23 dollars and Chinese rice for the whole battalion. That was what they gave to the soldier Yeris Andrés Gómez for the first “false positive” that he executed, as he said this Monday at the recognition hearing for these crimes against humanity held by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).
“I have come to acknowledge my responsibility for the crimes I committed when I was a member of the National Army, being a member of the La Popa Battalion,” began this retired private, whom this special court accuses of participating in more than 20 events between 2002 and 2007 in the who killed at least 50 people.
In his account, during the first day of the recognition hearing of this case, held in the city of Valledupar, Gómez recounted how he acted as the perpetrator of murders, the first of which was an allegedly demobilized member of the National Liberation Army guerrilla ( THE N).
“I recognize that I was part of a group that became a criminal organization within the Army,” said this former soldier, who stressed: “I always obeyed orders from my superiors without questioning them or thinking about the damage they were going to cause.”
Judge Parra asked Gómez Naranjo what determining factor allowed these 127 murders to occur in just two and a half years. “From the command of the battalion, the seed was sown through a permanent demand for results,” replied the retired soldier pic.twitter.com/JLDlsgGFhd
— Special Jurisdiction for Peace (@JEP_Colombia) July 18, 2022
Who gave the order?
Thus, he insisted that José Pastor Ruiz Mahecha, one of the three retired colonels accused -along with Publio Hernán Mejía and Juan Carlos Figueroa- in this subcase by the JEP, gave the order in several of the murders he committed, and that he did not They have accepted charges of crimes against humanity.
The JEP issued its second indictment at the end of last year – the first was against ten soldiers and a civilian for at least 120 false positives in Catatumbo (border with Venezuela) – in which it accused 15 soldiers who were part of the Battalion La Popa for 127 murders and disappearances of innocent young people to present them as guerrilla casualties in combat.
All They accepted the charges and will appear between Monday and Tuesday at the hearing, except for the three retired colonels, who now face an accusation by the JEP Prosecutor’s Office for an “adversarial process”, in which they could receive sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
The ex-soldier Gómez was the first to acknowledge their responsibility at the hearing, in which he also spoke of his complicity with the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) commanded in that area by Rodrigo Tovar, alias “Jorge 40”, and the involvement of other officers, including the former Army commander Mario Montoya, and retired generals Justo Eliseo Peña, Óscar Enrique González Peña and Raúl Antonio Arévalo.
“Just as my hands are smeared with blood, they, their soles and their Army officer ranks, are also stained with blood because they were the ones who gave us the reward for each person killed and legalized by the La Popa Battalion,” he said. Gómez, who confessed that he entered the Army in the 2000s as an infiltrator of the FARC guerrilla.
Violent indigenous
For killing innocents they were given “trips to Cartagena, San Andrés, they gave pistols as prizes, parties and also held meetings with sex workers,” he said.
And he also targeted former President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) who “asked for results” in his “democratic security” policy that served, in his words, “only to kill.”
One of the first victims to speak out Monday, Franklin Navarro, said that the day after the murder of his son, Carlos Mario Navarro, on February 28, 2004, Uribe went to Valledupar. “As he asked for results, it was when Mr. José Rueda Quintero (another of the defendants) gave the order to assassinate Carlos Mario,” said this father.
Navarro is a Wiwa peasant, one of the two indigenous peoples listed as victims in this case, since the military in this area also took young people from these communities to present them as casualties in combat.
“We have been crying for more than 20 years, 20 years hurting each other, remembering these bitter episodes,” said the Wiwa people’s Human Rights Commissioner, Pedro Loperena, at the beginning of the hearing, who exclaimed: “How nice that Colombia ratifies human rights! How nice that Colombia beats its chest, that it respects and advances in human rights! Today one is going to realize that it is not like that ».
However, he asked the JEP to take into account the 50 extrajudicial executions carried out by three battalions against his people, since, he said, it only recognizes three.
They will dictate “reparative sentences”
For his part, the governor of the Kankuamo people, Jaime Luis Arias, underlined before the JEP magistrates and the soldiers accused of the executions the “disharmonization” that his territory has suffered due to the conflict and the “systematic and persistent violence” committed by all the armed actors and criticized the “state abandonment”.
“We have been victims, along with our territory, of a historical and systematic process of violence, to the point of being declared at risk of physical extermination,” said the Kankuamo governor, one of the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. .
This is the second hearing of recognition of “false positives” of former soldiers before victims and magistrates of the JEP after the one that took place at the end of April in Ocaña (Norte de Santander) and that in this case studies the events that occurred in the Caribbean .
After this procedure, which will last until Tuesday, the magistrates will assess what the defendants have contributed and their acknowledgment of the facts and may issue “reparative sentences” with the victims that do not carry prison sentences.
It is also the case that involves one of the Army’s senior officials most singled out by victims’ organizations for participating in this “criminal organization,” as the JEP calls it: retired Colonel Publio Mejía, commander of the La Popa Battalion, one of the those who do not recognize the crimes.