More than 4,600 members of a leftist party in Colombia have been killed and any other 1,100 went lacking between 1984 and 2007, a special tribunal set up to strive the worst atrocities devoted at some stage in the U.S’s half-century struggle said in a document launched Friday.
The sufferers were contributors to the Patriotic Union (UP) communist birthday celebration that changed fashioned inside the Eighties in the course of a try via then-president Belisario Betancur to make peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) observed that “of the five,733 victims, four,616 had been victims of homicide” at the same time as the relaxation has been “forcibly disappeared,” the file stated.
“The violence against the UP members was carried out mainly by state agents and paramilitaries on a massive, generalized, and systematic scale,” added the JEP.
Among those murdered were two presidential candidates for the UP, Jaime Pardo, and Bernardo Jaramillo, as well as a handful of active legislators.
The party was reformed in the last decade and currently forms part of the Historic Pact leftist coalition whose presidential candidate Gustavo Petro leads opinion polls ahead of next month’s vote.
The JEP has the authority to offer alternatives to jail time to people who confess their crimes and make reparations.
It acquired witness statements from one hundred fifty human beings related to the assaults against the UP, the general public of whom have been members of the safety forces and intelligence employer.
The tribunal has also opened investigations towards guerrillas, state dealers, and paramilitaries into kidnapping, recruitment of minors, political violence, and the homicide of civilians for the duration of the armed battle that ended in 2016 with the signing of a peace deal that saw FARC lay down its arms and shape a political celebration.
Since 2017, the JEP has charged former FARC commanders with the kidnapping of at least 21,000 human beings and the recruitment of 18,000 minors.
Dozens of former participants of the army have additionally been charged with the homicide of 6,400 civilians who have been finished after which came about as fighters in return for advantages in a scandal called the “false positives.”
