The Truth Commission, established after the 2016 peace agreement, puts a face to the armed conflict in an 896-page report drawn over three years
“We bring a message of hope and a future for our broken and broken nation. Inconvenient truths that test our dignity, a message for everyone as human beings, beyond political or ideological options, cultures and religious beliefs, ethnic groups or gender. This is how the Jesuit Father Francisco de Roux, chairman of the Truth Commission, created in Colombia after the signing of the peace agreement in 2016, began his speech when he delivered the final report of a historical work in which it aims to tell the country the truth about what happened in 60 years of armed conflict. The data presented in the 896 page document is horrifying. Between 1985 and 2016, there were 450,666 deaths, eight million forced displacements and 50,770 kidnappings. But the main casualties were not combatants. They were civilians.
If the numbers give you goosebumps, Father De Roux’s speech is brutally harsh: “We call for the healing of the physical and symbolic, multicultural and multiethnic body that we form as citizens of this nation. Body that cannot survive a heart attack in Chocó, gangrenous arms in Arauca, destroyed legs in Mapiripán, severed head in El Salado, ruptured vagina in Tierralta, empty eye sockets in Cauca, ruptured stomach in Tumaco, shattered vertebrae in Guaviare, the displaced shoulders in Urabá, the severed neck in Catatumbo, the burnt face in Machuca, the pierced lungs in the mountains of Antioquia and the destroyed native soul in Vaupés».
The report makes it clear that the paramilitaries, guerrillas, armed forces, drug traffickers and the police are most responsible for such atrocities. The Truth Commission focuses its study on the period between 1958 and 2016, adding to the tragedy experienced by the Colombian people, reflecting a death toll reaching 700,000, most of them youths and farmers, 110,000 people considered missing and only 1.5% died in the battle. “We can talk about a genocide in Colombia,” assured Gustavo Petro, the president-elect for the next four years, who attended the event along with Vice President Francia Márquez.
The Commission places the conflict’s most violent period between 1995 and 2004, when 45% of the 450,666 murders were committed. The report asserts that everything was due in part to “a strategy of terror paralleled by the time of the greatest expansion and territorial confrontation of the armed groups and in particular paramilitarism.”
At the same time, the Commission recommended that the new government change its security policy, implement an authentic rural reform and conclude a peace agreement with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN). In the words of Father De Roux, Colombia must reject violence as a means of resolving its conflict: “We call for awareness that our way of looking at the world and interacting with each other is stuck in a ‘war mode’ in which we cannot conceive become Others think differently.”
In this regard, the final report specifies that the most widespread way of waging war in Colombia has been to eliminate all those considered “enemies”, and recalls the complete extermination of the Patriotic Union political group. “We are convinced that there is a way to build together in the midst of our legitimate differences,” the Commission president said hopefully.
The study was carried out after three years of work by the Commission, the main key of which was to put victims at the center of the peace agreement to lay the groundwork for reconciliation. The international community, including the UN Verification Mission and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner, welcomed the report and invited Colombians to accept the truth, announcing its unreserved support for the consolidation of peace and for guarantee the rights of victims.
The path of dialogue culminated this Wednesday with the meeting between Gustavo Petro and Álvaro Uribe, considered the man who has led the country in the shadows in recent years. Petro also met with Rodolfo Hernández, who was his opponent in the June 19 elections.
Source: La Verdad
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