Colombia will not pardon drug traffickers in search of peace: Minister of Justice

Colombia will not pardon or release drug traffickers in its pursuit of peace, although it will seek to dismantle criminal organizations responsible for the violence, cocaine trafficking and illegal mining, Justice Minister Néstor Iván Osuna said.

The official leads a bill to facilitate the submission to justice of high-impact crime organized armed structures, most of them involved in drug trafficking, as part of President Gustavo Petro’s policy to seek a total peace that puts an end to the armed conflict of almost six decades that has left more than 450,000 dead.

The initiative, which will be debated in Congress where the government has until now a coalition that guarantees it a majority, has generated controversy due to criticism from some political leaders and the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, who warn about the risk of negotiating with drug traffickers and pardon them.

“There are neither pardons nor mass releases. There is an offer to voluntarily dismantle armed structures in exchange for more benign penal treatment,” Osuna said Tuesday in an interview with Reutersin which he described the bill as altruistic and a priority to achieve generalized peace.

“It is a law that aims to overcome a problem of violence, of very difficult coexistence, to dismantle these armed gangs and so that we can cherish the illusion of living in peace,” he said.

The minister maintained that the interested groups must commit to dismantle their criminal networks, acknowledge their crimes, deliver weapons, goods and information about their illegal activities, in addition to making reparations to the victims.

Osuna clarified that the initiative is aimed at seeking the subjugation of groups in which there are people involved in drug trafficking, but without individual processes.

Until now, the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces -better known as the Clan del Golfo-, and Conquistadores de la Sierra Nevada, agreed to a bilateral ceasefire with the Government after they expressed their willingness to submit to justice.

The high commissioner for peace, Danilo Rueda, assured that other groups expressed their intention to submit based on the bill, which contemplates penalties of six to eight years in prison in addition to four years of a restorative process for victims with mechanisms surveillance and monitoring.

Verification to avoid infiltrators

The submission to justice for criminal groups will be complemented by the peace negotiation with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army and the dialogues that the Government seeks to initiate with two FARC dissidents.

The Minister of Justice said that the bill contemplates a rigorous process of verification and filters by the intelligence services of the National Police and the Military Forces, to prevent drug traffickers from being included in illegal armed groups and obtaining benefits from subjection to justice.

In a 2005 negotiation with known paramilitaries, drug traffickers paid millions of dollars to assume control of some squads, which allowed them to receive judicial benefits.

Osuna, a lawyer with a long career in the judicial sector, assured that organizations that try to infiltrate drug traffickers will be excluded from the process.

Extradition is not included in the project. If people who are part of criminal groups dedicated to drug trafficking submit to justice and have extradition requests, it will be a discretionary decision of the president whether he grants or suspends them, the minister said.

Most of the heads of criminal groups involved in drug trafficking are requested for extradition by the United States.

The 2016 peace process with the extinct guerrilla of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) included the suspension of the extraditions of the leaders of that group.

To guarantee restoration to the victims and their families, the bill establishes the reactivation of the main sentence of more than 30 years for those who do not do so.

“Colombians have suffered the effects of drug trafficking with blood, with pain, with deaths, with tragedies like probably no other people in the world, I wish there had never been a law to reduce a penalty in exchange for dismantling the gangs,” Osuna said. .

“But the situation has reached that point that, let’s say, the State offers the possibility of a reduced sentence to these high-impact armed structures in order to build a future without drug trafficking, without armed gangs, without that anxiety that is experienced in many places in the country,” he concluded.

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