'Insult to his victims': outrage as warlord appointed 'peace manager' in Colombia
Source: The Guardian
‘Insult to his victims’: outrage as warlord appointed ‘peace manager’ in Colombia
Salvatore Mancuso, who is imprisoned in US, is responsible for more than 300 killings and is accused of about 75,000 crimes
Luke Taylor in Bogotá
Tue 25 Jul 2023 11.30 BST
Last modified on Tue 25 Jul 2023 16.39 BST
Salvatore Mancuso is one of the most notorious figures in Colombia’s six decades of conflict, responsible for some of the most heinous of crimes during the darkest chapters in the country’s history.
As a senior commander of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) – the country’s largest rightwing death squad – he ordered forced disappearances, sexual violence and massacres of civilians.
“There was not a single campesino who did not live in fear of that man,” said Angélica Salsero, representative of the Association of Victims in Córdoba, the northern Colombian region where the AUC sprang up. Like many others there, Salsero lost a family member to the paramilitaries.
So when President Gustavo Petro recently appointed Mancuso as a “peace manager” for negotiations with armed groups, Salsero – like many others – reacted with outrage, saying the decision makes a mockery of all those who lost loved ones or were forced from their homes.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/25/colombia-salvatore-mancuso-peace-manager-outrage
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Mancuso overseeing the alleged surrender of guns by the ultra-violent death squads (A.U.C.) which often worked in tandem with the Colombian military during massacres, assassinations, etc.
While the Colombian government officially claimed the right-wing paramilitaries had disbanded, they had simply shuffled the numbers into smaller groups with new names, and continued their deadly terrorism, often engaged in right-wing pursuits, like social cleansing and violently suppressing any chance of unions forming in search of better working conditions for the extremely impoverished workers.