THE ETHICAL COLLAPSE OF "JUSTICE"HAS REACHED THE
"INFORMATION" MEDIA
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, a Colombia Support Network volunteer
translator)
A new attack against our Peace Community is trying to destroy our ethical
endowment in the eyes of national and international public opinion. The
attack
uses methods that are inconceivably perverted and mean. It took place last
May 28, 2009 at 6:10 a.m., when President Uribe's ex-Minister of Interior
and Justice, FERNANDO LONDOÑO HOYOS, interviewed the ex guerilla
commander alias "SAMIR" on his radio program "The Hour of Truth",
broadcast by Radio Super. "SAMIR" commanded the Otoniel Alvarez
Company of the FARC's 5th front. He had turned himself in to the Army last
November 2008.
That interview thoroughly resembled a script agreed-upon beforehand, aimed
at the defamation of the people of our Community. It was saturated with
lies,
slanders, manipulations and treacherous comments, overflowing with hate. It
was impossible to conceal their fury toward a group of victims that they are
trying to disparage, with the confessed purpose of discouraging any kind of
solidarity with them and also of misrepresenting their determined battle for
justice and truth.
The country is only too well aware of the ways and the approach taken by ex
Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS, who has certainly not distinguished himself by
his respect for universal and elemental ethical principles. In 1997, he
acquired
145 million shares in INVERCOLSA fraudulently, by passing himself off as
an employee of the company, when he was not one, and then rapidly
transferring the money to a Panamanian company. That led to judicial and
disciplinary procedures that were finally resolved by the Constitutional
Court
in August of 2007, a resolution that required him to return the money. The
situation had already resulted in a censure motion by the Congress, obliging
him to resign his position as Minister on November 6, 2006.
Neither is the country unaware of the ideological positions of ex-Minister
LONDOÑO HOYOS. These have been characterized by his defense of
authoritarian models of government and society; by his exaltation of
militarism and of resolving social conflicts by force; by intransigent
defense
of soldiers accused of crimes against humanity and of virulent attacks
against
prosecutors, judges and courts that have allowed charges against killers
allied
with the government and with the "para-government" to proceed to judgment.
In his column that appears in El Tiempo and El Colombiano, he has
shamelessly defended persons accused of horrendous crimes and attacked the
prosecutors who have pursued the cases. He defended the signers of the
Ralito Agreement (El Colombiano, July 31, 2007, page 4a); he attacked the
Attorney General for charging the soldiers in the Jamundi case and for
charging the ex-director of DAS (Colombian FBI) Jorge Noguera; for
pursuing the "false positives" cases and the massacres at San José de
Apartadó, at Santo Domingo and at Cajamarca (El Colombiano, February 27,
2007, March 6, 2007, and March 13, 2007, pages 4a).
He has even attacked the ex-director of DAS Andrés Peñate for taking a
position contrary to that of his predecessor Jorge Noguera, because Noguera
was close to President Uribe (El Colombiano, March 20, 2007, page 4a). He
has defended the multinational Chiquita Brands for its support of the
paramilitaries in Urabá (El Tiempo, March 29, 2007, pages 1-23); he
defended the "Operation Fenix" that violated the sovereignty of Ecuador (El
Tiempo, November 20, 2008, pages 1-21) and he has supported the
questionable thesis of ex-Minister Juan Manuel Santos of "legitimate
defense"
in that attack (El Tiempo, March 12, 2009, pages 1-21).
He accepted the versions that favored those accused of huge massacres,
contrary to the evidence known to the whole country: Jamundi, the 19
merchants killed in Magdalena Medio, Wilson Borja, Chengue, Santo
Domingo, Drummond, Palace of Justice, Mapiripán, La Llorona, the "false
positives", Cajamarca, etc. (El Tiempo, February 28, 2009, pages 1-21). He
went after President Uribe himself, with hammer and tongs, because he fired
27 military officers accused of participating in "false positives", and
after the
Court in Cundinamarca that ordered the prohibition of bombing areas with
civilian population (El Tiempo, February 12, 2009, pages 1-21). His defense
of these officers is brazen, arbitrarily and irrationally smearing all
of the
evidence that points to them as actors or accomplices in these great state
crimes. It demonstrates that the only thing that makes an impression on him,
even then very abstractly, are the violent acts of the guerrillas.
Confronted by
the millions of victims of the agents of the government and of the
"paragovernment", he demonstrates only lassitude, and hatred focused on
those who complain of those actions.
Against the backdrop of these, his positions, known to the entire
country, we
can understand his hatred and virulence against our PEACE COMMUNITY.
We have been the victims of the criminality of the armed forces and their
paramilitary accomplices, and we have made complaints of these crimes
without backing down, both nationally and internationally. That is what most
wears down ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS and drives him out of his mind.
It makes him explode with the most extreme manifestations of hatred and
intolerance, resorting, as he knows how to do, to the most infamous devices
of lying, defamation, manipulation, deceit, dissimulation, tricks, and
scheming.
The individual he interviewed, alias "SAMIR", who may, according to the
Army, actually be named "DAFNIS DANIEL SIERRA MARTÍNEZ", says
that he joined the FARC guerrillas in 1985, desiring to meet good-looking
women and because he enjoyed using weapons. If he had any social or
political motivation, the interview did not reveal it. He was known in
the area
of San José de Apartadó since the end of the '90's as the commander of the
"Otoniel Alvarez Company", part of the Fifth Front of the FARC. His troops
moved around the ranges of the Abibe Mountains, in rural areas near San José
de Apartadó. After the creation of our Peace Community in March of
1997,his "Otoniel Alvarez Company" murdered more than 30 residents of San
José de Apartadó. Our Community condemned these actions energetically and
filed public complaints, as our communication records show.
On May 4, 1997, they killed Liliana Londoño; On October 6, 1997, they killed
three of our first leaders: Ramiro Correa, Fernando Aguirre, and Luis
Fernando Espinoza; On January 18, 1998, they killed Giovanny Lora; On
October 24, 1998, they killed Elkin Emilio Sepúlveda; In September, 1999,
they killed William Gonzalez David, along with his 8[year-old son, Juan
Carlos
Sierra; On January 12, 2000, they killed at different times and in different
places, Wilson Martinez and Duvalier Torres;
In February of 2000 they killed Jaime Garcia; On July 16, 2000 they killed
Fredy Mazo; In September of 2000 they killed Alberto Restrepo. In the same
year 2000, they killed, on different dates, Alvaro Largo and Antonio
Borja. On
August 18, 2001, they killed two refreshment vendors in the town of
Caracoli; On December 15, 2001, they killed Henry Tuberquia; On June 21,
2002,they killed Aleyda Areiza; On July 28, 2002, they killed Jorge Eliécer
Atehortúa; In the same month of July 2002, they killed Pedro Vargas; In
October 2002, they killed Inés Jimenez, along with her two small
children, in
the town of El Porvenir. In the same year of 2002, they "disappeared"
Gustavo Guzmán; On November 17, 2004, they killed Amador Delgado; On
December 6, 2004, they killed three indigenous people from the Embera
Community at Las Playas, near San José: Arturo Domicó, Misael Domicó,
and Horacio Bailarín; On August 13, 2005, they killed Carlos Lopez; On
September 15, 2005, they killed Ángela Correa; In 2006, they killed Germán
Sepúlveda.
Our Community was also informed that this same Company had killed a
daughter of Mrs. Margarita Ciro and a driver with the last name of Muñoz in
the town of El Guineo. They gave him a trial of just a few minutes. They
also
killed a man they had kidnapped and then set free, only to murder him. Every
time that members of our Peace Community met him or members of his
Company, they begged him not to shed any more blood. They told him that if
he had evidence that paramilitaries were infiltrating our Peace
Community, as
they were saying, they ought to present some proof and the Peace
Community would exclude them, because the Community does not admit
armed actors and does not collaborate with them. Nevertheless, that
Company continued murdering members of our group until 2006.
Alias "SAMIR" surrendered to the Army's 17th Brigade, headquartered in
Carepa, Antioquia, in November of 2008. Surprisingly, and contrary to their
usual procedure, none of the communications media reported this surrender
until five months later. Members of the Apartadó Diocese, members of
international organizations, and occasional guests who visited the 17th
Brigade
during that time, noticed his presence at the military headquarters. Nobody
knew why they didn't follow the normal procedure in Article 4 of Decree 128
of 2003, where the steps to follow in case of an individual 4 demobilization
are established. It states: "Once the demobilized individual has been
received
by the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Interior shall be
informed
within three working days, and the individual is to be turned over to the
Ministry within no more than 15 days. The physical delivery of the
demobilized individual is
to be carried out with a certificate containing all of his personal
data, his
fingerprints, and the circumstances of his demobilization from the armed
group to which he belonged. (Paragraph 1.) In order to advance the
necessary investigation and clarify the juridical situation of persons
benefiting
from this Decree, the Ministry of the Interior is to coordinate with the
Attorney General and the Board of Judges to designate prosecutors and
judges."
In open violation of these rules, alias "SAMIR" has remained at 17th Brigade
headquarters. This is not the first time this has happened. Many demobilized
individuals in the region have been housed at those headquarters and have
taken part illegally in combat activities with the Army and frequently
in the
commission of crimes against the civilian population, such as bargained-for
exchanges of the benefits that they receive there. Not only that, ever since
our Peace Community has existed, officials of that Brigade have forced the
supposedly "demobilized" individuals to collaborate in the extermination
of our
Community. That collaboration has included providing false declarations to
the prosecutors co-opted by the Brigade; patrolling together with the
soldiers
in rural areas and threatening many farmers with "filing false charges
against
them or executing them"; inviting many of them to abandon the Peace
Community, telling them that they ought to "demobilize", though they had no
reason to, since they had never been combatants.
The same pressures were used against people who were illegally detained at
the Brigade Headquarters: they blackmailed Gloria Tuberquia, telling her
that
she would lose her 9- month-old daughter if she did not sign the accusations
that they put before her and if she did not "demobilize", although she
was not
a combatant; after they murdered her fouryear- old son, they made Liliana
Rojas sign illegal declarations and then they added numerous pages of
accusations that she did not make and did not even know about. The false
declarations of these two victims were used in numerous criminal files as
"proof" against residents of the region.
Similarly, they got false and "paid-for" declarations by extortion from
Heliodoro Benitez, Wilmar Durango, Samuel Antonio Tuberquia, Wilson
Guzman, William Guzman, Elkin Dario Tuberquia, Apolinar Guerra, Carlos
Alberto Garcia, Jorge Eliécer Palacio, Luis Alberto Pino, William Montoya,
Henry Guzman and the Ovidio brothers, Lubin and Albeiro Cardona Borja. We
have seen some of them lying without any shame to the powerful
communications media, and we have read their false declarations that turn up
in numerous files, falsehoods, all of them, that have been accepted as
judicial
"proof" by our corrupt judiciary, without any respect for the most
elementary
rules and criteria contained in the Code of Criminal Procedure.
All of this has been reported to the highest courts in the country, but
up to
now we have not seen any willingness to do justice. It is painful to see
how,
in a number of these cases, the moral conscience of these peasant farmers
falsely "demobilized" has been violated and broken down by perverse
psychological procedures. In some of the cases, they were promised rewards
but have not received them. After using them vilely as throwaway
instruments in the service of the plan to exterminate our Community, they
abandon them when their crude mistakes have taken them to prison. Some of
them have now confessed these mistakes, regretting to see that their
selfimage
has been converted into a moral waste.
Since 1995, when ex-General Rito Alejo del Rio served as Commander of the
17th Brigade of the Colombian Army, violence increased enormously in our
region and the population of San José de Apartadó was the victim of
numerous executions, massacres, disappearances, tortures, arbitrary
detentions and threats. Since the birth of our Peace Community, in March of
1997, the 17th Brigade has spared no effort to exterminate it, first with
bombing in all of the small towns, massive forced displacements, rapes and
sexual abuse, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, burning of
houses, destruction of crops, tortures, death threats, announcements of
extermination, judicial scams, illegal and arbitrary arrests, campaigns of
defamation, and pressure on institutions and social groups to isolate the
Community and remove any legal services, theft of pack animals, of work
tools, of household goods, of energy production, of school staff, of
shipments of community commercial products and of money earned by that
commerce.
When the scandalous number of massacres, executions and disappearances
carried out by agents, directly and indirectly, of the government—a number
that now exceeds 160 victims—the international community took notice. The
Brigade then initiated an obvious intensification of disparagement and false
prosecutions of the members of our Peace Community and of the
surrounding population. They used false charges, as demonstrated by the
super-corrupt criminal cases whose analysis we referred to the high courts a
few months ago.
When President Uribe began his first term in 2002,he proposed to crush the
most basic principles of our Community, that of refusing to live or to
collaborate with any armed actor. That meant that the Peace Community
would not take part in the plan for military/paramilitary control of the
area.
For that reason they developed a campaign intended to make people think that
our Community was part of the FARC guerrillas. That would help them to
justify the presence of the armed forces on all the life and work in our
Community, and through that, the paramilitary control of the territory. The
infamous calumnies against our Community on May 27, 2004 and March 20,
2005 obliged us to seek the aid of the House of Representatives Accusation
Committee, requesting that it sanction the Chief of State as required by
Decision T-1191 /04 of the Constitutional Court. The Procurator General
supported our petition, given that President Uribe had used false witnesses
prepared by the 17th Brigade in order to put together his defamatory
statements.
The attacks on our Community, on the part of the President and Vice
President, as well as by the Army and those judicial officials co-opted
by the
military, have had an unmistakable purpose: to exterminate our leaders and
principal associates, and, if it is not possible to eliminate them, to
destroy their
moral reputations and so to prepare the justification for exterminating
them.
The 17th Brigade prepared a phony scheme on February 12, 2003, when they
tried to kill two members of our Internal Council when they were riding in a
bus between Apartadó and San José by placing a box of explosives in the
interior of the bus in order to justify the crime. This clearly revealed
what
General Pauxelino Latorre, then-commander of the 17th Brigade, was
planning. He wanted to accuse the Internal Council of our Community of
furnishing explosives to the guerrillas and thus have all the members
charged
falsely with crimes. A few days before they had blackmailed a young man
from our Community by means of a collaborator from the Brigade, Wilson
Guzman. They made him file complaints with the prosecutors in Apartadó
against all the leaders of our Community, alleging false crimes. They
threatened him that, if he did not do it, they would accuse him of being a
"miliciano" (guerrilla) and they would charge him immediately, using other
false witnesses.
In spite of the clumsiness of the phony complaints and in spite of the fact
that all the government authorities were immediately informed of what was
going on, General Latorre published communications via internet in which he
accused the leaders of our Community of being "members of the Otoniel
Alvarez Front of the FARC". These communications then served as the basis
for "intelligence reports" and for "battle orders" furnished by the
Brigade to
prosecutors and judges. The super-corrupt judicial officials in the
region used
them as "judicial proof". Ever since then, the names of all of our
leaders and
supporters appear in numerous judicial files, with information extracted
from
the papers that the Brigade passes around, along with the names of numerous
"witness statements", all prepared at military headquarters to provide false
testimony.
We view the surrender of alias "SAMIR" to the 17th Brigade and his illegal
stay there for many months as one more event that follows the old script and
strategy. The only thing new is the rank of the demobilized individual,
in that
this time it is the commander of an insurgent company. Everything that has
led up to this supports the belief that he is being used to advantage
for the
accomplishment of their long-time plan to exterminate our Peace Community.
This is especially true when we see that his surrender took place at the
time
of the disparagement and false judicial complaints, the contribution to
which
of such deserter could be of exceptional importance if they are careful to
offer him rewards and benefits. His interview by ex-Minister LONDOÑO
HOYOS might have had some credibility if it had happened the same day as
his surrender, when it might be supposed that there was some degree of
spontaneity. But after five months of negotiation and preparation at the
military headquarters where they have produced such a number of criminally
false complaints, its credibility collapses.
Actually, the euphoria of the military has been high in the last few
months, to
judge by the comments and messages that are left on roads and in towns by
the military and paramilitary patrols that have been making the rounds
in the
area. They announce that "At last the final thrust has arrived for the Peace
Community." The excess of euphoria has been such that COLONEL
GERMÁN ROJAS DÍAZ, commander of the Voltígeros ("Specially chosen")
Battalion that controls the area of San José de Apartadó, was not ashamed to
telephone a former member of the Internal Council of our Community, on
January 17 and February 7, 2009, and propose that he collaborate in the
final
extermination of the Peace Community, offering him a large amount of
money, and threatening that, if he did not accept, they would accuse him of
"financing Front 58 of the FARC, and also of being a drug trafficker". What
leaves us perplexed is that all of this is known to the Ministry of
Defense, to
the national and regional (Antioquia) offices of the Attorney General,
and to
the Public Defender's Office, and there has been no punishment whatsoever
for the authors and accomplices of such filthy and execrable actions. The
ethical collapse of this government could not be more evident. The command
responsibility of the 17th Brigade has not been questioned about this
corruption and now it has been proved that they were busy negotiating with
alias "SAMIR" for his contribution to the defamation campaign against our
Peace Community.
Working hard, as the military has always been, to attack mainly the leaders
of our Community, now it becomes clear that with alias "SAMIR" they have
negotiated a frontal attack on three of our supporters: Eduar Lanchero,
Doctor Gloria Cuartas, the ex- Mayor of Apartadó, and the Jesuit priest,
Javier Giraldo. They have already succeeded in physically eliminating one of
our historically most valued leaders: Luis Eduardo Guerra, in the horrendous
massacre of February 21, 2005. Not long ago, they tried to eliminate the
present legal representative of our Community, Jesús Emilio Tuberquia, on
November 1, 2008.
In the case of EDUAR, we understand that they had asked alias "SAMIR" to
create such a flagrant contrivance against him because the military urgently
needed to justify the numerous efforts they had already made to eliminate
him. Eduar was sent to our Community by the religious congregations that
make up the Commission for Justice and Peace in 1997, in those first months
in which we suffered the massive displacements resulting from the bombings
by the Army and the incursions coordinated by the paramilitaries. He stayed
with us in the most painful moments and he helped us bury our dead and
organize our survival in the midst of terror and food blockades.
Our Community begged him to stay longer, and he became as one of us. On
May 24, 1998, a group of soldiers from the 17th Brigade promised that they
would cut him in pieces, just as they had cut up a cow that they stole and
killed with a bullet that same day. On December 2, 2002, the Highway Police
on the outskirts of Tunja arrested Eduar arbitrarily, along with Luis
Eduardo
Guerra and other members of our Community. They took his cell phone, his
papers, and his work files. What infuriated the intelligence agents who
interrogated him with extreme vulgarity was that, when going through his
papers, they found documents related to human rights and records showing
meetings with the Ministry regarding the protective order issued by the
Inter-
American Court for Human Rights. The members of the armed forces
insisted that human rights groups are what is wrong with Colombia.
In February 2003, members of our community were the victims of the
scheme put forth by the 17th Brigade to place a box of explosives in a
vehicle
where members of our Community's Council were traveling. They were all
interrogated about the whereabouts and the activities of Eduar. In August
2007, thanks to the desertion of a cadet from the Military School, José
Maria
Córdoba, in Bogotá, it was revealed that Captain NELSON GUTIÉRREZ
MARIÑO had shown his students a phony video in which Eduar appeared. He
urged the students to memorize his likeness as the image of a person who had
to be eliminated as soon as possible. That same Captain used one of the
cadets at the school to obtain Eduar's documents regarding our Peace
Community. The purpose was to have the students learn "how a guerrilla
thinks".
Up to now, the Colombian Government has refused to provide any
explanation to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights about this plan for
murder, and the investigation of the case, promised by the Ministry of
Defense, follows the usual formula of considering that a full confession by
the suspect would be the only definitive proof and, lacking that, the
case is
filed away. At the end of 2007, the paramilitaries living at the 17th
Brigade
sent a lot of messages to our Community, announcing that they were going to
eliminate some of the leaders, and that Eduar was at the head of the
list. On
January 16, 2008, Eduar was arrested by some police officers in the town of
San José de Apartadó, along with a member of our Internal Council. They
were both subjected to illegal interrogations, forbidden by the
Constitutional
Court. When they mentioned the Court's decision, Sentencia C-1024, the
police indicated that the Constitutional Court meant nothing to them and
that
they would do whatever they wanted.
A few days later, a high official of the 17th Brigade told an international
delegation that it had been a mistake to free Eduar on January 16 because he
was "a guerrilla". That same week, the paramilitaries living at the 17th
Brigade
told some residents of San José de Apartadó, in (the city of) Apartadó,
that a
valuable opportunity to kill Eduar had been missed, and that this had been a
mistake by the police. On February 22, 2009, some armed men, who you
could tell by a lot of details that they were connected with the Army, came
looking for Eduar among the people attending the ceremony commemorating
the anniversary of the massacre of February 21, 2005 in the hamlets of
Mulatos, La Resbalosa, and Chontalito. They were asking insistently about
how to leave the area.
There can be no doubt, then, that there is a long-time plan to kill
Eduar, and
that various institutions of the government and the para-government are part
of it. In their logic of extermination and persecution of our Peace
Community,
this translates today into a need to destroy his political and ethical
image as a
supporter of a Community that refuses the use of weapons and insists on its
right not to be involved with any armed actor. It's no secret to anybody
that
the way to discredit this ethical and political position is to make it
look as if
it's just a façade for a commitment to another armed actor. What is
paradoxical is that, to do this, they have resorted to someone like alias
"SAMIR', with whom our Community and EDUAR himself have always been
at odds and in opposition. To turn him into a "witness" to an allegation
that
the Community, and especially Eduar, were his "allies", that they gave
policy
directions, and ended up making alias "SAMIR" submit to a trial for
"betraying the revolution" defies all reason. There are no words to describe
such a spurious and illogical contrivance.
The following are some of the specific falsehoods that stand out in this
"interview".
1. Around the middle of the interview that ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS
had with alias "SAMIR" last May 28, he said that when the FARC sent him to
the area of Mulatos, his superior, alias "Jacobo", told him to
coordinate policy
with Eduar Lanchero, who was the legal representative of the Peace
Community and had arrived in the area with the authorization of the FARC
guerrilla leaders alias "Jacobo" and alias "Manteco". Alias "Samir":
also said
that Eduar was doing a good job with the "FARC's strategic plan", as he was
a member of the Communist Party and a friend of the FARC, just as were the
other members of what he referred to as the "Superior Council" of the Peace
Community. Naming the members, he included "Sister Clara", Gloria Cuartas,
"Father Giraldo" "Negro Tuberquia" and "Conrado". He insisted that the
political plans of the FARC were 95% consistent with those of the Peace
Community. He also said that when the FARC moved into the neighborhood
of the town of Mulatos, the people of the Community went there to seek the
FARC's protection.
It is difficult to fit so many lies into so few words. Ex-Minister LONDOÑO
HOYOS, in the interview, stimulates the answers of alias "SAMIR' by his
slanted and controlling questions, just as the deserter and the soldiers who
must certainly have coached him during several months for such a filthy
deception. Without a doubt, he violates the good faith of the audience,
relying
on the fact that the great majority of the radio listeners are not aware
of the
history of our Peace Community, nor of its members, nor of its leaders. The
story told by alias "SAMIR" has no basis in reality: Eduar was never a
Communist Party militant; he did not come to the region with the
authorization of the commanders of the FARC. Rather, he was send by a
religious and humanitarian organization that supports displaced people.
He has
never been the "legal representative" of our Community. We have never
referred to our Internal Council as the "Superior Council", nor has
Eduar ever
been a member of it. Neither has Sister Clara, nor Father Giraldo, nor Dr.
Gloria Cuartas. We know of no "FARC strategic plan" and none of our
principles are consistent with those of the FARC. We have always refused to
collaborate with any kind of armed actor. The farmers who returned to
Mulatos did not go there to look for protection from the FARC. Rather, on
the contrary, they had numerous conflicts with that armed organization.
2. Alias "SAMIR", pressured by the evil-minded and controlling questions
from ex- Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS, goes even farther in his monstrous
concoction of a false image of Eduar; he states that he met more than 20
times with him in meetings where Eduar provided revolutionary policy
directions, and that when committees came to the area to check up, Eduar
hastened to request that he pull his troops back so that the committees
would
not notice the relationship between the FARC and the Peace Community,
since, if such a relation were seen, the Community could lose the important
assistance that came from foreign countries.
He also said that our Community made false complaints to international
organizations, claiming that the people killed in combat were civilian
victims
of government agents. Thanks to those complaints, which made the
Community look like a victim of atrocities, numerous countries, among them
Norway, United States, Sweden and Denmark, sent millions of dollars or
euros worth of resources for the development of the area where the Peace
Community is located. These resources, according to him, go into the
pockets of the members of the "Superior Council" and that has made him lose
confidence in the Peace Community and that is why he has broken with it and
advises the farmers that they would be better off receiving aid from the
government, since the Peace Community has not shown itself to be effective
in economic development, given that the enormous resources that come from
foreign countries are being stolen.
The audacity of this denunciation is unimaginably extreme. The few instances
in which Eduar or any member of our Internal Council had any contact with
alias "SAMIR" were extremely confrontational. They centered on pleading for
respect for the lives of the peasant farmers and for the principles of our
Peace Community. On the contrary, alias "SAMIR" complained furiously
because the Community had expelled everybody who was suspected of being
a member of the FARC. Not only that, our Community has never undertaken
responsibility for the economic development of the region. The small
projects
that have benefited the community have had as their explicit goal the
subsistence of community members and resistance of the displacement and
the siege of hunger that we have been subjected to.
Sister communities of other countries have sent small resources for our
survival. Most of the time, they themselves have coordinated the
investments,
such as the small classroom for the children, the small restaurant and the
sewer system, the cacao processing equipment, the threshing machines and
the sugar mills in the towns that are part of our Community, all of
extremely
modest dimensions. We have regularly sent reports to the donors and most of
them have visited us and confirmed "in situ" the accomplishments of their
modest assistance.
In this part of "SAMIR's" defamations, he reveals, without intending to,
their
true origin. They coincide completely and exactly with the various false
testimonies prepared in the 17th Brigade, almost with the same words as the
vilification provided by retired General JAIME ERNESTO CANAL to the
Second Commission of the House of Representatives on May 25, 2005, when
he was trying to deny the evident participation of the Army in the
horrendous
massacre of leaders of our Community on February 21, 2005 in Mulatos and
La Resbalosa. That General, supported by four false witnesses he had
coached previously, made a speech astonishingly similar to the one made by
alias "SAMIR", where he presented our Community as allied with the FARC
and beneficiaries of enormous resources provided by foreign countries,
which resources we were stealing and passing on to the guerrillas. Evidently
alias "SAMIR' left out the last paragraph in order not to incriminate
himself.
Ex-General CANAL distributed his monstrous calumnies on the program "In
Contact" on TELEVISION CHANNEL ONE on June 6, 2005, with the
cooperation of politicians JUAN HURTADO CANO AND MIGUEL POSADA
and the presenter MARIA BEATRIZ ECHANDIA. All of the efforts we made
to have Colombian "justice" require them to repair the moral damage
resulting
from their crime were useless, given the ethical collapse of that which in
Colombia is usually called "justice". Our complaints to international
agencies
about the atrocities we have suffered have not been falsified or
distorted; we
always furnish names, locations, times and circumstances of the crimes, so
that an honest investigator would be able to prove them, and when we know
the perpetrators were members of the FARC, we file complaints with the
same precision. Contrary to the statement that Eduar requested alias
"SAMIR" to remove his troops when international verification committees
were coming to the area, most of these committees found squads of the
FARC on the roads, sometimes not far from the Army troops.
3. Alias "SAMIR" mentioned more specifically, in the interview conducted by
ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS, a meeting that took place in the town of La
Balsita, in the municipality of Dabeiba, in December of 2005. But, in accord
with his plan of trickery, he falsified all of the information. First of
all, he
describes it as if it was a meeting agreed-upon between the FARC
commanders and the leaders of our Peace Community. The truth is that when
three members of our Community left after a meeting with the farmers in
Dabeiba, with whom we buy and sell agricultural products, they were
overtaken by FARC fighters who forced them to appear before their
commanders. They warned them that there would be repercussions if they
refused. Alias "SAMIR" states that in that meeting he accused Eduar of
stealing the money that was coming from foreign countries and of
implementing a regime of cruelty toward the farmers. The truth is that
absolutely nothing was mentioned about money problems or about the work
of the farmers. The real complaint from alias "SAMIR" against our Peace
Community, in that meeting, was because we had excluded from our
Community anyone that we discovered had relations with the guerrillas. He
said we were "paramilitaries".
He even falsely accused one of the members of our Internal Council of
wanting to capture a guerrilla man in order to leave his wife alone so the
member could prey upon her. He complained, furiously, that the presence of
our Peace Community was an obstacle to the presence of the guerrillas and
he told us peremptorily that our Community would have to submit to the
interests of the guerrillas. Threatening us, he reminded us of the
massacre of
October 1997 in which his company had massacred three of our leaders and
he said that case could repeat itself.
In that meeting, alias "SAMIR" presented, as a "witness" against Eduar and
the other members of our Internal Council, a resident of the town of La
Unión
who had been excluded from our Peace Community for repeated
mistreatment of his wife. He took revenge by falsely accusing them of
favoring "paramilitarism". At the end of that "meeting", which for alias
"SAMIR" almost had the character of a "council of war", he himself forbade
us to enter the towns where we had not yet established groups for our Peace
Community. He warned us in an imperative manner: "Either the Peace
Community will serve the guerrillas, or we'll finish it off." Our members
answered that we would continue to be faithful to our principles and that we
would prefer to be finished off rather than to change them.
4. Later on in the interview with ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS, alias
"SAMIR" dared to state that he "infiltrated" our Peace Community at its very
beginning, using an individual he did not name, but whose
characteristics are
unmistakable: he was alluding to ARTURO DAVID. Alias "SAMIR" relates
that he had the privilege of serving as accountant for our Community and
thus he always had first hand information about the funds that arrived and
"got lost".
Recently alias "SAMIR", aided by the 17th Brigade and taking advantage of
ex-Minister Londoño's appetite for defamation, made up fables only
believable
by those who are not familiar with our history or our people. "Arturito", as
we called him affectionately, was not part of our Peace Community from its
beginning. He arrived at the end of 1998, displaced with his family from
Playa
Larga, after the murder of his father by the barbarity of soldiers and
paramilitaries. He stayed with some of his relatives in San José. Our
Community took him in in solidarity and he joined groups working on fruit
trees and with the radio project we had at that time. His human qualities
gained him respect and in 2002 he was democratically elected a member of
our Internal Council. He was asked to take charge of marketing the
community's cacao, a responsibility he took on with great integrity.
Little by
little, because he was the victim of threats and because of the painful
experience of the continual increases in persecution by the government
against our Community, during which he suffered a number of direct attacks
by soldiers and paramilitaries on the shipments of cacao that he was
taking to
be sold in Medellin, he began to feel sympathy for the FARC and he began to
draw nearer to them. He began to think that it would be easier to defend
himself against the government's atrocities. When he communicated those
thoughts to us, we asked him to leave our Community because at this time his
goals were incompatible with ours. He did that honorably in April of 2004,
when he joined the FARC. He was murdered in 2008.
Our Community made his exit public in a communication that was widely
distributed, in April of 2004, in order to avoid misunderstandings. When he
was murdered (not killed in combat) by members of the Army, we held a
wake over his body and he was buried in our Community, because his mother
and other family members lived there. We believed that the government's
criticism of that revealed their extreme and inhumane way of thinking and
feeling that we disavowed. The fact that he ended his days in the FARC did
not give alias "SAMIR" the right to make up false stories about an
impossible
"infiltration", a recourse that is a permanent part of the schemes
hatched in
the 17th Brigade, where they profane the dead in order to suit false
stories and
testimonies that the dead can no longer controvert, thus demonstrating once
again their lack of elementary ethical principles.
With this same capacity for lies, alias "SAMIR" states that Eduar asked him
and other FARC commanders to take Arturo far away from the Peace
Community, a request that is just as false as the numerous "meetings" that
alias "SAMIR" has invented to fake supposed coordination with our
Community.
5. In other parts of his interview with ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS, alias
"SAMIR" states that Arturo got our Peace Community to buy a truck for 770
million pesos (about $385,000), using some of the money provided by
international solidarity, and that the vehicle had "disappeared" due to the
"corruption" of our leaders. Alias "SAMIR's" capacity for lying is
terrifying,
even though, in the 12 years of the existence of our Community, we are
familiar with the habits of defamation of the 17th Brigade, where so
many and
so evil judicial deceptions have been hatched. The truth is that the
vehicles
obtained by our Community in order to market our cacao and bananas were
"second hand" vehicles purchased at very low cost. The Justice and Peace
Commission gave us a ramshackle truck in 1997 and it wasn't of very much
use. We traded it in for another one in almost the same condition and it
didn't
last very long either and we traded again for a jeep, also in very bad
condition.
We ended up using it for a small farm used by some displaced people from
our Community, outside of Urabá.
In 1999 a cooperative agency gave us a better truck that cost 30 million
pesos
(about $15,000), but the paramilitaries hijacked it with its load of
cacao and
abandoned it in a neighborhood in Apartadó. After that, we were afraid to
continue using it and we sold it for not very much money. We used the
money for the needs of the farm used by the displaced people. Later, a
religious community gave us a small truck that was also the object of
attacks,
threats and robbery by the paramilitaries, so we sold it in order to
support an
agricultural project that we were undertaking. Contrary to the fables
about the
enormous quantities of money that international agencies have supposedly
donated to our Community, fables reinforced by ex-Minister LONDOÑO
HOYOS, matching those of ex-GENERAL CANAL in his widely circulated
libels against us, we have to say that no powerful international agency has
financed any projects for us. Part of the reason for that has been the
pressure
of the national government and of the agencies and banks that follow its
orders. All the money we have received comes from communities and
support groups or from small agencies, and for specific purposes, evaluated
and controlled by the donors.
Neither have we ever tried to offer to the region development alternatives
based on outside financing. Rather we have proposed to the people entering
our Community voluntarily, a plan of survival based on their own efforts.
That has helped us build a unified economy, without incentives for the
acquisition of wealth, but always with the perspective of dignified and
unified
poverty.
The iniquitous persecution that we suffer from the government has reached
the extreme of requesting the banks where we have our accounts to freeze
them, alleging that we are "suspected of drug trafficking". There was a
protest by the Women in Black movement, in Spain, who, when they
discovered this sham, started a campaign urging that people with ethical
principles remove their funds from the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. The
Banco Ganadero de Apartadó (Ranchers Bank of Apartadó) is a branch of that
bank and took part in that depravity. The women's action got the
attention of
the bank and it apologized for the immorality. Entities like this act
out of fear
of loss of earnings and not because of ethics. Subsequently, we found our
accounts and records are contained in various judicial files in this
region and
nationally, because every time the 17th Brigade comes up with a new scheme
against our Community, they demand an "investigation of our sources of
income".
6. Alias "SAMIR" also attacks, in his answers induced by ex-Minister
LONDOÑO HOYOS, Dr. Gloria Cuartas, ex-Mayor of Apartadó. She has
supported our Community all these years and he is trying to make the
audience believe that she and all of her social and political efforts
have only
been a façade of the FARC. Just as at other points in the interview, alias
"SAMIR" creates imaginary meetings and conversations that never took place
and assumptions that fall apart in the face of any elementary analysis. He
claims he met the ex-Mayor when she began her election campaign, in a
supposed meeting in the town of Playa Larga, where he alleges that various
FARC commanders attended and were pushing for her political program as
one agreed-upon with the FARC. He concludes, dragged along in a vulgar
manner by ex-Minister LONDOÑO, that she was "the Mayor of the FARC".
Not only is it false that Dr. Gloria Cuartas attended that supposed
meeting in
Playa Larga, but, when she was Mayor, the FARC sent her a message
strongly criticizing her government and programs. Everybody knows that Dr.
Gloria Cuartas became Mayor of Apartadó as a representative of the "UNITY
FOR PEACE" CONSENSUS, supported by 14 political groups representing
the most diverse ideologies and positions. One of her most important
supporters was the Bishop of Apartadó, Monseñor Isaias Duarte Cancino.
For that reason it is a disrespect of huge proportions, not just to her,
but to all
of the community leaders of the whole region, to call her the "Mayor of the
FARC". Calling her that undoubtedly originates with the government that has
tried to eliminate every alternative social movement. They resort to the
only
pretext that might make their attacks appear to be legal. They make everyone
who seeks legitimate alternatives of justice and equity into an "insurgent".
The desperate desire of alias "SAMIR" to disparage the members and
supporters of our Peace Community is such that, in order to attack Dr.
Gloria
Cuartas, he uses a public event where there were numerous witnesses. That
fact allows us to measure directly his enormous capacity for lying,
distorting,
manipulating, and making up stories. Alias "SAMIR" says, in effect, that the
event in which Mr. MIGUEL ANGEL LAYOS participated (February 28,
1997) took place in the context of a farmers' meeting alias "SAMIR" had
called in the town of San José, and that Dr. Gloria Cuartas was present.
He claims that an "unknown" group arrived at the meeting and murdered four
people by garroting them. He says that one of them was Mr. Layos, and that
the ex-Mayor had never said anything about what happened, not then and not
in succeeding years, up until now.
All of that is false. The people of San José vividly remember what happened
that day. It did not happen in connection with any meeting, least of all
in the
presence of guerrilla commanders. Nor was Dr. Gloria Cuartas present, and
the group that arrived was not "unknown". Rather, it was the paramilitaries
who operated in the area, always in coordination with the Army, because at
that time the Army surrounded the town of San José.
Furthermore, Dr. Cuartas has not kept silent. On the contrary, this was one
of the worst incidents that caused her the most problems with the Army and
with the judiciary, accomplices to the crime. She complained with great
energy and bravery. In fact, when the soldiers and the paramilitaries
committed the crime, they buried their victims in a common grave, on a farm
located at the edge of the road between Apartadó and San José.
The widows and orphans went immediately to the Mayor's office to file
complaints about the crime and Dr. Cuartas demanded that the Attorney
General's staff carry out the legal procedures related to the bodies,
but the
prosecutors and the police refused to do it. So she went, along with the
widows and the orphans, in a municipal truck, carrying shovels and plastic
bags, to recover the bodies. Whey they found the grave, they began the
exhumation, but their lack of experience, their nervousness and their pain
resulted in cutting off the arm of one of the bodies with the first
stroke of the
shovel.
They stopped what they were doing and the Mayor returned to the Attorney
General's office and to the police, insisting that they carry out the
exhumation. They finally gave in, after she threatened to file a
complaint in
Bogotá if they continued refusing to carry out their duties. But when they
went to carry out the exhumation, they found a group of 50 paramilitaries
surrounding the grave. The officials greeted them effusively, with soldiers
and police treating the paramilitaries like "cousins". Dr. Cuartas was so
repelled by their arrogance in committing crimes in bright daylight and
in the
presence of so many people that she went back to Apartadó with the relatives
to wait there for the bodies.
Their repeated complaints about these incidents, made to national and
international agencies, earned them intense persecution and the murder of a
number of the members of her office staff. What we see then, plainly
revealed, is alias "SAMIR's" enormous capacity for lying, aided and spurred
on by the 17th Brigade and by ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS.
7. The deserter Alias "SAMIR", in his desire to please his military
benefactors, aiding them in their long-time goal of exterminating our Peace
Community, did not omit, in his prodigious collection of lies and
libels, some
that were dedicated to Fr. Javier Giraldo, the Jesuit priest who has
supported
our Peace Community system. Nevertheless, here is more of ex-Minister
LONDOÑO HOYOS, attacking him in a virulent manner, relying entirely on
poor and out-of-context words of alias "SAMIR". LONDOÑO HOYOS
states, at his own risk, that "Fr. Giraldo is the manager of all this",
i.e. what
alias "SAMIR" has presented as characteristic actions of our Peace
Community, being a façade for the FARC, dominated by a "Superior Council"
that obtains enormous quantities of money from the international community
and steals it, keeping the farmers in a condition of hunger and
oppression and
obtaining these aids thanks to lies inventing false crimes by the
government.
It is curious that the only thing that alias "SAMIR" has to say about
that is: "I
have never had the opportunity to meet with Fr. Giraldo", later adding,
obliquely, that he must be a member of the FARC, just like all the
leaders of
the Community. Curiously, and certainly without intending it and perhaps due
to his answers not having been carefully prepared in the Brigade, alias
"SAMIR", in stating that he had not met Fr. Giraldo, belies a series of
"testimonies" fabricated by the 17th Brigade (those about the three brothers
Cardona Borja, one by Elkin Tuberquia, one by Apolinar Guerra, and one by
Luis Alberto Pino, even though, apparently, this last person only signed,
without reading, the paper that the soldiers wrote for him). In their
statements, they say that Fr. Giraldo meets constantly with "SAMIR" and
brought him suitcases filled with millions of pesos. Once again, the
capacity
to lie, this time not just that of alias "SAMIR" but also that of the
soldiers and
of ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS, is naked and more.
8. In the final segment of the interview granted to ex-Minister LONDOÑO
HOYOS, alias "SAMIR" accuses Eduar Lanchero once again of having
planned his (SAMIR's) trial by the highest chieftains of the FARC, alias
"Jacobo" and alias "Manteco". He says that in April of 2008 several
leaders of
our Peace Community, Eduar among them, had met in La Esperanza Canyon
with commanders of Front 58 of the FARC. They claimed that alias
"SAMIR" had betrayed the revolution, because he was he was urging the
peasant farmers to cooperate with the government and especially with the
City of Apartadó in its plans for the development of the region. The
guerrillas
of Front 58 had already conveyed such accusations to alias "Jacobo" and to
alias "Manteco", and they had summoned alias "SAMIR" in order to try him
and put him to death, thus causing him to choose the path of desertion.
He said that he admitted that he had urged the peasant farmers to cooperate
with the government's development plans because, as he said, the
government was bringing more development to the region than that proposed
by our Peace Community. He said that was why 32 towns had left our
Community, and that that had caused our leaders to press for his execution.
He said they did this because they wanted revenge.
Once again alias "SAMIR" has invented meetings that never took place, such
as the one supposedly in La Esperanza in April 2008, which only exists
in his
imagination. It is equally false that 32 towns have left the community. They
were never with us and that statement alone reveals the total ignorance
about
our Peace Community. It has never consisted of territorial boundaries, but
rather of free and voluntary personal affiliations.
That falsehood is even clearer when you look at how today, the centers of
our Community are the same as they always have always been. On the
contrary, there are another three that are seeking to join us.
But the conflict that he describes, in which, according to him, he has
"detached" a number of towns from our Community, by convincing them to
support the government policies, since those policies really did provide
true
development, would be a nonexistent conflict, because our Peace Community
is made up of people who enter voluntarily and accept basic principles. We
have never proposed to "compete" with anyone, much less with government
policies or strategies that are supported by criteria radically opposed
to our
own.
Those who enter our Peace Community voluntarily never come seeking
riches nor forms of business development that are lucrative and competitive.
One of our basic principles has always been the refusal of power that is
built
on weapons or on force. Alias "SAMIR" demonstrates a deep-rooted
misunderstanding of our Community when he says that we keep farmers
oppressed with exhausting labor because he is unaware that participation in
our Community is voluntary. The work just demonstrates that the people are
keeping to principles of human dignity shared by everyone. When he imagines
that any of our leaders or members of our Internal Council could impel his
trial by his superiors, which would end up with his execution, he fails to
recognize the most essential of our principles and of our way of life. It is
difficult to understand whether it is his deep-seated ignorance of who
we are,
or if it is one more lie brought about by the people who are
manipulating him
right now in their deceit factories of long standing, such as the 17th
Brigade
and ex-Minister LONDOÑO HOYOS.
Impotence in the face of the anti-ethic that controls us.
It is certainly not the first time that our Peace Community and its moral
endowment are attacked in a vile manner, since even President Uribe has done
it twice by means of libels that remain in absolute impunity, in spite
of our
tireless search for justice. This new attack reveals dramatically the
impotence
of Colombian citizens when we confront the current administration. It gives
free rein to the big "information" media to destroy the honor of those
who do
not have money or power to pay for costly judicial proceedings, nor
political
influence over the big media at least to permit some line of defense. Any
look at the columns written and radio programs conducted by ex-Minister
LONDOÑO HOYOS produces perplexity for his capacity to lie and libel with
impunity. It is extremely repugnant when we see that his program is titled
"The Hour of Truth" and when the name that really fits its contents would be
"The Hour of Lies".
In the last few days, the radio stations in Urabá, which are unmistakably
moving in the orbit of power and intimidation from the 17th Brigade, have
made a real feast at the expense of our Community. They have repeatedly
rebroadcast the interview with alias "SAMIR". A Dutch citizen named
LIDUINE ZUMPOLLE directs the foundation "Hands For Peace", dedicated
to convincing imprisoned FARC combatants that they ought to sign
agreements and promises not to return to the insurgency and thus receive
government benefits. This is an activity that, without denying its
validity, has
succeeded in establishing close relations with the sectors most closely
allied
with the opposite pole of the conflict, that is to say, with the
military and
people from the extreme right.
This woman sent a document to numerous international entities in which she
assigns complete credibility to the lies and libels of alias "SAMIR" and
adopts
as her own the claims that the conspiracy makes about our Peace
Community. She is inviting everybody not to be impressed by a community
that is nothing more than a façade and part of the FARC. She invites the
world to refrain from showing any kind of solidarity, whether economic,
political or moral to the community.
This demonstrates the omnipotence that lies have gained in our society and
the extreme weakness in which we find ourselves as victims of lies even to
be heard. We are certain, nevertheless, that those who know us well and have
shared our moments of suffering with us, and those who have incorruptible
ethical principles and, because of those, can understand the ideological
manipulations of the corrupt powers that rule us, will not be influenced by
this new and nauseating conspiracy. In fact, this conspiracy itself will
help us
understand more profoundly the terrifying dimensions and the moral depravity
to which those powers have arrived, including those of the media.
Peace Community of San José de Apartadó
June 9, 2009
