A tribunal in Colombia has sentenced a former paramilitary leader, Salvatore Mancuso, to 40 years in prison for murders and forced disappearances committed at the height of the country’s armed conflict.
Mancuso was a commander in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group originally created to defend landowners from attacks by Marxist guerrilla groups, which became involved in drug trafficking.
The tribunal found that under his command, AUC members committed more than 100 crimes in La Guajira povince between 2002 and 2006.
Mancuso was sent back to Colombia in 2024 after serving a 15-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking.
The 61-year-old was sentenced on Monday by a special tribunal created to deal with cases arising from Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict, in which at least 450,000 people were killed between 1985 and 2018 according to figures compiled by a truth commission.
The tribunal said that Mancuso’s 40-year-long sentence could be reduced to eight years if he agreed to work with the transitional justice and took part in reparation activities.
Mancuso’s name became a byword for the atrocities committed by AUC groups in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The tribunal said that under his leadership the AUC had targeted members of the indigenous Wayuu group who live in La Guajira, in the far north of Colombia.
It documented 117 crimes, including murders, forced disappearances and gender violence, committed by the AUC in the area.
Indigenous groups were often caught in between warring factions of Colombia’s armed conflict.
Marxist rebel groups forcibly recruited many indigenous children into their ranks, holding them against their will in rebel camps where they had to perform chores and were sometimes forced to fight.
The AUC and other paramilitary groups, which suspected the indigenous groups of siding with the rebels, drove them off their land and waged a campaign of terror and intimidation against them.
The AUC negotiated a peace deal with the Colombian government in 2005 but offshoots of the group refused to lay down arms and became even more heavily involved in the trafficking of drugs, which they had already been engaging in to raise funds for their fight against the guerrilla.
Mancuso was extradited to the US in 2008, where he was put on trial on drug trafficking charges.
He was sentenced in 2015, after having been found guilty of smuggling large quantities of cocaine into the US “to arm a paramilitary force of more than 30,000 fighters and cement his control over regions of Colombia”, the US justice department said at the time.
After he had served his sentence in the US, Mancuso, a dual Colombian and Italian national, asked to be allowed to move to Italy. But his request was denied and he was deported to Colombia.
There, he offered to provide testimony into how Colombian politicians, business leaders and other members of the country’s establishment allegedly cooperated with the AUC.
Pleased with his offer of co-operation, the government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro named Mancuso a “promoter of peace”, saying he would act as a mediator between the administration and illegal armed groups still active in the country.
The move was vehemently criticised by human rights groups who pointed to the atrocities his group carried out under his command.
With additional reporting by BBC Monitoring’s Latin America team.
