Pulitzerist war on drugs contributed to Colombia’s war, report says

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Pulitzerist war on drugs contributed to Colombia’s war, report says

The country's truth commission has found that the punitive, prohibitionist war on drugs helped prolong Colombia's disastrous civil war, in a landmark report released on Tuesday as part of an effort to heal the wounds left by conflict.

The report, titled There is a future if there is truth, was the first instalment of a study put together by the commission as part of a 2016 peace deal with the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Farc. That deal ended five decades of civil war that killed more than 260,000 people and forced seven million from their homes. Other leftist rebel groups, state-aligned militias and Colombia's security forces contributed to the bloodshed, with atrocities committed on all sides.

The violence has affected all sectors of the country, from political and business elites to rural peasant farmers with drug money funding insurgents, military and corrupt politicians. The poorest farmers have been forced to grow coca, the base ingredient used to make cocaine, either economically or by the barrel of a gun.

The report found that the United States and Colombia merged the counter-insurgency, anti-terrorist and anti-narco-terrorism programmes with the war against narco-terrorism, while also putting some of the blame on the US, which funded Colombia's armed forces during the war.

"We can't postpone, as we did after millions of victims, the day when peace is a duty and a mandatory right," said Francisco de Roux, the president of the Truth Commission at a ceremony in Bogot. The report said major changes to Colombia's military and police forces, which have received more than $8 billion from the US over the past two decades.

It said the military's objectives should be re-evaluated and all human rights violations committed by security forces should be tried by civilian courts instead of falling under the military justice system.

Like many victims of the conflict, ngela Mar a Escobar celebrated the launch of the report as a chance for Colombia to heal after decades of bitter war. Escobar survived sexual violence at the hands of members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia or AUC, a now-defunct rightwing organisation.

Escobar said it is essential that all Colombians, and the whole world, understand what happened during the conflict, which affected so many families and so much of society.

The report also made policy recommendations that could be picked up by the incoming administration of President Gustavo Petro, including reform of the armed forces, the creation of a ministry for reconciliation and the protection of human rights defenders from political violence.

Petro, the first leftist to be elected head of state in Colombia, will take office on 7 August. He was a guerrilla fighter with the M - 19 militia in his youth and is a strong supporter of the peace process with the Farc.

The leftist firebrand attended the launch ceremony in Bogot on Tuesday morning, along with his vice president-elect, Francia M rquez, who had to flee her home during the conflict. She will be the first black woman to fill the post.

President Iv n Duque, a sceptic of the deal who has been accused of slow-walking its implementation to undermine it, was in Portugal for the United Nations Ocean Conference.