.Because justice done with lies is a double injustice and it is the re-victimization of the victims, a crime no less infamous than the one that made them such. For this reason, and not for more, the peace process with the FARC had from the beginning the legitimacy problems that it has had, because people do not accept that impunity is the great political achievement of that agreement.
(You may be interested in: Investigator couple in the Gómez case is imprisoned for connection with ‘paras’)
But this of Piedad Córdoba in the case of Álvaro Gómez is very serious and the country must be warned, because a kind of factory of impunity and whitewashing of those accused of terrible crimes is being set up, crimes that can later be handed over to the FARC, even when they did not commit them, so that this franchise is also the wild card that allows many horrors to be judged from the lie by the JEP, to free their true intellectual authors from responsibility and punishment.
It would be terrible for something like this to happen: it would be the last blow to the legitimacy of a peace process that was so questioned from the beginning precisely for these reasons and that what it needs to consolidate is the truth and the forceful action of justice, not the opposite. Or are we going to end up in the worst of all possible worlds, with the FARC denying the crimes they did commit and claiming those they didn’t commit to clear the name and conscience of their true authors?
That of Mrs. Córdoba is one more of the many actions that have taken place in these 25 years to divert the investigations into my father’s crime. But this time the consequences may be irreparable, because what is sought is absolute and definitive impunity with the FARC front man, old friends of Mrs. Córdoba, not to commit the assassination, but to free those who do so from their guilt. they planned and executed it and never paid for it.
Live to see! Now it turns out that the Farc were the Regime or, even worse, now it turns out that the Farc cover it up. I hope the JEP and the Truth Commission and the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation do not lend themselves to such a crude hoax that once again and in a very painful way injures the memory of my father and that of all the victims on behalf of dismal and unworthy process 8,000.
MAURICIO GÓMEZ
Special for THE TIME
