The Attorney General’s Office has asked the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to determine that the Western Bloc of the FARC committed kidnappings for the purpose of labor exploitation, which constitutes an independent pattern of macrocriminality. According to the request, the guerrilla group exploited the people, treating them as property and forcing them to do forced labor.
The purpose of the kidnapping in this case was to use the kidnapped with the objective of extracting his workforce, such as for the opening of roads, road repair, transportation, cleaning and food preparation, among others, as indicated in the document of observations presented by the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation.
The Attorney General’s Office highlighted six cases of this nature in its request, in which the victims were two peasants, two students and the driver of a dump truck. In addition, the document cites the case of the kidnapping of a woman in Policarpa, Nariño, who was taken to a guerrilla camp in the jungle to be forced to work in the kitchen, cleaning the boots of the guerrillas, and forced to have sexual relations with they.
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“Before Auto 019 of 2021, many victims from different Blocks were not aware that the forced labor to which they were subjected and the exercise of domain rights that former members of the FARC exercised over them was a special form of victimization: slavery”, indicated the delegate Acosta Aristizábal, who also pointed out that only when the Public Ministry and the office of the magistracy gave visibility to this form of victimization, was when the victims began to denounce the facts.
The Public Ministry considers that the recognition of this pattern by the Chamber of the JEP also constitutes a guarantee of the right to the truth of the victims and of society, since denying it implies making invisible one of the forms of victimization used by the Bloc. Occidental of the FARC in the framework of the kidnapping policy. In addition, the repair will have to be characterized in keeping with the damage.