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 FARC and the government. At the ceremony marking the report’s publication on Tuesday, they sat 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 part of the report that recommended major reforms of the police and military called for increased oversight and accountability and a restructuring of the state security forces that would include separating the national police from the defense ministry.
Other proposals included moving human rights violations and crimes committed by the police out of the military criminal justice system and into the civilian system, eliminating compulsory military service, evaluating the military budget with the goal of reducing its size, and eliminating agreements between the military and private companies in rural areas in which soldiers are hired to protect oil companies and other private entities.
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 country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. 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.
The investigation was highly critical of the U.S. role in the war. Today, despite a 20-plus-year effort by the United States to eradicate the Colombian cocaine trade, the drug’s base plant, the coca leaf, is grown at record rates, according to U.S. data.
The report comes at a significant inflection point in Colombia. Just a week ago, the country elected its first-ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro.
Mr. Petro had campaigned on issues of social and economic justice and inclusion — themes also promoted by the peace deal and the transitional justice process that came with it. He now faces the monumental task of following through on his promises in the face of a deeply divided society and an economy dogged by high inflation, a large deficit and chronic poverty.
The truth commission report could help in the healing process — or be used to further divide society. Mr. Petro vice president-elect Francia Márquez attended the publication ceremony. The outgoing president, Iván Duque, a conservative who campaigned against the peace deal, did not.
Father de Roux said he believed that Mr. Petro would carry out the report’s recommendations.
Mr. Petro took the stage and shook hands with Father de Roux who handed the president-elect a copy of the report. The sobriety of the moment contrasted sharply with Mr. Petro’s last major public appearance, when he accepted the presidency amid thundering applause earlier this month.
Mr. Petro told the audience that he believed this report could help “end, definitively, the cycles of violence” the country had suffered for generations, but that could only happen if the report was not used as a weapon for vengeance. Societies will always have conflict, he said, “but conflict cannot be synonymous with death.”
The report is not judicial, and the commission will not issue sentences or penalties. That process is being carried out by a different body, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, that was also created by the peace deal.
Instead, the truth commission is meant to “establish ethical and political responsibilities,” according to commission documents, while trying to establish a common truth and “lay the foundations for the transformations necessary to make peace possible.”
June 28, 2022
A photograph in an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified a man greeting Father Francisco de Roux, the head of Colombia’s truth commission, as retired Major Carlos Guillermo Ospina. He is Roberto Lacouture, a victim of a kidnaping by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
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