Thus begins the wonderful documentary Colombia Live!: 25 Years of Resistancedescribing the avalanche of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano that destroyed Armero on November 13, 1985. This expression refers to the ashes of the volcano that buried the Palace of Justice scandal. At minute 57:37 of the documentary, the then president, Belisario Betancur, of Armero, appears with a bitter face, uttering the following words: “Tragedy visits us again and again, but with God’s help we will move forward, we will move forward.”
It is still surprising that there was a man of his culture, who had his book by his bedside Hadrian’s Memoirs Written by Marguerite Yourcenar, she resorts to tragedy to refer to the events that occurred at the Palace of Justice and Armero. For in tragedy, according to the plays of ancient Greece, “its heroes are confronted in a mysterious, invincible and inescapable way, by a fatal mistake or a personal condition (the so-called hamartia) against a mortal fate” (phatum), the fate or fate of the gods.. In other words, its heroes, whether victims or perpetrators, can do nothing against this deadly fate. It is clear that, both in the Palace of Justice and in the Armero disaster, the opposite happened. Both “tragedies” could have been avoided, a fatal fate for the entire Colombian society, but especially for the thousands of innocent victims and their relatives, whose exact number one day we will never know.
They were not tragedies
Both “tragedies” were announced and publicly known, but those responsible for preventing them did nothing, but rather encouraged them. In the Palace of Justice, as the Truth Commission acknowledged in 2005, as Helena Oran reminds us in her brave and clear book Undo the node On page 72, there was already knowledge of the attack on the palace by an M-19. This is what appears on page 100 of the above-mentioned committee’s report:
“On October 16, 1985, Colonel Peña Herrera, Commander of the DINTE Army, sent Circular CK40, in which he communicated information from the General Command of Military Forces regarding the possible M-19 takeover of the Palace of Justice. On October 17, 1985, Colonel Sadovnik Sánchez, Commander (e) of the Army’s 13th Brigade, sent the aforementioned document the next day to the Bogotá Police and DAS.”
Therefore, there is no room to say that there is a grave error. As in tragedies On the part of Army Intelligence, because it learned of the aforementioned criminal act and reported it immediately, but the M-19 attack was not prevented. Therefore, this attack was not a “deadly fate,” as it should have been avoided institutionally. Hence, it seems very strange that the security measures and police surveillance that the palace enjoyed at that time were lifted. Instead, it can be concluded that the army’s “personal state”, humiliated by M-19s by actions such as the theft of thousands of weapons from the North Canton and the failed attack against General Rafael Samudio on October 23, 1985, facilitated this seizure to settle scores against such a defiant and daring enemy. Hence the hypothesis that it was a deadly mousetrap against the M-19.
What resume are we talking about?
Because of the way in which the general forces developed their scorched earth counterattack in Operation Palace, brutally ignoring the basic principles of international humanitarian law: the principle of humanity and the distinction between combatants and civilians; The principle of proportionality in the use of force and caution in the event of damage and casualties, its responsibility for hundreds of deaths and the indefinite number of missing persons is fully established, as a result of its brutal military actions without any limits, beyond the annihilation of the M-19 command. That is why there can be no talk of restoring the palace, but of its devastating disappearance and burning, nor of “preserving democracy, teacher,” in the “courageous” expression of Colonel Plaza Vega at the time, when the executive with its armed arm brutally cut off the judiciary and led to the deaths of 11 judges of the Supreme Court of Justice and the Council of State because of this excessive, reckless, disproportionate and incautious display of lethality. power.
What are human rights?
Not to mention the delirious and terrorist operation carried out by the M-19 when attacking the palace under a declaration “Operation Antonio Nariño for Human Rights”can be classified as a heroic and magnificent act, because it also criminally ignored the above-mentioned principles of international humanitarian law. What this work and its deadly consequences reveal to us, as much as the inability of its heroes, 40 years later, along with the entire political establishment, to assume their historical responsibilities, is that since then and long before that, we have lived under the symbiosis of politics with crime and violence against unarmed civilians, with almost complete impunity for institutional heroes and with amnesty and amnesty for rebels and their illegitimate opponents.
The above is incompatible with democracy, which all its beneficiaries cynically proclaim and claim to defend, regardless of the uniform they wear and the parties they represent, which makes elections a perfect pretext for them. For this reason, it is very difficult to sincerely pay tribute to all the innocent victims, and even today, among the perpetrators of these crimes, the fulfilled duty to defend that Tantic “democracy” or to apologize for the heroism of those who challenge it, is prevalent in their consciences, whether they are from the ranks of the rebels, or yesterday from the M-19 movement, or today from other armed organizations, where it is almost impossible to separate politics from ambition and control of illicit economies.
Hence, instead of living in the socialist and democratic rule of law mentioned in Article 1 of our nominal Constitution, we find ourselves in this kind of new political feudalism that divides the nation, confines thousands of rural people and condemns them to survival under control, and even places themselves at the service of criminal organizations that feud with blood and burn control of its lands and valuable natural resources. In such a scene of plundering of nature and deteriorating internal armed conflict, there is no room to talk about “comprehensive peace,” and what prevails is the opposite, which is similar to total chaos imposed by de facto powers.
The same thing happened in Armero
Something similar happened with the avalanche, the disappearance of Armero, and the death toll of nearly 25,000 or more. It was a disaster previously announced by studies and warnings of geologists, and the civil authorities never took it seriously. In this regard, the statements of meteorologist Max Henriquez were as proactive as the announcements of the M-19 attack on the Palace of Justice, but they were not listened to by the responsible authorities, and so he reminds us:
“One day, I received a visit from two geologists from INGEOMINAS. They came to my office and said to me: ‘Man, Max, we need you to help us, because it turns out that volcanologists have come from all over the world and told us that the volcano… it is in a pre-eruptive stage.’” The then Minister of Mines, Ivan Duque Escobar, father of former President Ivan Duque Márquez, refused to obtain the necessary equipment to monitor the volcano. That minister “was one of those responsible for everything that happened,” he said in his story.
Then continuing to describe the disappearances and deaths at the Palace of Justice and the Armero tragedies is not just semantic lightness and mediocrity on the part of the majority of the media, which covered what happened 40 years ago in a sensational and melodramatic manner. It is a way to hide the identity of the key political and military officials responsible for what happened. From the highest executive branch that did not fulfill its main duty to protect the life, property and honor of hundreds of hostages, who were sacrificed because of their indifference or the vindictive spirit of the army, as well as because of the strategic interests of perpetuating themselves in the Congress of the majority of its members and the false esprit de corps of the senior officers obsessed with eliminating the M-19 and destroying the files and judges of the Supreme Court and the Council of State. Judges who investigated and eventually convicted them as responsible for serious human rights violations in compliance with the disastrous Torbay security law, such as General Miguel Vega Uribe, then Belisario Betancur’s defense minister.
Thus, the Palace of Justice served as a warning and disastrous precedent for subsequent policies and strategies that, under euphemisms such as “democratic security,” ended up covering up state terrorism represented by thousands of extrajudicial executions, or “false positives,” according to point 33 of the Democratic Manifesto of the then presidential candidate Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who warned: “Contrary to the years of study, today political violence and terrorism are identical. Acts of violence for political or ideological reasons are terrorism, as is violent defense.” The state system is considered terrorism.
We will not be able to reclaim the memory of defending democracy, the life and security of all, and thus prevent millions of Colombians from ending up choosing those most concerned with its disappearance in our near future, and appealing to fear and security once again, using mascots such as the panther and the national slogan “Save Colombia.”
Rephrasing and amending the central message of the final report of the Commission on Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition, we must say: “If there are facts, there will be a future.” Rather than “there is a future if there is truth,” because that truth in the singular does not exist when what is at issue is life itself and its irreducible multiplicity. Both require memory, truth and responsibility on the part of everyone, starting with the memory of the perpetrators who went unpunished, whether institutional or insurgent, and who to this day care only about denying their sinister past to continue controlling the present and ruling the future.
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