In the event they participated senior government officials and 16 former paramilitary chiefs accredited As peace managers, among them Salvatore Mancuso, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, Known as ‘Jorge 40’, Diego Fernando Murillo and Carlos Mario Jiménez ‘Macaco’, among others.
The technical table is exceptional, temporary and does not grant any judicial benefit to those who participate in it.
According to the norm, each manager must sign an individual work plan before the Ministry of Interior, in Coordination with the DaPre and the Office of the Commissioner for Peace.
The process must be translated into an act of specific commitments, with specific repair activities to victims, verification indicators and defined responsible. In addition, peace managers will have to attend judicial proceedings, actively participate in the Technical Committee, comply with the commitments acquired and submit periodic reports of their advances. The resolution is explicit: Repeated or unjustified absence may lead to the President of the Republic I immediately cancel the designation.
What the government seeks with this technical table is different from any previous process. It is not about opening a dialogue with the exparas, as happened in the Santa Fe de Ralito agreement in 2003, nor to design a new legal benefit scheme. The objective is more limited and more institutional: to make an integral balance of what Law 975 of 2005 left, known as Justice and Peace, and prepare a definitive closure of that chapter.
At the end of the meeting, Interior Minister, Armando Benedetti, Who will lead this process, raised what he considers the first concrete task of the table: to look for legal alternatives so that the peace managers who still remain detained can leave prison or at least improve their imprisonment conditions.
“We can start the first task today: one of the people who are detained here how they can seek the release of them and how they can be on the outside. That is the first point that you have to look legally through the team of how it can be done as peace managers. (…) The mission site is improved or it can also be outside. I think that is important for the process, ”he said.
The second work axis proposed in the session was the construction of a schedule so that the peace managers visit the territories most beaten by paramilitarism.
According to Benedetti, that will be another immediate priority. “It is when and what days we are going to the territory and why. That is another important task. Which has to do with telling the truth why (…) You can go parallel restoring the fabric broken by the conflict and at the same time counting the truth that is parallel to the official truth. You don’t necessarily have to go hand in hand or one hand to the other. And with that we would advance to create a report and then create the judicial conditions and begin to wait for the closure of that process. ”
Finally, Benedetti remarked that the government’s commitment to this technical table is to advance quickly, seriousness and visible results. “With this I show you that this is serious, that it has seriousness, that it is a followed benefit for you, that you think about how to start doing the things that have to be said and we can continue, adapt and develop in record time this situation that I know has taken a long time. You have to start looking for legal architecture”, He concluded.
The meeting closed with the definition of Nuevo Meeting next Monday to begin to realize work schedules and security routes in the territories. What was clear is that the technical table, initially conceived as a balance space of the Justice and Peace Law, is also emerging as a scenario of sensitive discussions about the legal situation of the exparas and the way in which they will contribute truth and memory from the regions.
“The truth is going to hurt Colombia and the political class”: Benedetti
At a press conference, Minister Benedetti opened the session with a political warning. “Let’s see, we have met with the sixteen peace managers designated at a resolution by the President, and those peace managers have committed to tell the truth. I am sure that he will be amazed at Colombia, and above all to the true political class he was with them, which was also complicit of several deaths and massacres that were given at the time. Several of his political actors are today candidates, We will see what is of all that, it ends up being or based on what is due to do ”he said.
The meeting was accompanied by the Director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency (Dapre), Angie Rodríguez, who said that the entities planned to be at that table are advising to not overreach their functions: “We understand that we are the executive branch and not the judicial.
He added: “I want to point out that this is a preparatory meeting, it is not official, yes? POrque when we already do the official installation among more actors in the state, not of the government only, because we precisely understand the dimension of what this closure of this process means. ”
The political background of Benedetti’s words is evident: the Petro government’s commitment is that the country knows the complicities of paramilitarism with sectors of national politics, even with actors that are still in force in electoral life today. For the minister, the truth of the former paramilitary chiefs is not only necessary to close an unfinished process, but also to highlight historical responsibilities that society has not yet finished facing.
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