After more than two years of being imprisoned in a crude show trial, of suffering persecutions and threats to his life inside the prison, as also stalking and threats to his family, friends and lawyers, Miguel Ángel Beltrán, academic, sociologist and historian who was kidnapped in Mexico and handed over to Colombia where two years of a Kafkaesque process awaited him, has walked free. As Beltrán put it:
“I consider that the attitude of branding everyone who investigates the social reality through a critical lens as a guerrilla comes from a State which persecutes and criminalizes those of us who think differently. Precisely this is what happened to me and for this my academic writings have been taken as proof to accuse me of the crime of rebellion, which constitutes a clear persecution of critical thinking. The purpose of the regime in depriving me of my liberty, despite that the illegality of the proof was found out a long time ago, is to send a clear message to critical academics and the public university in general: ‘be careful in social and armed conflict from a perspective different to the official one: look at what can happen to you. Take care in thinking critically.’ And this, undoubtedly, has shut up some sectors of the university who have taken refuge in silence.” (1)
The past weeks have been particularly anxious ones for Beltrán and his family. First the testimony of an agent, who worked for DAS (Colombian secret police) in Mexico, came to be known in which he stated that he had trailed Professor Beltrán and that the professor was not part of any international commission of FARC (Colombian guerrilla army) as the Colombian state had accused him. Later his testimony was rejected by ‘Colombian justice’ under the claim that it was not valid because it was not made in person. (2) The Mexican agent declared before the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico for security reasons that Beltrán was innocent and that he had said so to DAS but had obtained from it the response that Beltrán was a “trophy”.
Beltrán walked free on June 4, 2011, from what is considered as “judicial kidnapping”, something known by thousands of political prisoners which, in Beltrán’s case, lasted for two years. Beltrán had repeatedly denounced the prosecution, of which he was a victim, as a message to terrorise critical thinking, as a way of impeding the investigating the historical and social roots of the social and armed conflict in Colombia. As he indicated in the interview of April 14, 2011, “the truth makes the system uncomfortable” (See 1). Among the “proof” that was grotesquely put forward against Beltrán were his writings, making each judicial hearing an inquisitorial parody. As Beltrán always maintained: critical thinking is not “terrorism”.
The Constitutional Court’s ruling on the invalidity of the “magical computers” should bring about more freeing
Beltrán walked free thanks to the May 2011 judgment of the Colombian Constitutional Court that invalidated as “proof” the so-called “magic laptop” which the Colombian state claimed to have recovered (3) in the camp of the guerrilla commander Raúl Reyes, bombed in 2008 in flagrant violation of Ecuadorian territory – the three survivors recounted how the injured were, after the bombardment, shot at point-blank by Colombian soldiers, and the autopsies confirmed the massacre.
There are at least fifty people imprisoned and accused under the “proof” of the “magic computers”, charged with belonging to or collaborating with FARC: these people should be freed immediately if the judgment of the Constitutional Court is respected; but the Attorney General, who some signal as an “inquisitorial body” and “apparatus of political persecution”, has called for the ruling to be contested, for which the expected freeings have still not happened. Among those whose liberty follows immediately by law is the journalist, Joaquín Pérez Becerra, recently handed over to the Colombian government by the Venezuelan government, without respect for due process of an ordered extradition and in violation of human rights (4) and the sociologist and documentary-maker Liliany Obando who has spent almost three years imprisoned, separated from her children, being a mother and head of family, and who is being kept in “judicial kidnapping”, with the aggravating fact that it is time for “liberty for the exceeding of deadline” (5), given that the time stipulated in law has passed “without the public hearing having been completed, which according to Article 365 (section 5), the Law 600 of 2000 constitutes a reason for liberty for exceeding of deadline. (Ibid) The exceeding of deadline notwithstanding, and despite the ruling of the Constitutional Court about the invalidity of the “proof” of the computers that the state attributes to Raúl Reyes, Liliany and Obando remain prisoners and victims of constant sanctions for having assumed in the prison the defence of human rights of other prisoners.
There are other prisoners and political detainees, accusations against whom have been invalidated by the Constitutional Court ruling but who still remain imprisoned. There are accusations that behind the walls Liliany Obando is being repressed harshly to deny access to her the one-to-one visits in solidarity with the political prisoners being held in Bogotá in the first week of June. “The Immediate Response Group entered Patio 6 of Buen Pastor and without any explanation removed the prisoner of conscience Liliany Obando Villota, proceeding to isolate her, causing anxiety to her family (…) the prisoner was translated to another high-security yard away for the other political prisoners (6). Liliany Obando is being deprived of her liberty from August 8, 2008.
In its declaration, the Public Prosecutor claimed the Constitutional Court’s ruling was “an act of treason against the country”
Beltrán was freed reluctantly. The Public Prosecutor expressed its total discontent with the court ruling, claiming the judgment would be a “treason against the country”. This is how Eduardo Umaña Mendoza of the Judicial Brigade put it: “The judge absolved Miguel Ángel of all charges which the Attorney General’s office had unjustly saddled on him, which in a grotesque manner in its declarations said that the writ of prohibition which the Criminal Appeals section of the Honourable Supreme Court of Justice issued on 18 May 2011 was ‘an act of treason against the county’. This reveals the character of political persecution that the Attorney General now diligently assumes.
The sociologist Miguel Ángel Beltrán insists that is about political prosecution, denouncing that the critical intellectuals in Colombia are branded as guerrillas as a way of impeding the development of critical thinking and social conscience. The academics are objects of persecution and stigmatisation as happened with Orlando Fals Borda or with more recent cases like that of Professor Alfredo Correa de Andréis who, after being freed and leaving the prison, was assassinated by the paramilitary arm in 2004.
Beltrán was accused of engaging in aggravated crimes and rebellion. He was captured on May 22, 2009, in Mexico City, from where he was shifted to Bogotá, where he was imprisoned at La Picota. After more than two years of anguish and infringement of his liberty, he left free to take care of his life from the paramilitaries because not a few people, finally freed after judicial show trials, suffer assassinations or forced disappearances in Colombia. The coherent and critical voices, like that of Professor Beltrán, are prosecuted by the dirty war developed by the state and its parastatal forces, now rebaptised with the euphemism “BACRIM” in an attempt to conceal them. Despite the make-over operations, “the actions of the government of Santos to cover up paramilitarism (7), the savagery keeps intensifying daily, and the public forces and the paramilitary arm keep on assassinating and massacring, as the Movement of the Victims of Crimes of State have denounced: “In the politics of democratic prosperity, the persistence of crimes against humanity are covered up under the denomination of criminal bands, which is part of the rejigging of the paramilitaries and the false spectacle of demobilisation. The mafia-like, political and business powers of the paramilitary structures persist (…) The criminalisation of social protest, the penalising of farmers, students and human rights defenders, with the prolongation of the practice of forced disappearance, of sexual violence, of military control over life and critical thinking, continue.” (Ibid)
Colombia, bitter ‘record’ in political prisoners: judicial montage and inhuman conditions of imprisonment
Colombia’s is a bitter record in political prisoners: with 9,500 political prisoners, of whom at least 9,000 are civilians imprisoned in judicial montage – trade unionists, teachers, students, academics, peasants, lawyers, human rights defenders, environmentalists, sociologists, artists, documentary-makers. All who demand social justice and get on with critical thinking are exposed to suffering the repression of the Colombian regime and prosecution in show trials with “magic” laptops or witnesses paid by DAS.
All prisoners are exposed to torture, degrading treatment and denial of medical assistance. A study of the centres of imprisonment of political prisoners has systematically revealed that the food contains faecal matter. At Tramacúa prison, the humanitarian condition has been denounced as: “Inhuman conditions, beatings and torture persist in the high-security prison of Tramacúa, in Colombia, claimed the Alliance for Global Justice. The prisoners are deprived of water and the food contains faecal matter or is rotten, as has been verified by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and different NGOs, and the sanitary conditions are deficient.” (8)
The denial of water for three consecutive days is a repeat practice in detention centres as in Valledupar, in the interior of which the temperature hovers around 35-40°C; prisoners have fallen ill from infected water and infections not treated for denial of medical assistance have even produced fatalities. In the centres in Bogotá and in colder places, one of the harmful practices for the health of the prisoners is making them bathe in freezing water and forcing them to remain naked in yards in temperatures that can hover around 5°C, as the prisoners of ERON centre have denounced, where the practices are inspired by the U.S. prison model and imposed on Colombia.
“Projected to host around 4,000 prisoners, the installations of ERON-Bogotá do not comply with the minimum norms established by international protocols for the treatment of people deprived of liberty (…) it obliges us to do our necessary physiological necessities in public view, violating the right to intimacy; meanwhile in the yard are eight communal showers for a population of 220 internees. Sunlight never enters the prison and the lighting and ventilation are precarious; despite the low temperature in the prison, they have not provided us with blankets nor do they let these in (…) For movements inside the prison, dealing with visits, interviews with lawyers and other formalities, we are handcuffed. The situation contrasts with the absence of cameras in the aisles and yards, facilitating the realisation of these illegal acts by the prison authorities. (9) The prisoners similarly denounced that they are deprived “of access to work, study or learning as a mechanism for overcoming sorrow, demonstrating that the proclaimed “purpose of resocialising” of the prison establishment is a chimera, as they never take protective actions that prevent or minimise the effects of the process of imprisonment.” (Ibid)
The situation of mothers, political prisoners and head of families, is dramatic as one of the tortures employed by the prison authority INPEC is to blackmail them with restricting the right to visits of their children and to threaten them that their children will end up being handed over to orphanages if they do not comply with demands made of them to qualify for the opportunity for liberty; and when the mothers as head of families do not have families to look after their children they have the misfortune of the little ones are sent to state centres, to prolong the misery of the mothers in a way that violates even their constitutional rights.
The political prisoners are subjected to repeated beatings and sometimes even to being kept in yards full of paramilitaries, in which they are isolated from other political prisoners, with the evident intent of an attempt on their lives and physical integrity. Many of them have been assassinated in these circumstances though it has been denounced on many occasions. The political prisoners are also hastened to their death by illnesses and infections provoked by adulterated medicines and the inhospitable conditions in the prisons: in advanced stages of illness, medical assistance is denied to them. In 2011 alone, five political prisoners have died in Colombian jails as a consequence of torture. (10)
The testimony of prisoner of war Diomedes Meneses is a representative one:
The state took out one eye with a knife; they showed no mercy with his humanity in leaving him paralysed; they slit his throat and sent him to the morgue in a cataleptic state and tried to kill him on finding out that he was still alive. Behind bars, they took it out on him, leaving him to lose his leg from gangrene without due treatment: torturing him by denying medicines and other practices. (See the video about the case of Diomedes Meneses)
Chronicles of the other shack, Miguel Ángel Beltrán: a voice that not even the bars could still
Miguel Ángel Beltrán: “The backdrop to the writing that I present in my book, The Chronicles of the Other Shack, is the armed and social conflict bludgeoning Colombia for more than half a century and which has brought about a high economic and social costs, particularly that of lives. There have been episodes of intense military confrontations but also of dialogues which, unfortunately, have not crystallised in agreements that eradicate the roots feeding this fratricidal war. In that sense, I consider that the recent liberation of politicians and soldiers held by FARC is a signal that the armed organisation is sending in creating conditions towards smoothening the path for a possible dialogue between the guerrillas and the State. Nevertheless, I do not perceive a real desire for peace on the part of President Santos who, even if he has a style of governance different to that of his predecessor, maintains the line of privileging a military exit.
“When the President affirms that “the door of peace is not closed” but that to open it the guerrillas should cease their military activities, give up arms, etc, in reality he is telling the Colombians that the war is going to continue. How is it to be expected that the FARC, after more than 46 years, demobilise its men and hand over its weapons in exchange for vague promises of peace? Especially, when it is up against a State that has systematically breached agreements. It is enough to glance at Colombian history, from the surrender of Guadalupe Salcedo, under the military government of Rojas Pinilla, till the more recent agreements (…) the breach has been a constant.” (11)
Critical thinking:
“Critical thinking is, in my way of seeing, a fundamental condition of academic and intellectual work: it offers us the possibility of analysing and examining the reality from a different perspective to the dominant ideas (…) Critical thinking has been the indispensable motor for the advance of humanity, but it has not taken a linear route and has had to confront institutional powers interested in showing only one truth (…) In a country like ours, crisscrossed by an internal secular conflict, the exercise of critical thinking is still more necessary. We social researchers have the ethical and political obligation of investigating these realities that hegemonic thinking tries to hide. It is about truths which make the system uncomfortable, and which it tries to erase, criminalizing those of us trying to find it. Today, those to whom we signal critical readings of the social reality, mark us publicly as ‘terrorists’, but as surely tomorrow these aspects of the reality will be discovered and the dimensions of an armed and social conflict – which the governments in turn have tried to reduce to a “terrorist threat” – will be recognised. (Ibid)
Professor Miguel Ángel Beltrán is a necessary voice for the Colombian people, as also the 7,500 voices imprisoned under show trials.
Notes:
(5) Liliany Obando sociologist, documentary-maker, trade unionist, Judge arbitrarily denies the right to liberty of Lilian Patricia Obando Villota, Colombian political prisoner. Nevertheless the fact is:
“Desde la fecha en que quedo en firme la calificación del merito del sumario hasta la actualidad han transcurrido dos (2) años y veinte (20) días sin que se haya terminado la audiencia pública, lo que según el artículo 365 (numeral 5) la Ley 600 de 2000 constituye una causal de libertad por vencimiento de términos”
(7) “ Inhuman conditions, beatings and tortures persist in the high-security prison of La Tramacúa, en Colombia, claims Alliance for Global Justice. The prisoners are deprived of water and the food contains faecal matter or is rotten, as has been verified by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and different NGOs, and the sanitary conditions are deficient.” Tuesday 17 May 2011
Leandro tired of eating faeces committed suicide in prison today
(10) Already 5 political prisoners have died for denial of medical assistance in the prisons of Colombia in 2011.
There are around 500 prisoners of war and 7,000 political prisoners in the prisons of the Colombian regime; torture is denounces a grave and recurring practice against these 7,500 political prisoners
Gracias a: Tlaxcala
Fuente: http://azalearobles.blogspot.com/2011/06/libre-miguel-angel-beltran-faltan-7500.html
Fecha de publicación del artículo original: 05/06/2011
URL de esta página en Tlaxcala: http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=5015
