“The official story is false”: Gustavo Petro on the forgiveness of the victims of the Palace of Justice

The militancy in the M-19 guerrillas persecutes presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, more than other former members of that armed group, and along the same path the memory of the most important armed action: the Taking of the Palace of Justice in November 1985. In an interview with the magazine Bocas of the El Tiempo Publishing House, the leader of the Historical Pact referred to that moment and why he has not asked the victims for forgiveness.

By November 6 of that year, when the seizure of the Palace of Justice began, Petro was imprisoned in the La Modelo prison in Bogotá, after being captured in the Bolivar 83 neighborhood of Zipaquirá. Alvaro Fayad, then commander of the M-19, formed a select group of 35 guerrillas (as determined by the Final Report of the Truth Commission formed for that fact) to enter the building, there were 41, but six of them did not manage to enter the building.

“I didn't take the Palace. The organization, collectively, accepted that it was a huge failure and a huge mistake. I didn't make any decisions about the Palace, because I couldn't, I was in jail. I was militarily subordinate,” Petro told him in an interview with El Tiempo.

The presidential candidate stated that he was militarily subordinate, and for that reason in his subsequent analyses he has disassociated himself from this type of organization, because it leads to armies having a “body spirit”.

During the interview, Petro argued that “forgiveness must be followed by non-repetition”, that it would be called an act of contrition and that it should start from identifying what he considers to be a contradiction between the official version and the “internal version” of events, which is the one he possesses.

According to Petro, “the official story is false”. “The guarantee of non-repetition has to do with finding out why an organization takes over the Palace and why a State ends up with everything in the Palace, including the Supreme Court,” said the Historical Pact candidate to Bocas editor Mauricio Silva.

In the autobiographical book Una vidas muchas vidas, the current senator and candidate recounts the version he considers most closely attached to the truth of the events that took place between November 6 and 7, 1985. A controversial position that has not been resolved by the shadows that still tarnish the truth of this guerrilla and military operation.

The candidate wrote that the M-19 intended to restart the peace process that was then being carried out with the government, with the seizure of the Palace of Justice. His intention was to study a case against President Belisario Betancur for allegedly breaking the truce with the guerrilla movement.

“The M-19 never intended to attack Supreme Court justices,” Petro wrote. By that time, the movement had achieved a military victory in Yarumales and considered that the armed route could allow such a large operation, but it did not calculate the army's response.

“The Government never intended to save their lives. The Army had two great motivations for forcibly entering and retaking the Palace. The first was the relationship between several members of the leadership with Pablo Escobar and Rodríguez Gacha, a reality that has been completely silenced by the press,” says the candidate.

That version has not been tested. The truth is that the capture left 94 people dead and 11 missing, due to military work. In addition, the Tricolor Plan, as the resumption was called, did not contemplate the rescue of hostages, but rather the decisive results, as reconstructed by the Truth Commission formed to make a subsequent report.

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