Originally published in Spanish in: confidencial.com
Today, Holy Sunday, we celebrate the return to life of Jesus of Nazareth. What better occasion to remember the inspiring story of love and struggle of Doña Fabiola Lalinde, who died on March 12, 2022, and the search diary of her son Luis Fernando Lalinde Lalinde.
Luis Fernando was a member of an opposition political party who was detained, tortured, disappeared and extrajudicially executed between October 3 and 4, 1984. In light of his disappearance, the Lalinde family filed a criminal complaint before the 13th Court of Criminal Instruction of Medellín on December 15, 1984. The head of Court 13, Dr. Bernardo Jaramillo Uribe, declared the investigation open on January 4, 1985, due to the amount of evidence that established that Luis Fernando had been detained in the Vereda Verdum, municipality of Jardín, Antioquia and taken in a truck to the municipality of Riosucio, Caldas by members of the Ayacucho Battalion of the National Army, after being accused of being a guerrilla fighter by an informant in civilian clothes.
But from the beginning, the military criminal jurisdiction intervened to obstruct the work of the ordinary justice system. After several tests, Judge Jaramillo, on March 28, 1985, requested information from the 121st Court of Military Criminal Instruction that was prosecuting the case of alias “Jacinto” because several elements of that case were similar to that of Luis Fernando. It turns out that on October 26, 1984 the Army commander, General Rafael Forero Moreno, had informed the Minister of Defense, Miguel Vega Uribe, about the operations in Riosucio and Andes by the Ayacucho Battalion, including the capture on October 4 in the municipality of Jardín of NN “Jacinto” who supposedly tried to flee in the Ventanas, Riosocuio, Caldas, and was killed. But Judge Jaramillo’s request was ignored. Despite reiterating it on several occasions, he never received a response.
Judge Jaramillo persisted. On August 2, he referred the case to the Single Superior Court of Andes, Antioquia, which took cognizance of the investigation three days later. In that context, I had the honor of acting as Doña Fabiola’s representative in the civil part and in October 1985 I traveled several times by plane to Medellín and then by municipal bus to Andes, to attend the case before the courts of knowledge and instruction.
Unlike the ordinary jurisdiction, at that time the military criminal jurisdiction did not accept the constitution of a civil party. That is why I could not represent Lalinde’s relatives or attend the exhumation of alias “Jacinto” that took place some time later in that space.
No member of the army was involved in the investigation until July 1988. The military judge and his secretary argued before the ordinary justice system that they did not remember the site, nor did the fingerprint examiner of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS). The forensic doctor from the Institute of Legal Medicine refused to testify before the civilian courts, claiming loss of memory. In 1989 Judge Jaramillo was murdered in Medellín.
Military interests also influenced the Attorney General’s Office, which limited itself to repeating the army’s communiqués. Since November 1984, the case passed through the hands of the prosecutors Carlos Jiménez Gómez and Carlos Mauro Hoyos – kidnapped and murdered in 1988 near Medellín – an investigation that was carried out by the Attorney General’s Office for the Military Forces. The person in charge of the investigation was Captain María Isabel Barbosa, a lawyer with whom I studied law at the Universidad Gran Colombia. The case was archived, but due to the international incidence it was reopened. On December 10, 1987 the Delegate filed charges against Captain Piñeros Segura, Lieutenants Tejada González and Soto Jaimes, and Corporal Medardo Areiza for cruel treatment against NN “Jacinto”, who eventually, when the body of the NN was exhumed, turned out to be Luis Fernando Lalinde. On August 1, 1988, the ridiculous sanction of suspension of 30 and 20 days was requested for the captain and a lieutenant, and the statute of limitations was declared for the death of the other lieutenant and the corporal.
For years, Doña Fabiola documented her search for justice for Luis Fernando in a diary. The story of the diary arose from an interview with journalist Daniel Samper Pizano, a columnist for El Tiempo, to whom she told her that she was going to start a search, to begin a journey about her son. Daniel Samper told her that when she finished she should tell him what results she had obtained. Once the task was finished, doña Fabiola sent the original diary to Daniel Samper at the address of El Tiempo in Bogotá because nothing was lost there … and it never appeared. But she kept a photocopy of it as a precaution.
As Doña Fabiola said in her diary “With the military there is something very special. One went and they all said that no one knew about Luis Fernando’s case, no one, no one, nowhere (…) and the behavior that the military criminal justice system has had against the ordinary justice system I see it as the confrontation of David and Goliath, but the ordinary justice system is David and the others with all their power are Goliath”.[1]
Luis Fernando’s case reached the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IACHR, thanks to the activity of Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, president of the Regional Human Rights Committee of Antioquia. Abad Gómez maintained an exchange of correspondence through the IACHR with the Colombian government, which denied the capture, deprivation of liberty and identity of Luis Fernando Lalinde. In 1987, the same year Héctor Abad was murdered, the IACHR condemned the Colombian government for the arrest and subsequent disappearance of Luis Fernando Lalinde. On September 16, 1988, the IACHR modified the resolution for the arrest and subsequent death. This decision of the IACHR contributed to the advancement of domestic actions, together with the advocacy of the international community, in particular the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, FEDEFAM, Amnesty International and Americas Watch.
I had the honor and pleasure of participating with Doña Fabiola in the United Nations Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. The adoption of the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action was of great help to our efforts to achieve the observance of the principles of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Fabiola was among the 7,000 participants at the Conference who overcame differences to reinforce important principles: the universality of human rights and the obligation of states to abide by them, the centrality of women’s rights, the need to combat impunity, including through the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court, and the promotion and protection of human rights as an essential element of the UN’s identity and purpose, which led to the establishment of the post of High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Today I remember very well the premonitory words of this great woman, “the only certainty is that we will not rest until we know the truth about the fate of Luis Fernando”. It was not only to find the remains of her son but to continue fighting against forced disappearance, her life and her struggle serve as an example of persistence and hope for all of us.
[1] (El Camino de la Niebla. La desaparición forzada en Colombia y su impunidad. Bogotá 1988. Colombian League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective).
Originally published in Spanish in: confidencial.com
