The secretary general of Comunes, Rodrigo Londoño, alias ‘Timochenko’, has announced that he will request the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to open a new case on crimes committed by the State after the condemnation of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) for the massacre of Unión Patriótica (UP), without ruling out that they may present themselves as victims in the process.
«The UP was born of an agreement between the State and the extinct FARC, now that the State’s responsibility in that genocide is known, it is necessary for the JEP to open a macro case on the State’s responsibility in war crimes and crimes against humanity,» Londoño claimed.
«It is a historic sentence that does justice and dignifies those who gave their lives for peace, democracy and the people,» said Londoño, underlining the possibility that they can present themselves as victims before the JEP since those crimes forced them to continue at war with the State.
«Those crimes not only affected the more than 6,000 murdered and disappeared» of the UP «but forced us into a war that went on for more than 25 years, with millions of victims that we would have saved if the State had complied with those agreements,» Londoño has said in his Twitter profile.
In this sense, Londoño stressed that the «changes» for which they are currently «committed» together with the government of President Gustavo Petro «should have become a reality 35 years ago».
In this line, the senator of Comunes, the party that emerged after the disappearance of the FARC, Julián Gallo, also known as ‘Carlos Antonio Lozada’, has also expressed himself, who has stressed that «surely» they were «victims» since the «violations» committed by the State forced many of them to continue with the armed struggle.
«All of us who were part of the FARC and who signed the peace agreement through our leadership were victims because those breaches and violations by the State forced us to continue to take up arms when it was a war that clearly could have been stopped,» Gallo told Blu Radio.
The UP was formed as a political organization in May 1985 as a result of a peace process between the government of then President Belisario Betancur and the now disbanded FARC guerrillas. The crimes subsequently committed against the party, considered crimes against humanity by the Attorney General’s Office, have their own judicial process within the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), Case 06.
The JEP puts the number of murdered party members at 5,733, among them several sitting congressmen and even two presidential candidates, Jaime Pardo Leal in 1986 and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa in 1990, as well as hundreds of local officials.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
