Colombia Truth Commission Report: Live Updates
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombia’s national truth commission called on Tuesday for a sweeping transformation of the country’s armed forces that would refocus the military around respect for human rights and international law.
The recommendations are part of an expansive report designed to tell the most comprehensive narrative yet of Colombia’s long and brutal internal conflict, which lasted at least 58 years, involved almost every sector of Colombian society and cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of American dollars.
The report, overseen by a group of 11 commissioners, is the product of the 2016 peace deal between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a leftist group, and the government. At the ceremony marking the report’s publication on Tuesday, they sat on the stage of a theater in Bogotá, some in shirts that read, “There is future if there is truth.”
The commissioners were instructed to not only investigate human rights violations committed by all actors between 1958 and 2016, but also to write an extensive history of the way the conflict affected social, economic, political, cultural and environmental rights — and then provide recommendations that would set the country on the path to lasting peace.
The commission was also asked to examine the factors that perpetuated the conflict, including the rise of paramilitary groups and the rapid growth of what became an all-powerful cocaine industry.
Father Francisco de Roux, the head of the commission, spoke at length about the often painful work, which took nearly four years and involved more than 14,000 individual and group interviews, many of them conducted in 28 “truth houses” set up all over the country. He thanked the many victims who had spoken, “overcoming fear,” to tell their stories.
At times, victims of the conflict interrupted the speeches, shouting in the rafters and from their seats, and demanding recognition for the deaths of their loved ones, or protection for their territories.
The Colombian conflict began as a war between the government and the FARC, the country’s largest rebel group. It eventually evolved into a complex battle involving the government, the FARC, paramilitary groups and the United States government, which provided billions of dollars in aid to the Colombians to help them fight the insurgency and the drug trade that funded it.
The conflict left the country with deep scars that are yet to heal — an estimated 260,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, and more than five million were forced from their homes by the violence.
The report was released at a ceremony at a theater in the capital that is named for Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a presidential candidate whose assassination in 1948 is largely viewed as a precursor to the conflict with the FARC.
Colombia Truth Commission Report: Live Updates