Colombian Senator Demands President Duque Admit to State Crimes

Colombian senator Ivan Cepeda demanded President Ivan Duque take responsibility for the State crimes that his government does not recognize and have plunged into mourning thousands of South American families.

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Cepeda recalls in an open letter addressed to the president the direct responsibility of several governments for the deaths of thousands of citizens, but highlights two particular cases: the well-known Genocide of the Patriotic Union (UP) and the so-called false positives, with a total figure updated to more than six thousand after recent investigations by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).

The UP Genocide refers to the systematic murders during the 1980s and 1990s of more than three thousand demobilized members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who remained members of the party in civilian life. On the other hand, false positives is the term used to refer to civilians killed by the military and reported as enemy combatants to justify their deaths in the context of the internal conflict that confronted the State with guerrilla, paramilitary and criminal organizations.

"The time has come for you to recognize the victims of state crimes," Cepeda tells Duque in the letter and then urges him "to ask for forgiveness from the victims and their families," regardless of whether this compromises his political mentor, former President Álvaro Uribe.

Uribe headed the Colombian government from 2002 to 2010, a period in which, according to the JEP investigation, 6,402 false positives were registered. Still, he applauded the military's effectiveness in the fight against the insurgency under his policy known as democratic security and minimized the impact of those deaths.

The figure, the legislator, points out, means that during the six years of Alvaro Uribe Velez's governments, "every two days a young person was taken from his or her home to be manhandled, disguised and vilely murdered as part of this strategy."

Cepeda, a legislator for the Polo Democrático party, recalls in his text that Uribe ignored the crimes that compromised the government and its relationship with the paramilitary organizations. The senator considers Duque a continuator of Uribe's policies for refusing to recognize the referred State crimes and consequently condemning them.