Inter-American Court condemns Colombia for the extermination and persecution of the UP party

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Colombia for the extermination of 6,000 members of the left-wing political party Unión Patriotica during the 1980s and 1990s.

The political organization arose in 1985 as a result of a failed peace process between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government.

The IACHR said that it was possible to verify that systematic violence spread throughout almost the entire country with different forms of human rights violations, such as forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture, and attacks.

The ruling was received with hope by survivors and relatives of the victims, many of whom had been persecuted for years.

“That it be made visible that in Colombia there was a genocide against a political party and that it be recognized that there were human rights violations in this extermination that took place for political reasons,” César Rengifo told the Voice of America.

Another survivor, Dogoberto Chamarroy, expressed that the message for the president “is to recognize that it was a genocide against the Patriotic Union and that all the victims, such as men, children, and women, who have lived through this war since 1984, can repair themselves and reach an happy term for all people”.

For the analyst and professor at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá Mauricio Jaramillo, with the sentence the Colombian State must work to recover the truth and memory of what happened.

“A series of reparations is ordered, which is a way to compensate these people for the damages. In addition, the State is obliged to continue working on the discovery of the disappeared persons and on the work of memory,” Jaramillo told VOA.

The Government of Gustavo Petro announced that it will abide by the decision and will respect each of the points of the sentence. In this sense, Senator Iván Cepeda, from the ruling coalition, pointed out that the decision is valuable for Latin America.

“It constitutes a precedent so that in the future in Colombia a political genocide will not be repeated again.”

In the 180-page ruling, the court ordered a series of measures that include guarantees of non-repetition, protection measures, investigation of the facts, identification and trial of those responsible, a public act of acknowledgment of responsibility, a national day to recognize to the victims and the construction of a monument in honor of the victims.

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