After fifteen years of being imprisoned in the United States, former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso was deported this week to Colombia, where he will remain held in the La Picota prison in Bogotá and will formally submit to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).
“Mr. president, Both the former commanders of the AUC, and I personally, are ready to formally install the technical table for the definitive closure of the Ralito negotiations. This is a moral duty of yours and ours with Colombian society and with the communities of the territories in which we fight this war,” he indicated in the document.
Hernán Cadavid, representative to the chamber for the Democratic Center, spoke exclusively this Wednesday with about Mancuso’s arrival in the country and explained that his deportation is part of a plan by the current national administration to “manipulate the truth.”
Likewise, the Colombian congressman assured that he has no doubt that there is also a strategy to discredit former President Álvaro Uribe, which is why he pointed out that the former paramilitary leader will be “instrumented” to say what suits them.
“I take responsibility individually, I have no doubt. They are in a strategy to bring Mancuso, use him politically and have him tour the country as a peace manager. Of course there is a political intention to use Mancuso,” he initially indicated.
Then, he sentenced: “We saw how Petro said on several occasions that Mancuso had to be removed. He now brought him under the figure of peace manager. It cannot be that now everything he says becomes an absolute truth, because he is not going to say it in court. That will then become an instrument of the national government and the Special Peace Justice.”
Where will Salvatore Mancuso be imprisoned?
The former paramilitary leader, who currently has 17 pending cases, was transferred to the extraditable pavilion of La Picota prison, located in the south of Bogotá, where he will be guarded by a specialized guard of 64 men trained in the United States. He will also sleep in a small cell measuring three by four meters.
It should be remembered that Salvatore Mancuso had been extradited to the United States in 2008 along with 13 other ex-paramilitary leaders, after having signed the Justice and Peace process. His arrival was done under a strict security operation.
