“I went all day without eating”: kidnapping victims face the FARC

Juan de Jesús Montañez, a peasant from the Colombian department of Meta, the former guerrilla of the FARC 20 years ago subjected him to the most chilling harassment of the armed conflict in a torturous kidnapping lasting three months, two weeks and three days in which he was accused of being a paramilitary.

One day he was forced to walk for 11 hours up a mountain where he was abandoned, while he was tied up, so that “The beasts will swallow it“Because it gave them” llove ” spend a bullet with him, as he relates.

“I was terribly afraid of a leaf falling because it seemed to me that it was a shot”, he confessed this Monday to Judge Julieta Lemaitre, of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), during the first day of the hearing of observations of the victims of the “Case 1″, that corresponds to the kidnapping.

Last January, the JEP accused the eight members of the former FARC Secretariat, the guerrilla’s highest decision-making body, for their responsibility of command in the atrocities suffered by the hostages and the horrors that were caused to them during the armed conflict, facts that The ex-guerrillas have accepted and it is pending that the Jurisdiction will impose the sanctions it deems on them.

Today a group of victims attended the first observation session of the written acknowledgment made by the Secretariat of the FARC that last April he admitted his responsibility “for ordering the arrests and prolonged deprivation of liberty of civilians and members of the public force ”.

“The kidnapping was a very tremendous thing for me. They did things to me that I never thought another man would be capable of. Everything they took from me I earned with the sweat of my brow “, lamented the peasant when he recalled that “I would go all day without eating ”.

SURVIVE BY A MIRACLE

Montanez responded to the senator and former guerrilla from the FARC Sandra Ramírez who stated last week that those kidnapped during the conflict had “Your comforts” when they were in captivity.

“That they come to say that the deals were very good, that is a very big lie “, said. “I don’t know how I am alive because when they released me from the pole (where I was tied) I would fall all at once because one is kind of stiff. His arms, his legs, everything hurts “he added during the hearing in which the victims accused the FARC for “Inhumane treatment.”

The JEP, a court created at the request of the peace agreement signed in November 2016, also accused the guerrilla leaders of crimes against humanity and war crimes for serious conduct related to kidnapping such as homicide, torture, attacks on personal dignity. , sexual violence and forced displacement.

“When they arrived I could not find what God to ask because one feels death (…) It is a miracle of God because there (in the kidnapping) at the time they want they kill him”, He stated when lifting a bouquet of flowers that he said, “my family could have put it on my grave. ”

“WE ARE LIVING PRACTICALLY ON THE STREET”

The JEP determined last January that the kidnappings were not errors of the ex-combatants in the war or necessities or excesses of the war, as the former leaders of the FARC have tried to justify.

In this sense, the victims reaffirmed today that the kidnapping forever marked their lives and that they barely overcome the injuries.

“The Government has not had a heart, it has not had a will for us victims of the armed conflict at any time”Montañez lamented when referring to the fact that he has not worked for 20 years, has no home or pension, and that today he lives “Practically on the street.”

“All of us in this situation are begging. Sometimes I have one meal for just one meal and you start to think that those people who did evil, who committed all these atrocities are the ones who are benefiting. “, he said in a criticism of the Government for having the survivors of the kidnapping “Totally abandoned”.

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