▲ Gustavo Petro (left) and Salvatore Mancuso (center), who has been peace manager since 2022.Photo taken from Petro’s X account

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La Jornada Newspaper
Friday, October 4, 2024, p. 20

Bogota. After almost two decades, two former opponents met yesterday for the first time in Colombia: former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso and President Gustavo Petro, who was part of a guerrilla in his youth and later, as a congressman, denounced paramilitarism.

The meeting took place in the north of the country in Córdoba, capital of the department of Montería, where the paramilitaries stripped hundreds of peasants of their land before beginning a collective demobilization in the early 2000s.

The government indicated that nearly 8 thousand hectares of land that belonged to several former far-right paramilitary leaders in Córdoba will now be used for fix to his victims in the area.

This is a historic moment. Today, not only the victims to whom I caused so much pain and suffering are present, there is also a president who was part of the armed conflict, who was in the insurgency, who was a victim and military objective of the self-defense groups.said Mancuso, former leader of the defunct United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that fought leftist guerrillas.

Petro recalled that the last time he saw Mancuso was in 2004, when the then paramilitary chief went to Congress, in an episode later criticized for being an actor in the armed conflict who was barely negotiating peace.

What I said at the time was that it did not seem like a peace agreement between enemies, but rather a political-military alliance, and I dedicated myself in those years to discovering the links between the political leadership of the country and what was called at that time paramilitarism, which had devastated ColombiaPetro recalled.

But the scenario two decades later changed radically. Petro became the first progressive president in Colombia in 2022 and appointed Mancuso as peace manager, a figure that allows him to collaborate in the government’s approaches to armed groups, especially of paramilitary heritage, that still continue to commit crimes.

The former paramilitary returned to Colombia in February after being deported from the United States, where he was extradited in 2008 and later sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for having directed the manufacture and shipment of more than 100 thousand kilograms of cocaine.

In Colombia he was imprisoned for his outstanding debts with the justice system for more than 34,000 crimes – most of them by line of command – but in July a judge granted him freedom to serve as a peace manager.

Mancuso advocated for the installation of a negotiating table with the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, also known as the Clan del Golfo, of paramilitary heritage and the largest active cartel in the country that is not yet part of the politics of total peace with which Petro has promoted simultaneous conversations with various groups outside the law.

In the past, Petro proposed to the clan a collective appeal to justice that would have a legal negotiation with the prosecutor’s office in order to dismantle their illicit businesses, which has not been publicly accepted by the illegal group.

In yesterday’s speech, the president did not speak specifically about the Gulf Clan, but rather proposed more broadly to reactivate the peace table that had been opened with the paramilitaries at the beginning of this century when considering that The process has not ended, since the goods that you provided to justice have not been delivered to the victims of violence..

After the demobilization of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the former paramilitaries appear before a special court of justice in which they receive criminal benefits by recognizing crimes from the internal conflict.