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Next Monday, February 8, the Inter-American Court will finally see victims of the Patriotic Union, delegates of the Colombian State and experts face to face. What is at stake is the largest ongoing lawsuit in that international court and that the responsibility of the State in the extermination of an entire political group is recognized, or discarded.
At eight in the morning next Monday, February 8, from San José (Costa Rica), but with active virtual participation from Colombia, an international audience expected for 28 years will begin. At the request of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a four-day debate will begin on a crucial issue in the memory of Colombia: the responsibility of the State in the extermination of the Patriotic Union (UP), a political party that emerged in a peace agreement in 1985, which today accredits 6,002 victims of massacres, murders, disappearances, exiles, attacks and threats.
(Also read: What did Virgilio Barco have to do with the extermination of the Patriotic Union?)
The hearing will begin with the explanations of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to access the case, a decision adopted in December 2017 but rejected by the Colombian State in May 2018. It will immediately lead to a debate that, despite the briefness of the interventions , has historical perspectives. A hearing of experts that will be held among the representative voices of the UP divided into three groups of victims, with few minutes to summarize before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights their long history of resistance to impunity.
The memory of the Patriotic Union chapter, conceived in the peace agreement between Belisario Betancur and the Farc in 1985, which had its creation congress in Bogotá on November 16, a week after the holocaust at the Palace of Justice. His first electoral participation was in the legislative elections of March 11, 1986, when, through his own lists and alliances, he obtained seats for five senators and nine representatives to the Chamber. Later he obtained 18 legislative seats in departmental assemblies and more than 300 seats in municipal councils.
(You may be interested: “You cannot talk about a State strategy for the UP genocide”: Carlos Osaa)
However, before it was constituted as a political movement, the UP members began to be killed. In his records, he details that, prior to his first electoral incursion, they already counted 247 victims among militants, activists, leaders and candidates. After the March 1986 elections, in the first months of the Barco era, three of the elected legislators were assassinated: representatives to the Chamber Leonardo Posada Pedraza and Octavio Vargas Cuéllar and Senator Pedro Nel Jiménez Obando. The following year, his first presidential candidate was sacrificed: Jaime Pardo Leal.
UP leaders denounced extermination plans entangled in cobwebs of dirty war, but instead of the violence against their militants being stopped or the justice punishing those responsible, the terror increased with victims of massacres, selective murders, enforced disappearances and exiles. The success of the UP in the first popular election of mayors, in March 1988, in the northeast of Antioquia, Urabá and Meta led to an attack against its political bases, with a string of massacres that left the portrait of a violent time that ended in the assassination of his second presidential candidate: Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, in 1990.
(Also read: The open wound of the Patriotic Union)
In UP accounts, there were more than a thousand dead, including mayors, councilors, deputies, agrarian leaders, representatives, council governors and, of course, congressmen. In the midst of this offensive, for obvious reasons, his electoral setback was inevitable. Although she intervened in the 1991 constitution through delegate Aída Avella, she also maintained legislative participation in the Gaviria era and continued to add victims in the territories. The new justice institutions did not make any major progress against impunity, as there was no containment of the State against new crimes.
Faced with the state of defenselessness and the lack of responses from the State to the complaints against the extermination plans, the Reinzando Corporation, guided by Jahel Quiroga, former councilman of Barrancabermeja (Santander), filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to evaluate the State responsibility. His supporters kept falling and the world should know what was happening with the UP. The action was filed on December 16, 1993, one month after the crime of the communist leader José Miller Chacón in Bogotá and almost in the same week that former congressman Henry Millán was assassinated in Florencia (Caquetá).
(You may be interested: Extermination of the UP goes to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights)
At the dawn of the Samper era, Senator Manuel Cepeda Vargas also fell in Bogotá. Measures were reinforced, but the list of homicides did not stop and many leaders in the municipalities were killed. From north to south, from west to east, there was political violence against their militancy, with the only expectation of justice centered on the petition filed with the Commission, which was delayed in opening the case until 1997, when the FARC added prisoners of war to their pressure for a swap and paramilitarism made their way to the point of selective assassinations and massacres, with many victims of the UP.
In a context of peace talks with the insurgency, when the days of the Pastrana government arrived, the Colombian State and the Reinzando Corporation accepted the Inter-American Court’s suggestion to initiate a friendly settlement process and thus avoid the route of international justice. The initiative resulted in an agreement signed in 2000, which implemented a protection system and showed a willingness to seek solutions, but it was that momentum that began to falter when the Uribe era arrived and the dialogues cracked, until the definitive breakdown of the option of the friendly settlement in 2006.
The defiant stance of the Uribe government to distort the memory of the UP during its re-election campaign contributed to this slam, by including disorienting propaganda about the true causes of its difficult political transition. Some time later, the political leader Iván Cepeda (son of Manuel Cepeda) managed to get the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to resolve the dispute over the murder of his father in his favor and during the act in which the Colombian State had to ask for forgiveness, the president Uribe did so reluctantly and, against the evidence, expressed his doubts about the State’s responsibility for the crime.
With no solution in sight, the discussion of the UP chapter was subject to the repetition of violence, the reluctance of justice and the ups and downs of war and peace on the political scene. In the Uribe era, as a result of the issuance of the Justice and Peace Law, created to implement the troubled process of negotiation with the paramilitaries, it was even suggested that this way the matter be settled. Some time later, in the development of the negotiation process in Havana between the Santos government and the FARC, the idea of the path of transitional justice resurfaced to solve it once and for all.
In both cases, the position of the victims was to insist on the route of the Inter-American Commission, from the perspective that their rights are non-negotiable and that there must be authentic reparation for the damage suffered. In Havana, with the expectation of reviving the option of a friendly solution, there was even a waiting period for the government and the FARC to set up a space for the victims of the UP; But when it became clear that the case was not being resolved in Cuba and a decision on the merits could not be delayed, in December 2017, the Inter-American Commission produced its admissibility report.
A forceful document with express recommendations to the Colombian State to correct errors, promote justice, promote truth and, above all, repair. But the National Agency for Legal Defense of the State, with arguments more defensive of public finances than interested in restoring rights, decided not to abide by it. For this reason, it is now in the hands of the Inter-American Court and the immovable of the victims is the same: reparation. There are dilemmas associated with their lists and demands for them to be refined, but in support of their claim, thirty boxes were sent to the Court with all the possible documentation, collected over many years in the territories.
In that time consuming task, contradictions have arisen. The Restart Corporation has sustained the case for 28 years and that effort has meant hiring lawyers, psychologists and human rights experts, in addition to promoting meetings in the regions in search of testimonies. But at the time Iván Cepeda opted for his own litigation, and the same decision was adopted by a group of relatives of victims in Antioquia, led by Consuelo Arbeláez, widow of the leader Gabriel Jaime Santamaría, murdered in Medellín in 1989; and also Gloria Mancilla, widow of the leader Miguel Ángel Díaz, who disappeared in May 1984.
This explains why, during the hearing from February 8 to 12, the three groups must divide the time allotted to the victims, in equal proportions to the Inter-American Commission and the Colombian State. However, between differences and agreements, both have a similar perspective: many victims died waiting for justice and reparation; others are in a wheelchair, ill or sick with old age; most have not had health services, many are still persecuted or could not return from exile; But they all hope that the State will finally recognize its responsibility.
“Colombia will not achieve peace and reconciliation without clarifying the UP (chapter),” said Congressman Iván Cepeda in 2011, in another act of recognition by the State for the murder of his father. That event involved a victim who moves in high political circles. Now it is a question of adopting a decision regarding 6,002 more militants, 476 for cases of disappearance, 3,098 for homicide and a few others for various human rights violations. The State knows what that means in terms of dignified reparation and wants to convince the Court that the path is transitional justice; But the victims have been waiting for justice for almost thirty years.
