Attention! This is a notice to victims who did not declare themselves as such to have the right to reparation for crimes committed against them since January 1, 1985.
Law 2343 of 2023 extended to three years the period, from the date of the victimizing event, to register as a victim before the competent authorities, and gave a “last chance”, until November 2024, to those who never did so within the original period of two years, established in the Victims Law.
It is an opportunity for ranchers, victimized for decades by communist guerrillas, with the false narrative that their lands were stolen from peasants and indigenous people, and with the slogan of “the land for those who work it”, a speech with which they justified its violence…, a speech that we are still hearing.
Then, when they lost the support of international communism, they resorted to kidnapping, extortion and looting, crimes that were also practiced by the so-called paramilitaries. In the end, both ended up as narco-terrorists fighting for territorial control to sustain their illicit income.
It is a story that I will never stop telling, because in that environment of violence and in the vulnerability of the abandoned countryside, the ranchers were not only victims of murder, kidnapping, extortion and dispossession by all the violent people, but also turned into victimizers by the narratives of the left, a stigmatization that ended up making livestock victims invisible, who could not be invisible to a society that perceived the rancher as the victimizer.
For this reason, under the volunteer leadership of María Fernanda Cabal, the Colombia Livestock Foundation, Fundagán, created the “End Forgetting” program and published a report in 2009, which rescued 3,293 ranchers who were victims of murder and kidnapping from anonymity.
With the issuance of Law 1448 of 2011, Fundagán decided to accompany livestock victims in vindicating their rights and, in 2013, published a second report, with more than 6,000 victims of different crimes.
There are still names missing from that macabre list, that of a true livestock genocide, although in this country it is the perverse narratives that dictate in the media and on the networks which victims are important and which are not. The ranchers are among the latter, with the heroes of the Public Force, to whom the Constitutional Court even denied a space in a Museum of Historical Memory that, apparently, will only tell half a story.
Therefore, faced with this “last chance” for the victims to be recognized, Fedegán and Fundagán will redouble their efforts, because it is still necessary to “End the Forgetting” of ours.
And the most serious thing…, because that list of ignominy has not yet been closed. This week, in which two farms were invaded in Córdoba, two ranchers, the brothers Lelis and Hernando Santana, were murdered in Arauca. Even when?
Jose Felix Lafaurie Rivera