![]() Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images ![]() Those targets include Gustavo Petro, then a leftwing congressman and now the country’s president.Ī former combatant of the AUC shows his tattoos during the first National Meeting of AUC ex-combatants in Puerto Boyacá, on 6 May. There was “enormous pressure” from the state to wipe targets out, Mancuso said. ![]() “Mancuso’s narrative was that the military was not strong enough to combat the guerrillas themselves and needed an extrajudicial force in order to carry out the scorched-earth tactics that they themselves could not,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, senior analyst for Colombia at International Crisis Group. Mancuso said officials gave the AUC lists of individuals and communities with suspected ties to the communist rebels so they could intimidate, torture and assassinate them without consideration for the rules of war. In sessions lasting up to eight hours the former warlord this week gave grisly accounts of how the militia acted as an arm of the Colombian state to silence the political opposition and take on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) guerrillas. Mancuso, who was the AUC’s second in command, has admitted to orchestrating thousands of crimes and some of the darkest chapters in Colombian conflict – including massacres of unarmed civilians, torture and sexual violence. Photograph: Schneyder Mendoza/AFP/Getty Images Salvatore Mancuso, former commander of the right-wing paramilitary group AUC, seen on screen during during ceremony where he apologised for his crimes. Most of its 20,000 combatants laid down their weapons in 2004 as part of a controversial peace process. The AUC formed in the Córdoba region in the north of the country to protect landowners from guerrillas but rapidly expanded into one of the world’s biggest drug cartels. Mancuso was released from prison in 2020 and is seeking a reduced sentence from Colombia’s transitional justice system in exchange for divulging the human rights atrocities committed by the AUC – a key player in a brutal, six-decade-long conflict which has left 450,000 dead and millions displaced. “This phenomenon of paramilitarism came from the state,” Mancuso told the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) on a video link from the US where he was extradited on drugs charges in 2008. She said that in April 2022, after Drumgold warned the police that the ABC would publish a story about the wrongful service of Higgins’ counselling notes on Lehrmann’s original defence team, her subordinate, Detective Superintendent Scott Moller, told her it was “clear” that Drumgold had told the journalist.Salvatore Mancuso told Colombia’s peace tribunal this week that state institutions were not only complicit in the expansion of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) but actively coordinated with them, giving orders to wipe out anyone suspected of aligning with communist rebels. In her written statement, Cameron said the constant media attention generated a “trust no one mentality”. “I held the concern that, at the very least, whenever these sorts of interactions were occurring, if they became known to others, there would be judgments made, not even knowing what the conversations were about … others would make a judgment unfairly against my officers,” Cameron said. After ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold, SC, announced he was discontinuing the case against Lehrmann on December 2, the ACT government launched a review into the handling of the case, which was partly spurred by a public breakdown in the relationship between the police and the DPP.Īustralian Federal Police acting assistant commissioner Joanne Cameron, who was deputy chief police officer in the territory at the time of the trial, told the inquiry on Thursday she feared investigators speaking with Lehrmann’s lawyers during the trial would fuel rumours of police conspiring with defence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |