Senator Rubio urges Biden administration to reject a former warlord's extradition to Colombia
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FILE - Colombian paramilitary warlord Salvatore Mancuso is escorted by U.S. DEA agents upon his arrival to Opa-locka, Florida, May 13, 2008. Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called on the Biden administration Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, to reject Colombia’s request for extradition of Mancuso after he was named a peace envoy in the South American nation. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz, File)
Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022, in Miami.
BY JOSHUA GOODMAN
Updated 2:08 PM CDT, August 23, 2023
MIAMI (AP) — Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is calling on the Biden administration to reject Colombia’s request for extradition of a former warlord after he was named a peace envoy in the South American nation, a move that could see him avoid additional prison time for human rights abuses.
Salvatore Mancuso, the top commander of a former group of right-wing militias, completed a 12-year cocaine trafficking sentence in 2020. He has been held in U.S. custody ever since after Colombia at the last minute reversed a U.S. order that would’ve sent him to Italy, where he also has citizenship, and instead struck a deal for him to be sent back home to face justice.
This month, Colombian President Gustavo Petro named Mancuso a peace envoy to promote the disarming of other illegal armed groups that emerged after Mancuso’s United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, laid down its weapons two decades ago. To facilitate the peacemaking role, Petro said he would seek to suspend prison sentences courts already imposed against Mancuso for his role in more than 1,500 acts of murder and forced disappearances.
More:
https://apnews.com/article/rubio-colombia-extradition-warlord-mancuso-8ea9743d8020602609ba7a61c48180db
(It's about time the Batistiano Cuban "exiles" stopped controlling U.S. foreign policy re: Latin America. Permanently. It never should have been allowed in the first place.)
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Colombian warlord: Release of death squad boss 'El Mono' from U.S. prison has Canadian victims seeking truth
When Salvatore Mancuso was shipped from Colombia to a U.S. cell, he said, ‘they extradited the truth.’ But his sentence ends today and he has secrets to tell
Author of the article:Brian Fitzpatrick
Published Mar 27, 2020 • 21 minute read
Former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso is escorted by guards to a court in Medellín, Colombia, on Wednesday, May 16, 2007. PHOTO BY AP PHOTO/FREDY AMARILES
For weeks, locals had been quietly fleeing the northern Colombian town of El Salado. They were afraid, they told neighbours, of the arrival of the AUC, a death squad led in their region by a tall, imposing figure named Salvatore Mancuso, known as “El Mono.”
By the year 2000, El Salado, a farming community nestled in Colombia’s Montes de María mountains, had become a coveted target in a brutal conflict between two irregular armies. On one side were the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who had been at war with the Colombian state since 1964. On the other was Mancuso’s United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary death squad that colluded with corrupt elements of the Colombian military and did their dirty work.
As it did for the FARC, Colombia’s cocaine trade bankrolled the AUC. And to move AUC drugs from Colombia’s interior to the Caribbean coast — for export onward to North America — Mancuso needed to clear a path north through El Salado and across the Montes de María. On Mancuso’s orders, Rodrigo Mercado Peluffo, a fearsome AUC boss known as “Chain,” planned an attack on El Salado using five FARC deserters — handed over to him by the Colombian army — to guide the way.
By Feb. 16, 2000, for anyone who hadn’t fled, it was too late. Four hundred AUC soldiers began garrotting peasants, slowly encircling the town. When they reached El Salado’s main square, the AUC produced a list upon which were scrawled the names of suspected FARC operatives, or locals felt to be helping them. Mancuso would later call what followed an “anti-subversive” operation. In reality, it was killing for sport. Over a weekend on a concrete soccer field, at least 40 men, women and children were stabbed, bashed and shot dead. Using instruments pillaged from El Salado’s cultural centre, the killers gave each victim a musical sendoff.
The Colombian army, despite frantic calls from locals to the nearest base, was nowhere to be found.
“They pulled my daughter away,” one survivor told Human Rights Watch seven years later. “She called to me, ‘mommy,’ and they shot her in the head. She had been celebrating her 20th birthday that day. They killed my cousin, they scalped her, tied her up … they strangled her and finally, they cut her head off.”
The mother thought another of her daughters, a seven-year-old, had lived. Three days later she found her body. “They put a plastic bag over her head and she died, suffocated … on the top of a hill.”
More:
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/colombian-warlord-release-of-death-squad-boss-el-mono-from-u-s-prison-has-canadian-victims-seeking-truth
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