By Armando Neira, CAMBIOColombia, May 29, 2025
https://cambiocolombia.com/pais/el-genocidio-de-la-todo-paso-frente-nuestros-ojos
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
From now on, October 11 will be National Patriotic Union Victims Day. Why is this decision so vital for our memory in this country? How is it possible that at least 5,733 militants of one movement were murdered, disappeared, or kidnapped? How is the UP doing now? Here is an analysis.
In those days, the whole country knew that they were going to kill Jaime Pardo Leal, the leader of the Patriotic Union (UP), the son of a campesino couple, born in Ubaque (Cundinamarca Department) on March 28, 1941. He was a lawyer who graduated from the National University, and was the politician with an uninhibited style who burst into the Presidential elections of 1986 to sow the seed that would permit, in a distant day, the left to achieve power by being voted in.
Everybody knew it, even he knew. That’s why he had bought several insurance policies and opened an account in the name of his wife, Gloria de Pardo. He placed enough in the account for his family to live for a year, according to his instructions.
In the newsrooms of the communications media they knew it and had prepared detailed profiles of the important moments in his life, ready for publication when they would kill him. That’s why, after he spent a Sunday with his family, when they fired several blasts of gunfire at 3:45 in the afternoon of October 11, 1987 on the road that joins La Mesa with Bogotá, the news caused stupefaction, but not surprise.
The murderers proceeded coolly, with the certainty that nobody would arrest them. Even though he was seriously injured, and his body was nervously placed in an intermunicipal bus so that his children could take him to a hospital, few were able to understand the dimension of his murder. It was not just a tragedy for his family, but for the country. You can’t buy leaders of his stature in the supermarkets; their absence left a gap impossible to fill for generations.
Looking back, there are still no answers about what it was that Colombia experienced in those years of violence, how such a barbaric thing could take place: the systematic extermination of a political party.
5,733 militants were murdered
According to the report by the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH in Spanish), “This all happened right before our eyes. In the genocide of the Patriotic Union (1984-2002), at least 4,153 people were killed, disappeared, or kidnapped. For its part, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) counted 5,733 militants killed between 1984 and 2016.
Among the victims were two Presidential candidates: besides Pardo Leal there was Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa. They were the most visible faces on a list that included five actively serving Members of Congress—Leonardo Posada, Pedro Jiménez, Octavio Vargas, Pedro Luis Valencia, and Manuel Cepeda—as well as mayors, council members, social leaders, and nameless militants. It was an implacable persecution of unarmed citizens. The cases were accumulating like beads on an endless rosary.
The repression was perpetrated by a terrifying combination of paramilitary groups, agents of the State, drug traffickers, and extreme right political sectors. They killed in the country and in the cities, by day and by night.
Without protection, as was Pardo, or even forcefully sentinelled, as was Jaramillo Ossa. He was killed in the Air Shuttle Terminal in Bogotá on March 22, 1990, in front of Mariela Barragán, the love of his life and in front of his 16 bodyguards from the DAS.1
The hit man that killed him, a youngster, barely 16 years old, made his way through the bodyguards with suspicious composure, pulled out a Mini Ingram machine gun, and shot him. The National Police took him to a clinic on El Dorado Avenue, and he died before he could reach the operating room, after a delay of the clinic’s elevator.
That’s the way Colombia was at that time: these men were risking their lives by denouncing the offensives by the death squads, were talking about peace, dreaming of building an alternative political party, and getting excited with tangos and boleros, agonizing between an intermunicipal bus or waiting for an elevator.
The hope that surged in the Green House
The UP was founded on May 28, 1985, in the framework of the La Uribe Agreements. La Uribe is a Municipality in Meta Department that, in its rural part, harbored the Green House, a sanctuary of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the People’s Army—(FARC-EP). The Agreements were signed by the administration of President Belisario Betancur and those guerrillas.
Betancur, at his inauguration on August 7, 1982, promised that during his term, “not one more drop of blood will be spilled.” He stated that under the conditions that had been given, the FARC-EP would lay down their arms and do politics legally.
The FARC and the Colombian Communist Party had promoted the creation of the UP, which was first presented to society at the Green House in an act that was considered one of the most hopeful events of the year. In that same 1985, they had their first national meeting in Bogotá with the presence of the commanders and militants that the FARC had sent to the city. That gesture contributed to the reception the UP received: a hopeful expectation for a country that was shipwrecked in an ocean of blood.
The movement made a notable transit into political life. It consolidated as a third force that opened some space between the traditional and stagnant Liberal and Conservative parties that dominated the power structure.
The agreement between the government and the FARC included a truce and the formation of a broad and inclusive legal collective that would embrace every person who was committed to peace. That possibility was seen as hopeful by some and rejected with violence by others.
Ever since it was founded, the UP was the target of a systematic campaign of extermination. It started in the most remote regions of the country and then was extended to the urban nuclei. In 1986, after great results in the elections, the UP’s first Members of Congress were murdered.
The devious enemies of peace
The administration responded with perplexity. Nobody knew how they could arrest this killing machine. The official explanation was that the killers were “the devious enemies of peace”. With time, some of their leaders severed links with the FARC, looking to find a negotiated political solution to the conflict. Others, in the midst of the slaughter, went back into hiding.
These were harsh times. There was a general clamor for their protection, not just for the elementary fact of treating them like human beings, but also, they really couldn’t deny the reality of those election results. They had won 14 seats in the Congress, 275 Municipal Council positions, and nearly 10% of the Presidential vote with Pardo Leal. It was the best demonstration that you could make progress with voting that had never been obtained with rifles.
But the killing had become customary. “I was really afraid that they would kill me, but now I don’t have that fear. I know they’re going to kill me, but I’m not afraid now,” said Senator Pedro Luis Valencia with resignation. On August 14, 1987, hit men on motorcycles, dressed in National Police uniforms, broke down the door of his residence in Medellin and machine gunned him. Then we started hearing a name that, sadly, would change the history of the country by revindicating crime: Carlos Castaño.
At that time, Castaño was a merciless partner of Capo Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria and at the same time, of José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, “El Mexicano”. We know that Rodríguez had a limitless love for money and a borderless hatred for the left.
Rodríguez Gacha’s money financed not only the equipment as well as the training of several paramilitary commanders by foreign mercenaries. That’s how the groups of Fidel Castaño, Victor Carranza, Rodríguez Gacha himself, and the Self-Defense Forces of Magdalena Medio arose. The latter group subsequently multiplied all over the country as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).
Shoot anything that moves
In that generation of killers was Alonso de Jesús Baquero Agudelo, alias “El Negro Vladimir”, the author of several murders and massacres like the one in Segovia, Antioquia, on November 11, 1988, which left 46 victims lying dead on the asphalt. The killers drove into the town in several SUV’s, firing at anything that moved. The sins of those poor people had been voting for the UP.
For this process, they put together death squads that went from place to place, torturing, disappearing, and executing people in cold blood. In 1989, Colombia had a little more than 33 million inhabitants. Most of them got their news from the radio or the newspapers. Television was starting to come in; there were no private channels, no internet, no social networks, and every morning the citizens got up with their hearts in their hands, to hear the names of those most recently killed.
Years later, we learned that Castaño got his information from Alberto Romero, the Intelligence chief at the then-Department of Administrative Security (DAS).
At that time, the attacks on civilians—victims of car bombings that the mafia set off almost every day—were intertwined with the crimes directed at militants of the Patriotic Union. Nobody was safe.
The paramilitary groups, supported by members of the Armed Forces, took advantage of that connection to intensify their war against the UP. It was that time when the drug lords were fortifying their business.
The drug traffickers beefed up a brutal market of violence, put together squads for private security, armed gangs, and the logistical capability for massive victimization by hit men, tolerating terrorist activities, even massacres carried out by commanders transported by air.
Four Presidential candidates murdered
At the end of the ‘80’s and the beginning of the ‘90’s, many believed that there was no way out. Four Presidential candidates had been murdered: Pardo Leal and Bernardo Jaramillo (UP), Carlos Pizarro (M-19), and Luis Carlos Galán (New Liberalism). The Medellin Cartel blew up airplanes, buildings, and newspapers, and Pablo Escobar offered a million pesos for every Police Officer murdered.
“Just a few days ago, in Montería, the capital of paramilitarism and anticommunism, José Antequera had the courage to denounce Carlos Castaño and the AUC for promoting the dirty war against the UP, all with the complicity of officials and Army Brigades,” related Carlos Lozano, Director of the Weekly Voice.
“He sealed his death sentence by doing that. The courage of this young communist and revolutionary was greater than that of so many others. He didn’t hesitate to denounce those directly responsible for the martyrdom of the communists and those struggling for the people,” he added that when he spoke of the March 3, 1989 murder of the charismatic leader, Pepe Antequera, killed in the El Dorado airport before the eyes of hundreds of witnesses.
Coming back to the present, Gabriel Becerra, Representative of Bogotá in the Chamber of Representatives, highlighted the importance of the decision by the Congress just recently to approve the project that would declare October 11 as the National Day of the UP Victims.
After 20 years of struggle, that key date in the memory of this country has been recognized. This decision is part of our compliance with the ruling by the Inter-American Court for Human Rights (CIDH in Spanish), issued in 2022, that found the Colombian State guilty of illegal actions and omissions in the systematic extermination of the UP.
Recovering the memory
The project that was approved was introduced by the UP caucus, led in the Chamber by Gabriel Becerra and Gildardo Silva, and in the Senate by Aída Avella and Jahel Quiroga Carillo. Senator Quiroga also represents Corporación Reiniciar1, which has accompanied the UP victims in international litigation, especially before the Inter-American Human Rights system
Why is that decision so crucial to the memories of this country? “For one fundamental reason: the memory of the UP cannot remain forgotten. It must be permanently in the memory of Colombian society, even more so after the decision of the Inter-American Court in 2022 that condemned the government and found it responsible because of its actions and omissions in the extermination and genocide against the UP,” said Congressman Becerra.
It’s a way of paying homage to Pardo Leal, murdered on October 11. Its significance is, above all, political. Starting now, through a law passed by Congress, the government—and not just the victims, as has happened up to now—will have the duty to organize an official program under which on every October 11 there will be activities of recollection of what took place here as a society.
“This is not an act of hatred or revenge, but rather a time for reflection that contributes to reconciliation and to peace in Colombian society. The objective is to guarantee that Colombia never again, not against those of us who are on the left nor against those who fight for other ideological or political expressions, will allow something to be done as what was done to the UP,” stated Becerra.
The project was approved unanimously in full sessions of the Chamber and the Senate. In spite of the differing policies and ideologies existing in the Congress right now, it was possible to overcome those and recognize that the open wound in Colombian democracy, which is the case of the UP, could not remain unrecognized.
Never again
Members of Congress reflected on the necessity that there never be another genocide in Colombia, never assassinations of public figures, never tortures, never persecutions, never murders. If we aspire to be a true democracy, all those things must remain in the past.
After the agonizing civil war, the loss of legal representation and exile of many militants, the UP is now a protagonist. After recovering its legal capacity, the UP began to regroup its victims, permitting new leadership to come to the fore, and reactivating its policies.
Now we have a new generation. Some were not even born during the most cruel part of the genocide. The UP is the founder of the Historic Pact Party, and it furnished the first legal support for President Petro’s candidacy.
He can count on four members of Congress (two senators and two representatives), a member of the Bogotá City Council, ten municipal officers, one deputy in Quindío and another in Tolima. His leaders aren’t hiding themselves, and they’re not afraid of being killed for the simple fact that their thinking is different.