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In addition to the surprising admission of responsibility in the assassination of Álvaro Gómez, which almost 25 years later takes a dramatic turn in terms of possible perpetrators, the FARC announced in a letter to the Special Jurisdiction of Peaceor intention to recognize five other deaths that marked the worst decades of the war in the country.
(Also read: ‘It was a mistake to assassinate a politician of the stature of Álvaro Gómez’: Farc)
The murders of the former professor of the National University Jesús Antonio Bejarano (1999), of the former Army Commander and former Defense Minister Fernando Landazábal Reyes (1995); ex-congressman Pablo Emilio Guarín (1987) and two guerrilla leaders (Hernando Pizarro Leongómez and José Fedor Rey (alias Javier Delgado) are also on the list that the FARC leaders commit to fully confess.
(In context: Farc acknowledges responsibility in the homicide of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado and five other cases)
Except in the case of Gómez and, to a lesser extent, in that of Bejarano, In the other files, that guerrilla had been singled out for the murders. This is what was in those processes so far.
1. The hypotheses in the assassination of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado
The former presidential candidate and former constituent Álvaro Gómez Hurtado was assassinated by hitmen in Bogotá in the midst of the 8,000 crisis.
The assassination of the former presidential candidate and former president of the National Constituent Assembly Álvaro Gómez Hurtado shook Colombia on November 2, 1995, In the midst of the crisis of the Samper Pizano government due to the scandal of the infiltration of the Cali cartel in his presidential campaign the previous year (the famous 8,000 Process).
Throughout a quarter of a century, the hypotheses had moved between an alleged crime of the State – the family maintains that high figures of the current government saw Álvaro Gómez as their main critic-; a murder committed because Gómez refused to support an alleged coup attempt against Samper (the thesis of the same former president, who states that the assassination also sought to hasten his fall from power), and a crime perpetrated by the paramilitaries and the Norte del Norte cartel Valle to favor high-ranking politicians of the time (supported by the version given at the time by the late former head of the Auc Carlos Castaño and mentioned by some capos from the north of the Valley as ‘Rasguño’).
(Read also: Drug trafficking bosses cited to testify in the Gómez Hurtado case)
The hypothesis of the FARC’s authorship is surprising because until now there was not a single strong indication towards that guerrilla in the investigation of the assassination. In fact, lÁlvaro Gómez’s family described it as “outrageous” and maintains that it would seek, through the mediation of Piedad Córdoba, supposedly favoring former President Ernesto Samper.
At the time of the crime, the Farc began its worst warlike scale with the great takeovers of towns and military bases. And as for their relations with Álvaro Gómez, they always saw him as one of the great ideologues and leaders of the establishment. In fact, they were openly hostile to him for decades, largely due to his condition as the son of former President Laureano Gómez, one of the toughest leaders of the last century in Colombia and a front-line protagonist in the well-known era of La Violencia.
(Also read: ‘Infamous hypothesis’: son of Álvaro Gómez on the declaration of Piedad Córdoba)
But Álvaro Gómez Hurtado of the late 1980s and early 1990s was seen by the Colombian left as a respected opponent. More since his participation in the 1991 Constituent Assembly and after his intense work to get the country to begin to change the power structures that he called “the regime.” Because It is surprising that the FARC have participated in that assassination and that is why the country will continue with a magnifying glass the confessions of the guerrilla leaders who have announced their intention to speak to the JEP.
Furthermore, the confession of the Farc opens a new chapter for Héctor Paúl Flórez Martínez, the only one convicted of the assassination and who pays 40 years in prison.
Last year the Supreme Court refused to review the conviction. But now the surviving evidence represented by the FARC’s confession could overturn the process of a man who has been denying for decades.
2. The crime of the ‘teacher’ Bejarano
Jesús Antonio Bejarano was a liberal politician who was at the forefront of the first attempts at peace with the guerrillas in the 90s.
The crime of Jesús Antonio Bejarano, in September 1999, is another of the thousands perpetrated in the hardest years of the war in Colombia that remain in impunity.
It was an attack by hitmen in the capital of the country and only so far has there been an open recognition by the Farc that their claws were behind the death of one of the men who, paradoxically, fought the most for peace in Colombia.
Until now there were versions off the record and some deductions: these pointed out that some of the most warlike sectors of the Farc considered Bejarano an enemy because he ended up accepting the presidency of the Colombian Farmers Society (SAC), which at the time was one of the toughest union organizations in the world. against the guerrillas.
Bejarano, according to several of his close associates, considered this opportunity as a door to bring new ideas to a rocky organization. But a few months before his death he resigned from the SAC, precisely because of those tensions with the agricultural establishment, which he considered too “left-wing.”
Jesús Antonio Bejarano was an academic of peace. An economist and professor at the National University, at the beginning of the 1990s he embarked on the search for peace with the guerrillas and his signature appears in the agreements that led to the demobilization of the EPL in the Gaviria government.
He was also an official negotiator in the negotiations of Tlaxcala and Caracas with the National Guerrilla Coordination, which did not end in anything and which were the immediate antecedent of the worst violent escalation of the Farc in history: the bloody takeovers of the second half of the 90s that left hundreds of civilians, police and military dead and at least 300 kidnapped soldiers.
3. The murder of Landazábal
The government of Belisario Betancur sought peace with the FARC guerrillas and reached an agreement in 1984. General Fernando Landazabal, commander of the Army, was a staunch opponent of this process.
Archive / TIME
When General Fernando Landazábal Reyes was killed during his morning walk in May 1998, no one hesitated to target the FARC.
At that time, Landazábal had retired from the Army for more than a decade, a weapon in which he was one of the most powerful generals for years and, without a doubt, one of the clear exponents of the ‘hard line’. The hit men used by the Farc killed him a few cases from his apartment in the north of Bogotá and the pair of bodyguards he had at the time could do little to prevent it.
Landazábal was the typical Latin American military man of the Cold War era. Trained in the famous School of the Americas in the United States, he saw any peace negotiation with the leftist guerrillas as a surrender of the State and that is why, as Minister of Defense, he opposed the process that his boss, President Belisario Betancur, it started with all the subversive groups since he became president in 1982.
The peace of Belisario even reached the signing of agreements with the FARC and the M-19, but it did not have solid foundations. The political and military opposition led the president to remove Landazábal from his post as commander of the Army, but in the end the process failed because both from the establishment side and from the guerrillas the most warlike sectors always prevailed.
At the end of the Betancur government, the bloody takeover of the M-19 of the Palace of Justice occurred, and all the agreements with the guerrilla groups exploded in the Barco government. In all that time, and during the following years, Fernando Landazábal continued to be a recognized officer among the Colombian military and in the sectors of the right.
And, as confirmed now with the confession of the FARC chiefs, his name never left the list of enemies of that guerrilla, who murdered him when he was approaching 80 years of age.
4. The case of Guarín, the ideologue of the self-defense groups
In the Magdalena Medio, the country’s first large paramilitary armies were formed in the 1980s.
Carlos Garcia / AFP – Archive / EL TIEMPO
Pablo Emilio Guarín was one of the ideologues of the Self-Defense Forces of Magdalena Medio, the same ones that marked the first stage of paramilitarism in Colombia and that ended up being the protagonists in the murder of Luis Carlos Galán.
They killed him in 1997 as a representative to the Chamber for the Liberal Party and throughout this time always It was certain that the hit men who shot him were at the service of the Farc.
Guarín was one of the men closest to Henry de Jesús Pérez, the man who proclaimed Puerto Boyacá in the 1980s as the ‘anti-subversive capital of Colombia’ and who was the country’s first great paramilitary boss. He was the one who brought the Israeli mercenary Yair Klein to train the first ‘paras’ gangs and one of their hitmen, Jaime Eduardo Rueda Rocha, was the murderer of Luis Carlos Galán on August 18, 1989 in the Plaza de Soacha.
After Pérez’s assassination, a new paramilitary generation led by the brothers Fidel, Vicente and Carlos Castaño began to rise and ended up turning the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Auc) into an irregular army of national scope.
Although it was known that the Farc had assassinated Guarín, the versions that will reach the JEP should provide greater elements of truth about the crimes of the Farc in that stage of the formation of the first paramilitary armies in the country.
5. The internal purges of the FARC
Guerrillas from the Felipe Rincón Front walk through a camp of the Eastern Bloc, Jorge Briceño.
To Hernando Pizarro Leongomez, brother of the renowned academic Eduardo Pizarro and the murdered former head of the M-19 Carlos Pizarro Leongomez, he was assassinated in February 1995 in the north of Bogotá in a false CTI operation.
Hernando Pizarro and one of his lieutenants, Jose Fedor Rey (alias Javier Delgado) were the heads of the Ricardo Franco group, a dissident of the Farc in Cauca that at the time terrorized the country when the summary trials were known in which it was ordered the murder of at least 160 members of that guerrilla, most of them indigenous. Many of them were massacred with a club and with knives. That episode is known in the history of the war in Colombia as the Tacueyó massacre.
At the time, there was speculation with an alleged official complicity in the murder of Pizarro, But now the FARC confirm the strongest version: that they executed the death sentence that had been imposed on the two leaders of Ricardo Franco.
In the case of José Fedor Rey, he was captured in 1995 and sentenced to less than 20 years despite acknowledging his responsibility in the hundreds of murders in Tacueyó.
When he was beginning to contemplate the possibility of going free due to reduced sentences and other judicial gabelas, he was assassinated in his cell in the Palmira prison. They found him hanged and from the first moment the investigation pointed to the Farc. Now that hypothesis is confirmed.
ELTIEMPO.COM WRITING
