MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Petro OK with meeting former paramilitary leaders

Petro still wants millions of Colombians to organize themselves to achieve total peace

Colombian President Gustavo Petro Sunday said he was willing to meet with former paramilitary leaders to discuss the peace process. The head of state, a former guerrilla fighter himself, insisted that those who have served their sentences and who have publicly expressed their willingness to meet should explain “to what extent” the “peace process ... can be finished and finalized.”

”I have seen with concern how many of the haciendas that the paramilitaries had in (the region of) Urabá are today occupied by frontmen or by the Gulf Clan. Hence the need for a specialized police force to take care of these assets and a review of the final phase of the Justice and Peace law,“ Petro said.

”The victims in Colombia are millions, if these millions of people could organize themselves, we could have the first social movement in Colombia whose objective is to achieve peace,“ Pero went on.

”It seems fundamental to me that victims' organizations, of all kinds, of any origin, become a Social Movement for Peace“, he said, indicating that the memory center should ”accelerate as far as possible the processes of land restitution, the processes of compensation for victims and even the judicial processes that have to do with the truth.”

Former leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) sent Petro a letter last month asking for an audience to discuss the law that allowed their 2006 demobilization following negotiations with then-President Álvaro Uribe. As part of the agreement, the former paramilitaries benefited from the Justice and Peace Law, which provided for sentences of up to eight years in prison in exchange for collaboration in clarifying crimes, but some of the leaders lost those benefits.

Petro assured this Sunday that he considers it necessary that the Government and the paramilitaries who benefited from this law “meet to establish in black and white what happened with the assets, to evaluate what happened with the law, to what extent this peace process was truncated or can be finished and terminated”.

It all started last March 22 when Petro criticized the Justice and Peace Law because he considers that the victims have not been paid reparations and that the perpetrators should tell the truth. “It was a law of impunity for Colombia's armed drug traffickers,” Petro has said, adding that the paramilitaries “believed they were making a business” by fighting the guerrillas and “perhaps they thought they were really cleaning the country of what they considered inferior, but they were being promoted by those in power”.

Seven days later, a group of 16 former paramilitary leaders, including former AUC commander Salvatore Mancuso, requested an audience with the government to “explain in detail” their “judicial and extrajudicial contributions to peace and reconciliation in Colombia.” They said that 4,902 demobilized AUC members have been killed since 2006 and added that they hoped that total peace, the flagship plan of Petro's government, will mean “the end of structural violence”.

”We consider that a public debate on the results of the demobilization of the Self-Defense Forces is pertinent and necessary (...) Today a certain and objective balance can already be made, which attends to the call that you are making to us,” the former AUC chiefs affirmed.