By Ellis Cortez
Impunity Watch Reporter, South America
BOGOTA, Colombia – The Colombian Attorney General’s Office has announced the capture of a fugitive Catholic priest who was convicted in absentia last year of organizing a killer far-right militia made up of members of a dismantled paramilitary bloc.
After months-long search, Rev Oscar Albeiro Ortiz was arrested in the town of La Virginia, in the central-western province of Risaralda. The Colombian Army took part in the raid.
Ortiz, a former parish priest of a Roman Catholic Church in San Antonio de Prado, was arrested in 2010, but was cleared by a lower court and continued to maintain that he was innocent. This past August, Ortiz was retried and sentenced to 19 years in prison. The High Court in Medellin convicted him in absentia of giving orders to a group known as “Los Desmovilizados de El Limonar.”
Ortiz created the group in San Antonio de Prado in 2003. During this time, Ortiz had accompanied members of the paramilitary bloc and then recruited them after the bloc was ostensibly disbanded under a peace pact brokered by the government of then-president Alvaro Uribe. The group engaged in kidnappings, extortion, and murder.
Authorities say investigators using wiretaps had overheard Ortiz pointing out people as leftist rebels who later turned up murdered. People beaten or driven from their homes by paramilitary henchmen of Ortiz were told they were being punished “for disobeying the orders of the priest.”
The so-called paramilitaries, organized under the umbrella of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, committed more than 70% of the killings in the country’s nearly half-century-old dirty war, according to prosecutors.
The AUC, accused of committing numerous human rights violations, demobilized more than 31,000 of its fighters between the end of 2003 and mid-2006 as part of the peace process with the Uribe administration.
Under the terms of the 2005 Peace and Justice Law, former AUC members face a maximum of eight years in prison if convicted of any of the scores of massacres of suspected rebel sympathizers.
Their foes in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are now engaged in peace talks with the government in Cuba.
For more information please see:
ABC News – Colombian Priest Who Ran Far-Right Militia Nabbed – 1 February 2014
The Guardian – Catholic priest who ran right-wing death squad arrested in Colombia – 31 January 2014
The Washington Post – Colombian priest who ran far-right militia nabbed – 31 January 2014
Fox News – Priest captured who ran far-right death squad in Colombian suburb – 31 January 2014
