Before the JEP court, the former paramilitary chief of the Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, known by the alias ‘Jorge 40’, the last card is played to be accepted to the transitional justice.
The former paramilitary chief began by apologizing to the victims to whom he declared “survivors,“
“From my most essential privacy I want to declare that I feel deeply and sincerely sorry for all the pain and damage caused (…) as a result of my actions as a third party and as a combatant,” he apologized to the victims before responding to the JEP questions.
Subsequently, the magistrate Sandra Jannette Castro who presides over the diligence, began to investigate in search of those answers that the whole country wants to hear. The first question was focused on clarifying who contributed to the Northern Bloc of the AUC.
I want to talk about my life story And what led me to be at some point a third party collaborator, but not only of the Self-Defense Forces, a third party collaborator of the Farc and a third party collaborator of the ELN, because that was first, a third party collaborator ELN and the Farc, that was Rodrigo Tovar from 1993 to 1996”, he pointed.
‘Jorge 40’ promised to tell the whole truth and stated that he was willing to accept having been a paramilitary and that he financed these groups, but not under the accusation of the JEP, which maintains that as a combatant he served as a liaison with the forces of order .
‘Jorge 40’ is giving his statement from La Picaleña prison, in the city of Ibagué (Tolima), where he has been since his return from the United States in 2020 after serving a twelve-year sentence for drug trafficking. He has recently been sentenced to 40 years for a double murder in 1999.
Like other illustrious paramilitaries such as Salvatore Mancuso, ‘Jorge 40’ also joined the demobilization policy of former President Álvaro Uribe, acknowledging his participation in more than 1,400 crimes, including 300 massacres, for which he will have to answer now if he does not manages to hold on to the JEP.