Colombia and Venezuela agree to search for bodies of alleged victims executed by paramilitaries

Colombia and Venezuela agreed on Tuesday to search for the bodies of hundreds of victims apparently executed by far-right paramilitaries and buried in the territory of the oil nation to hide the evidence, President Gustavo Petro announced after a meeting with his counterpart Nicolás Maduro.

The former leader of the far-right paramilitary squads, Salvatore Mancuso, recently told the Special Jurisdiction for Peace that at least 200 Colombians were executed by these illegal armed groups and buried in Venezuela, near the binational border.

“With President Maduro we have reached an agreement that it be allowed, with forensic experts, perhaps even with the arrival of Salvatore Mancuso, in order to find the remains and hand them over to their relatives,” Petro told reporters on the sidelines of a summit. of South American presidents in Brazil.

“We are going to develop all the work we can with our experts in identifying corpses, we already have a tradition in that, an experience. If Mancuso manages to detect the areas and there are indeed corpses there, the Venezuelan State would help us to return the remains already hand it over to their relatives,” the president explained.

Paramilitary squads were illegal armed groups that emerged in the 1980s amid the violent armed conflict of nearly six decades that has left more than 450,000 dead.

Those groups, financed by ranchers, landowners, merchants and businessmen to protect themselves from attacks by leftist guerrillas, spilled over with bloody attacks against the civilian population escalating the confrontation, according to human rights groups.

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