MIAMI (AP) – A lawyer for a former Colombian paramilitary leader asked a U.S. federal court to force Attorney General William Barr to expel the former warlord in Italy after serving a long drug sentence.
Monday’s emergency request in federal court in Washington, D.C. on behalf of Salvatore Mancuso, former commander-in-chief of the Colombian United Defense Forces, known as AUC, arises at a time when Colombia is organizing a last-minute crusade to block Mancuso returning to Italy after lacking an extradition request that had to be withdrawn last month.
Mancuso’s attorney argues that Barr, Chad Wolf, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, and 4 other top US officials. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service illegally detained Mancuso in federal custody beyond the maximum of 90 days allowed for the removal of aliens. request a copy of a final administrative termination resolution dated April 15 requesting that DHS and ICE return Mancuso to Italy, where he also has citizenship.
Immigration lawyer Hector Mora attributes the delay to strong pressure from Colombia’s conservative government, which says he is working hard with the U.S. State Department to bring Mancuso back to Colombia.or even killed, even though he has fulfilled his obligations under a 2003 peace agreement he negotiated, which limits criminal sentences to 8 years for defense force leaders who confess their crimes.
“He and his circle of relatives are terrified of his imaginable return to Colombia,” Mora wrote to ICE officials on March 27, the same day Mancuso served a 12-year sentence in the United States for cocaine trafficking.
Mancuso, 55, the most remorseful of former leaders of the right-wing defense forces after their demobilization and the eagerness to talk about paramilitary war crimes has already shaken Colombian politics.
His boast in 2005 that a third of the members of the Colombian Congress had been elected with the help of the paramilitaries triggered a wave of judicial investigations that ended with dozens of arrests of elected officials.preference for locating a Colombian court to order Mancuso’s arrest in a “desperate effort to silence him.”
Mancuso “through his multiple statements, he has gained enemies in the degrees of power, adding senior officials of colombia’s ruling party and the narrow circle of the current administration,” Mora wrote.
Colombia’s President Ivon Duque this month called for Mancuso’s return and his immediate imprisonment for “crimes against humanity.Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s Office said it was introducing itself to a new extradition request after AP revealed how the first attempt had to be withdrawn when the government learned that a sentence about had already overturned the arrest warrant.
While Colombian courts have convicted Mancuso of more than 1,500 acts of manslaughter or enforced disappearance, many of these crimes are identified as crimes under U.S. law because they stem from his position in the AUC’s most sensitive chain of command, based on express orders.In 2001, the United States designated the AUC as a foreign terrorist organization.
In 2008, President Alvaro Uribe stealthily extradited Mancuso and thirteen other warlords to face drug rates in the United States.Critics say the surprise measure, an obvious violation of the peace agreement, an attempt to calm men when they began to reveal secrets about their crimes and political collaborators – added Uribe, who as governor in the 1990s supported the creation of legal and armed teams to protect the lands of pastors opposed to left-wing guerrillas.
Monday’s emergency case, known as the Mandamus mandate, comprises a new vision of how Mora and Joaquín Pérez, Mancuso’s criminal defense attorney in Miami, controlled to outwit Colombian authorities.as well as Human Rights Watch, which accused Colombian officials of being “particularly negligent” in pursuing Mancuso’s extradition.
According to correspondence with the petition, Mancuso applied for asylum in the United States, where his ex-wife and youngest son received coverage, and also indicated that he would oppose the return to Italy, but that he will fight any order to send him to Italy.Colombia.
Mora, in correspondence with U.S. officials in March, said his consumer had already purchased a one-way price ticket to Rome and had a confrontation in Italy, where he will remain quarantined for 14 days after arriving in Italy., Mancuso’s family circle also showed up to purchase price tickets for two ICE officials who were going to escort the former criminal.
Mora included the Italian mancuso passport, which expired in 2001; The documents were delivered through the Italian Consulate in Miami on August 14, according to the correspondence included in the petition.
The U.S. Department of Justice has not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time And ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
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