Officers hope that Salvatore Mancuso will cooperate to disclose details about a whole lot of murders and enforced disappearances.
Former Colombian paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso has been repatriated after serving a drug-trafficking sentence in america.
Salvatore Mancuso arrived at Bogotá's El Dorado airport on Tuesday. After seeing a number of requests to be despatched to Italy, the place he additionally has citizenship, denied, he was rapidly taken into police custody, with the authorities hoping that he’ll make clear a whole lot of crimes that occurred throughout civil unrest within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s.
Now 59, Mancuso, who arrived on a chartered flight carrying dozens of Colombians deported after illegally coming into america, was previously a pacesetter of Colombia's United Self-Protection Forces. The paramilitary group, based by cattle ranchers, has fought leftist rebels throughout some of the violent stretches of Colombia's decades-long armed battle.
Human rights organizations and authorities officers hope he’ll cooperate with the justice system and supply info on a whole lot of crimes.
Mancuso confessed his duty for quite a few massacres. He has been in jail in america since 2008 for drug trafficking, and has indicated that he’s now able to tackle the function of “lawyer of peace”.
“I’m coming to proceed with my commitments to the victims, however on the similar time, I’m coming to place on the service of a peace agenda that forestalls Colombia from being an everlasting manufacturing unit of victims and collective ache,” mentioned Mancuso in an announcement distributed to the media upon his arrival.
He’ll stay in jail in Colombia, the place the courts have judged him answerable for greater than 1,500 acts of homicide and disappearance. He’ll attempt to get a diminished sentence, and probably a launch from jail, from a transitional justice system created by Colombia's 2016 peace deal.
Victims of the nation's battle hope Mancuso will assist make clear a whole lot of killings and enforced disappearances carried out by paramilitary fighters, together with extrajudicial executions by which victims have been buried in mass graves.
In a number of hearings with Colombian judges, together with some by teleconference whereas in US custody, the previous paramilitary chief spoke about his dealings with politicians, and the potential involvement of senior officers in warfare crimes.
However his extradition to america in 2008 had slowed down the investigations.
“The return of Mancuso to the nation should contribute to the development of peace, justice, fact and the non-repetition of warfare.” he said Rodrigo Londono, often known as Timochenko, a former chief of the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgent motion. He’s the present president of the FARC Comunes political celebration.
“I prolong my hand to Mancuso to reconcile the nation and produce to gentle all of the tasks of the armed battle,” he wrote on social media. “Peace will win!”
Colombia has endured almost six many years of civil warfare between left-wing rebels, right-wing paramilitaries and the nation's navy. The battle has killed greater than 450,000 folks and displaced hundreds of thousands.
FARC, the most important insurgent group, signed a peace settlement with the federal government and laid down its arms in 2016.
President Gustavo Petro, who took workplace in August 2022, has made the seek for “whole peace” within the South American nation a key plan of his administration. He signed a landmark ceasefire settlement with the Nationwide Liberation Military (ELN) that was prolonged in early February.
