Farc rebel leader: ‘We repent everything, not just the war’

[Judi Lynn]

Farc rebel leader: ‘We repent everything, not just the war’

Carlos Antonio Lozada, supreme urban commander of Colombia’s Farc rebels, is poised to lead his organisation into politics. In this exclusive interview he speaks about war, making peace and meeting victims

Interview by John Mulholland and Ed Vulliamy

Saturday 25 June 2016 19.05 EDT


The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) stands apart from other Latin American leftwing guerrilla movements founded since the 1960s because it has outlived them all – well into the 21st century – and remains in control of vast tranches of territory. But it is also from a different mould: almost entirely rural – its leaders have not been intellectuals, such as Che Guevara, but peasants, fighting a peasant war in the countryside. The Farc’s violence has, however, had an impact on the cities, and during the 1990s Colombia even feared that the guerrillas were poised to take the capital, Bogotá.

The group’s presence in urban areas has been led by a man who most observers say will be the new figurehead of Farc in politics, Carlos Antonio Lozada (left). Lozada is from a generation younger than the guerrillas’ supreme commanders, and though he also fought in the jungle with them he is distinct in that he hails from Colombia’s second city of Cali. He spent 19 years in Colombia’s cities as Farc’s supreme urban commander.

During recent months the Observer has interviewed all Farc’s commanders, in depth, for a long-term project, including Lozada, Farc’s coming man, who hopes to take the organisation into its next conflict, a political fight, a “war without weapons, but with words”. Here, in this interview extract, Lozada talks exclusively about the road to the Havana peace deal.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2016/jun/25/farc-rebel-leader-colombia-interview-carlos-antonio-lozada-supreme-urban-commander-peace

[Judi Lynn]

1. ‘It’s a miracle my Colombia could never have imagined’

‘It’s a miracle my Colombia could never have imagined’

After 60 years of conflict, the truce signed between President Santos and leaders of the Farc rebels has made a nation rejoice

María Jimena Duzán

Saturday 25 June 2016 19.05 EDT

Last Thursday the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, and Timoleón Jiménez (Timochenko), the head of Las Farc, the largest guerrilla organisation in this hemisphere, decided to sign a truce to put an end to 60 years of conflict.

It was a bloody war that took the lives of 220,000 Colombians, according to the country’s Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Those who died were mainly poor people and innocent civilians. More than six million were displaced from their lands and forced to go to the cities, and an authoritative number for those “disappeared” is still unknown. The office of attorney general has said that 45,000 people were disappeared, but according to the International Committee of the Red Cross the toll is higher: 100,000.

For Colombians, the peace accord is not only the best news in years, but a miracle that not even the novelist Gabriel García Márquez could have imagined. After 30 years of unsuccessful negotiations, Colombians became so pessimistic that we took for granted that this war would never end. We thought we were condemned to live with perpetual conflict.

We even drew a red line between cities and the rural territories, as if this country was torn apart. Cities became safe havens when the Colombian army, Latin America’s largest, managed to push the rebels back to their jungle strongholds, and rural Colombia became off-limits for generations of citizens who never dared to go outside the cities. The Farc never was defeated, though, and the war became a way of life.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/25/colombia-truce-farc-maria-jimena-duzan

[flamingdem]

2. More than 60 years if La Violencia is included

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Violencia

[Judi Lynn]

3. So glad to read that link on La Violencia. Had no idea some of those atrocities were used back then.

So up to 300,000 people died within that 10 year time period. Horrific. We've heard over 200,000 have died in the time since La Violencia, too, in the next phase of the war. Probably more than that, if the truth were known. That's a whole lot of murdered people, isn't it?

Had to go look to see if there was anything to be learned yet about Gaitan's murderer, no great news, but this is interesting:

Colombian "Magnicidio" Remains a Mystery After 60 Years

Written by Paul Wolf
Tuesday, 08 April 2008 09:58

~ snip ~

Discovering the Past

For the past eight years, I have been collecting historical materials about the death of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan from the files of U.S. government agencies. Most of these materials I have obtained were located at the U.S. National Archives, including reports from the Office of Intelligence Research of the US State Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, reports of the US Embassy in Bogota, and the transcript of a closed-door Congressional investigation of the CIA's first "intelligence failure" in not predicting the Bogotazo.

The files of America's premier intelligence agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have proven elusive. I filed suit against both agencies in Federal court in Washington, D.C. in 2001. After four years, I learned that the FBI had "disposed of" most its post-World War II Latin America records without authorization from the National Archives. Technically, this means they could have destroyed them, lost them, or given them to an employee to store in his basement. It means only that the FBI is no longer maintains them and there is no accountability for what happened to them.

The CIA is even worse. For seven years, it argued that it would harm US national security and US-Colombia relations if it were to admit that records about the assassination of Gaitan even existed. Eventually, the DC Court of Appeals decided I was entitled to thirteen documents used by Admiral Hillenkoetter in his Congressional testimony. It was at this point that the CIA admitted that its "Post WWII Era Records" are on microfilm, and that their microfilms are indexed by an old IBM-type punch card computer which is no longer operational. This is the dustbin of our history. The CIA is demanding payment of $147,000 to find the missing reports from the first Congressional investigation of the CIA. I am now seeking judicial review of the CIA's recordkeeping policies. However, aside from the thirteen records used by Admiral Hillenkoetter in his presentation, any other information in the possession of the CIA appears to be outside the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

What should also be made public are the working papers of the Colombian judge who first investigated the matter, Ricardo Jordan Jimenez. These were once in the possession of Gaitan's daughter Gloria, who managed the Casa-Museo Gaitan (the Gaitan House Museum) and are now in the hands of the Colombian government. It's unlikely the public will have access to them any time soon.

Yet this is a mystery that demands resolution. Colombia's war is a war of assassination, and Gaitan's dramatic death is a paradigm of the conflict. The plethora of conspiracy theories is the predictable result of unreasonable government preoccupation with the secrecy of its historical records. As long as these files are kept secret, the suspicion that someone is hiding something will remain. Whatever the answer may be - and most likely, we will never know the answer - there is nothing to be gained from obscuring our common history. After 60 years, it's time we learned the truth.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/1212-colombian-magnicidio-remains-a-mystery-after-60-years

It is about time they start sharing the facts on these important murders of leftist leaders, wouldn't you say? Jeez, Louise. They couldn't show much more contempt for the human beings on this planet.