By Jairo Gómez, SEMANA, November 13, 2020
https://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/ganaron-la-paz-y-la-jep/202057/
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The snipers insist on disparaging the Special Jurisdiction for Peace – JEP –; now it’s not only the missiles that President Duque and his boss Uribe Vélez are firing every day, but also the dogmatic columnists anchored in the past, in that old legal system lacking any credibility and its effectiveness controlled by cronyism and political chicanery.
It’s obviously a system tailored to accommodate the nefarious interests that allow it to issue its decisions that are consistently infamous toward ordinary people and benevolent toward the white collar criminals, their own caste.
That is the legal system that they—the omnipotent and omniscient powerful—control; the Attorney General’s Office and the Courts, not in their totality—we have to recognize that. But what they can’t forgive themselves for, and what eats away at them, is having lost the civil rights action about the JEP; a loss that stimulates bitterness, fury, resentment, chagrin, and, of course, distaste for an independent institution.
So, as there are no arguments that can make it go away, now they are pursuing the flawless performance of its President, Patricia Linares, who, with her tenacity and wisdom, gave life to an agency that she received as just a piece of paper, and which today is a vigorous, independent, and highly regarded institutional reality, not only in the national context, but also by the United Nations, the European community, and one of the most prestigious agencies in the world, the International Criminal Court – CPI–.
Doubtless there is an immense annoyance in that circle of the omnipotent and omniscient powerful, given that the FARC took apart their narrative about the assassination of Álvaro Gómez; they were unmasked and disarmed. And they had designed a set-up to take down other political leaders by means of their manipulated investigations. They were so shaken up that in the new oracle of the Colombian right, the Sergio Arboleda University, the ideological bastion of Colombia’s extreme right wing, they convened a forum to discredit the JEP, its Justices, the Truth Commission, and the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons. Gómez Hurtado must be turning over in his grave to judge the posturing of the new generation.
Compare that evil propaganda with the graciousness of former Minister and former Presidential candidate Germán Vargas Lleras, after the revelation where the FARC admitted how they tried to kill him when they carried out two attempts on his life: “Unlike those who did die and now can’t give an answer, in my own case, I accept the offer and extend my pardon. It’s enough for me to find out the whole truth,” he wrote in his Sunday column.
The country has begun to learn the responsibility of the FARC, and they are going to have to prove what they are saying; now we are going to see the testimony of, among others, Generals Rito Alejo del Río, the so-called Pacifier of Urabá, Mario Montoya, the celebrated Commander of Operation Orión and the strategist of the extrajudicial executions or so-called “False Positives”, as well as the testimony of soldiers of high and low rank who are seeking the benefits of the JEP in exchange for telling the whole truth. That, as far as we know, has them worried, anguished, and even neurotic.
It’s that fear of the truth that unites Duque, Uribe Vélez, who proposes eliminating the JEP, the organizations of retired military, powerful landowners and cattle ranchers (Fedegan) and the dogmatic columnists who are playing the role of snipers against the JEP.
Duque knows that the arrival of Biden to the Presidency of the United States will require him to modify his decision to rip the Peace Agreement to shreds. The new occupant of the White House was a protagonist of the Agreement and the way it was reached. His boss, President Obama, had a delegate at the negotiation table in Havana.
Who would have believed it: Trump lost and Duque is weakened; the Peace Agreement and the JEP are strengthened.