By Camilo Cohecha
BOGOTA (Reuters) -Forty years after a deadly siege at Colombia’s Palace of Justice killed more than 100 people, survivors and relatives of the victims say the anniversary is a solemn reminder of their ongoing fight for truth and justice.
Colombia’s Supreme Court will hold a commemorative event on Friday to mark the November 6, 1985, assault on the court building by the M-19 guerrilla group, which took Supreme Court magistrates and staff hostage. The guerrillas stormed the building to try to subject then-president Belisario Betancur to trial following the collapse of peace talks between the rebel group and the government.
The military deployed tanks, helicopters and hundreds of soldiers during its bloody 27-hour attempt to retake the building. More than 100 people died, including 11 of the 25 Supreme Court justices, and 11 people remain disappeared.
The horror of that day remains vivid for Amelia Mantilla, whose husband, Magistrate Emiro Sandoval, died during the siege.
“We never imagined such horror as the one that occurred, because it lasted for hours,” Mantilla said. “It was simply a matter of destroying and killing everyone.”
Mantilla, who also later served as a magistrate, and her daughter Alexandra, now a judge on Colombia’s transitional justice court, received disturbing news more than 30 years after the siege.
In 2017, authorities working to confirm the identities of victims informed them that the remains originally handed over to them were not Sandoval’s, but other unidentified casualties of the attack.
“What do victims demand? They demand the truth. They want to know what happened to their loved one. They want to have something, a symbol, that represents the body of the person who died. They also need to be sure that the acts will not go unpunished,” Mantilla said.
Though Sandoval’s real remains, confirmed with DNA testing, were later given to the family, the mistake is an example of the ongoing suffering many victims’ families – especially those of the disappeared – are still subject to.
“This is a tragedy […] they haven’t allowed us to close,” Mantilla said.
The siege remains a political flashpoint.
President Gustavo Petro, a former member of M-19, last week claimed on X that forensic evidence showed no magistrates were killed with guerrilla weapons. Some victims’ relatives, including the son of slain magistrate Manuel Gaona, have disputed the president’s claims.
The M-19 demobilized under a peace deal in 1990 and many of its leaders have gone on to long careers in politics. In 2015 then-president Juan Manuel Santos apologized for the military’s response to the siege, recognizing “failures in the conduct and procedures of state agents.”
Erik Arellana, a victim advocate and the son of an M-19 member who was disappeared two years after the siege, said commemorations are critical to create empathy for victims.
“Commemorations have been a way for the families to say, ‘We’re here, we’re still here,’ … we’re still asking the national and international community to understand the harm that was done.”
(Reporting by Camilo Cohecha, Andres Rojas and Herbert Villarraga; Writing by Iñigo Alexander; Editing by Brendan O’Boyle and Christian Schmollinger)
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