MIAMI – A last-minute war is being imposed on the fate of a former paramilitary warlord whom the Colombian government needs after a long drug sentence in an American prison.
Salvatore Mancuso, commander-in-chief of a now disbanded group of right-wing defense forces, served a 12-year sentence for trafficking cocaine in March.
He remains in detention in the United States, while Colombia, where courts have convicted him of more than 1,500 acts of murder or enforced disappearance, is fighting a U.S. order that would send him to Italy, where he also holds citizenship.
Mancuso’s lawyers say he would be killed if he returned to a South American country that has gone from decades of bloody conflict. They claim that it has already fulfilled its obligations under a peace agreement he negotiated in 2003, which limits criminal sentences to 8 years for paramilitary leaders who confess their crimes.
The many sick people who stayed through Mancuso say that they have long been denied justice. Colombian officials also complain that the refusal of his request to expel Mancusco from his home would be a high-profile cover-up for an unwavering best friend who has suffered a decades-long civil standoff that has left another 260,000 people dead and millions of displaced persons. . The carnage was aggravated by the U.S. call by Colombian cocaine, which financed illegal armed groups, adding the Colombian United Defense Forces in Mancuso, known as AUC.
Successive Conservative governments have sent several thousand Colombians to face drug trafficking rates in the United States, including Mancuso, having led the manufacture and shipment of more than 138,000 kilograms of cocaine, according to his usty agreement.
“Sending him back to Italy would be a disgusting betrayal for the victims,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch’s director for the Americas. “If the Colombian government is brought to justice honestly for heinous crimes, it will exhaust all legal avenues to bring Mancuso back to Colombia, hold him accountable and avoid this humiliation of the victims.
The battle underscores the unfinished paintings of the paramilitary peace process, known as Justice and Peace, which led to the demobilization of 30,000 right-wing fighters, but failed in its ambitious purpose of telling the fact and reconciliation.
The injuries reappeared this month when Colombia’s Supreme Court ordered the arrest of former President Alvaro Uribe while investigating whether he helped bribe witnesses to involve suspicions that have long revolved around his own appointments with paramilitary groups.
In 2008, far-right Uribe extradited Mancuso and thirteen other warlords to deal with drug rates in the United States. his crimes and his political collaborators – adding Uribe, who as governor in the 1990s supported the creation of legal and armed teams to left-wing guerrilla shepherds’ lands.
“They extradited the truth with me,” Mancuso told Colombian media shortly after arriving in the United States in 2008.
On April 16, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered Mancuso’s deportation to Italy, according to two other people close to Mancuso who spoke under anonymity to discuss the personal administrative procedure.
But this expulsion did not occur. In June, U.S. prosecutors asked on behalf of their Colombian counterparts that Mancuso, 55, be extradited to Colombia to serve a 27-year sentence for the 1997 abductions of two relatives of a leftist commander, according to U.S. court records. fighters disguised as Colombian policemen abducted a flower shop while, at the same time, in a separate operation, commandos posing as potential homebuyers searched the other victim’s apartment.
Mancuso, who, according to the extradition request, communicated by telephone with one of the kidnappers without delay after the raids, then took over the charge of kidnapping the peace process. The two captives were subsequently killed.
Colombia withdrew its extradition request last month and the U.S. case closed. Although the government did not give an explanation for why his sudden turnaround, it appears that Miami-based Mancuso’s lawyer Joaquín Pérez has mocked prosecutors.
Last year, a ruling in the capital, Bogota, granted Mancuso parole in Colombia. The opinion on the mancuso’s years of imprisonment in the United States met the needs of the Justice and Peace Act, which allows for election sentences of up to 8 years abroad. He rescinded the arrest warrants on July 15; Colombia withdrew its extradition request five days later.
But the country’s president still says he needs Mancuso to return and prosecutors are still seeking his arrest for other crimes, they are not identified as violations under U.S. law because they stem from his position in the AUC’s most sensitive chain of command, not from the express orders he has given.
The workplace of Colombia’s leading prosecutor said Tuesday that he is proceeding to seek extradition of Mancuso. In a statement, he said that an extradition request at one time depended on a trial being passed in a case in which Mancuso was suspected of having performed money laundering after his demobilization. In 2018, the opinion delivered to a time suspended the proceedings in the case.
Mancuso’s strong legal reputation did not prevent Colombian officials from calling for his arrest. And in a country with a notoriously weak, corrupt, maze-like judicial system, it doesn’t take much for an independent opinion to take into account an arrest warrant.
Colombian President Ivon Duque said Mancuso’s time in the United States for drug trafficking can be attributed to his sentences for “crimes against humanity” in his country.
“The moment I enter Italy, I will ask the International Criminal Court to be tried for these crimes,” Duque said in a recent interview with Bogota Week magazine.
Some critics that Duque’s government would possibly be following the motions.
Opposition Senator Ivón Cepeda said Duke, whose political mentor is Uribe and whose supporters come with politicians imprisoned for links to the AUC, has little to gain from the return of the warlord.
“You have to be really naive that an involuntary bureaucratic mistake is what blocks the return of the user who knows the history of paramilitaries more productively,” said Cepeda, who traveled to the United States to meet With Mancuso on behalf of the victims.
Leftist Cepeda, who is Uribe’s chief accuser and whose father murdered through infantry soldiers in coordination with paramilitaries, agrees to hold congressional hearings on how he believes Colombia has not complied with the extradition request.
Formed as self-defense forces through wealthy ranchers in the 1980s to counter the extortion and kidnapping of left-wing rebels, the militias seized much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast in the last 1990s, killing thousands of people and stealing millions of acres of land. while taking a lucrative drug. Routes. In 2001, the United States designated the AUC as a foreign terrorist organization.
Mancuso expressed more regret than paramilitary leaders and a ardent preference for making peace with their former enemies on the battlefield, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who signed their own peace agreement with the government in 2016.
His sophistication (studied English at the University of Pittsburgh) has highlighted him among other rural warlords. Robert Spelke, a retired federal narcotics prosecutor who prosecuted the warlords, described Mancuso as “very bright, very understanding” and a cooperative witness decided to tell the truth. Spelke spent more than two hundred hours interviewing Mancuso and once recalled the moment when the Colombian broke down to cry when he recounted a paramilitary bloodbath of civilians.
“I know what those boys did, ” said Spelke. “But when you put yourself in his position, it’s an unpleasant war. I’d like to think I’d do things differently, but if the FARC killed my family, they stole my cattle…”
Mancuso’s eagerness has already shaken Colombian politics.
His boast in 2005 that a third Congress in Colombia had been elected with paramilitary assistance triggered a wave of judicial investigations that ended with dozens of bans from elected officials, Uribe’s cousin senator added.
His cooperation with the Justice and Peace process continued after his arrival in the United States, where he organized more than three hundred video conferences with Colombian researchers and victims.
In a symbolic gesture that surprised many Colombians, Mancuso spoke by phone last month with former FARC commander-in-chief Rodrigo Londoño. Former adversaries have come together to commit to peace, reconciliation and millions of victims.
The franchise is what led Mancuso to be extradited to the United States in the first position, and puts his life in danger if he is fired, said Jaime Paeres, his lawyer founded in Colombia. Several members of the family circle have already gained threats and last month Paeres filed a complaint with Colombia’s leading prosecutor, claiming that he was the target of an attack through 35 armed men who attacked a ranch adjacent to his home.
“Mancuso needs to return to Colombia. But it was us, his lawyers and friends, and even some authorities, who told him not to come back,” Paeres told The Associated Press. “I have no doubt they’ll kill him if he comes.”
With the U.S. order to send him to his father’s local Italy, Colombian officials introduced a definitive lobbying effort.
Colombia’s Washington ambassador Francisco Santos has met in recent weeks with U.S. officials at the White House, as well as with the Departments of State and Justice to verify and block his move to Italy, according to a senior Colombian official who spoke on anonymity. . to talk about personal interviews.
The State Department and the White House did not comment. A spokeswoman for immigration and customs enforcement said in a statement that the firm had taken custody of Mancuso, which she only called “Colombian national,” federal marshals on July 21 and was now awaiting deportation. ICE refused to provide details, bringing operational security.
While the extradition of Colombian drug traffickers has helped relieve the country’s investigators, it is much rarer for Colombia to call for arrests beyond its borders.
But the price of Mancuso is unique. If the remarkable and fickle warlord returns, he will spread awkward truths that many Colombians do not need to hear, said Cepeda, the left-wing lawmaker.
“Much of the fact is already known, ” said Cepeda. “But much more to come.”