Colombian President Gustavo Petro apologized on Wednesday on behalf of the Colombian State for the massacres committed in La Granja and El Aro in the 1990s.
«On behalf of the Colombian State I have asked forgiveness to the victims of the massacres in the villages of La Granja and El Aro in 1997,» the president announced through his Twitter account, after he participated in an event at the Casa de la Memoria Museum, where symbolic acts about the massacres that took place in the province of Ituango have been carried out.
«The Colombian State recognizes that the dead were not enemies of anyone, they were humble and hard-working people who were killed just because (…) that in their deaths in La Granja and El Aro the State was present, it was an accomplice to the murder», said the Colombian leader to the families of the murdered people, in statements reported by ‘El Tiempo’.
Likewise, he stated that the State has been covering up the events, for which he criticized the «State of impunity» that has ruled since these events took place.
In this sense, the president has pointed out that these crimes are crimes against humanity, so they could be called «genocide». «In Colombia there was a recent genocide», he added.
«The danger we have now is that it repeats itself and as a kind of perpetual condemnation of Colombian society we have to carry after our lives and future generations the circumstances that perhaps Colombia, as a single society of human existence, decides to destroy itself permanently,» he lamented, in an act that is part of the total peace project of his Executive.
With this declaration, Petro –accompanied by photographs of the victims and white candles– has complied with a sentence of 16 years ago, in 2006, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered to ask for forgiveness for such massacres by demonstrating that there was collusion of state agents with paramilitaries, reports ‘El Colombiano’.
In addition, the court urged then to provide justice, free health care and facilitate the return of displaced families to their homes.
