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"There is Future if There is Truth": Colombia's Truth Commission Launches Final Report
In Fusagasugá, the mural "The Embrace of Truth" memorializes those killed during the conflict. (Source: Colombia Truth Commission)
Declassified U.S. Evidence Fortifies Truth Commission’s Findings and Recommendations
Bogotá, 28 June 2022 - Today, Colombia’s Truth Commission wraps up three-and-a-half years of work with the launch of its report on the causes and consequences of Colombia’s conflict. The publication of the Commission's findings and recommendations is an important step forward in guaranteeing the rights of victims and of Colombian society to know the truth about what happened, to build a foundation for coexistence among Colombians, and to ensure that such a conflict is never repeated.
. . .
Among the most impactful records are U.S. diplomatic and intelligence reports evaluating the nature and extent of ties between anti-guerrilla “paramilitary” death squads and the Colombian state. Of special interest are a handful of CIA operational reports—documents normally outside the purview of FOIA—that reveal contemporaneous U.S. knowledge that the Colombian military was engaged in a persistent pattern of collaboration with paramilitary operations.
One CIA report from May 1988 said that Colombian Army intelligence and brigade commanders were behind “a wave of assassinations against suspected leftists and communists” during 1987, including the killings of several members of the leftist Patriotic Union political party, victims of a state-sponsored “genocide” according to the Truth Commission.
The 1988 CIA report also said that the intelligence section of the Army’s 10th Brigade had supplied target lists and other support to the paramilitaries who murdered 20 workers in the infamous March 1988 massacres at the Honduras and La Negra banana plantations. The CIA said that the names of all the victims, most of whom were members of the Sintagro agricultural workers union, had “appeared on the B-2’s [Colombian Army intelligence section’s] interrogation reports” and “were accurately identified by their attackers from a list which the attackers possessed.”
More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/colombia/2022-06-28/there-future-if-there-truth-colombias-truth-commission-launches
