The Colombian-Spanish journalist Fernando González was in the hands of the revolutionary group in July 1981, due to an order from the former guerrilla commander Jaime Bateman Cayón . For such a crime, the Spanish justice admitted a criminal proceeding against Gustavo Petro
By
Santiago Díaz BenavidesJournalist and editor
The Spanish journalist and presenter was kidnapped for three days by the M-19 in 1981. (Alejandro Márquez – RTVC Communications Office).
It was in 1981 when the newspaper El País published an article reporting on a Spanish journalist who had been kidnapped by the M-19 guerrillas in Colombia. At that time, the left-wing group used to take hostages from the public sphere by force to carry communiqués or bulletins to the national audience, hoping that their reception would be superior through these names.
During the early 1980s, Colombia was led by President Julio César Turbay Ayala. It was a period in which the guerrillas flaunted their extremely radical positions regarding the decisions made by the government. In July 1981, Turbay Ayala recognized that the amnesty law for the guerrillas had been a total failure, since very few members of the insurgent forces had accepted, and announced to Congress that the established state of siege in the country would be maintained, which had already been in force for 31 years.
While Turbay Ayala delivered to the Colombians the updates of his decisions in this regard, the actions of the guerrillas grew. In July of that year, the country’s capital saw how an urban command launched three explosives in the garden of the Palacio de Nariño and the M-19 and the FARC took action in some rural areas in southern Colombia. For the insurgent groups, from the beginning, the government project was incomplete.
“It is preferable to have lost the amnesty battle than to have destroyed the moral foundations of the State”< /b>, said Turbay in Congress, after being firm after the last appearances of the insurgents. By then, barely four months had elapsed since the law entered into force, a law, the 37th of that year, which granted amnesty to Colombians, “authors or participants in acts that constitute rebellion, sedition or riots, and crimes related to the above”.
In those days, when the M-19 was gaining strength as a left-wing intellectual group, various criminal acts were attributed to them, from terrorism to extortion and kidnapping. The guerrillas took several people from the Colombian journalistic circle hostage, including El Espectador journalist Alexandra Pineda, and other personalities from the public sphere, between 1980 and 1990.
One of the names that had the greatest resonance in the international press, or at least in the Spanish press, was that of the journalist and presenter Fernando González Pacheco, who today is one of the most memorable men on Colombian television. Pacheco was born in 1932, in Valencia (Spain), but from a very young age, after the outbreak of the Civil War, he emigrated with his family to the coffee country. He was in this nation from a very young age and quickly became the owner of the ways of Colombians.
As he was one of the most well-known faces at that time, the M-19 wanted to use him to communicate to President Turbay a peace proposal based on three points. Jaime Bateman, the commander of the subversive structure, was the man behind this decision. He took the journalist Alexandra Pineda as a witness, but he did not allow her to know in depth what would be the course of the statements that Pacheco would give him. to the Government.
< /p>The revolutionary leader of the M-19 who had Fernando González Pacheco kidnapped for three days in 1981. (Photograph taken from: Las2Orillas).
She tells, in a publication of El Espectador, that everything happened one night in July 1981. Bateman had her in a place in Bogotá where he would attend a kind of clandestine press conference. Minutes before, she had seen Pacheco for the first time, he was slipped into a car. Later, sitting around a table, she understood that she was just another guest, and the presenter was the official spokesperson. There were also five men and a woman “armed to the teeth” and hooded, who were guarding the meeting.
Pineda, who was only held hostage for 24 hours, describes the moment as one she will never forget and which, unfortunately, not everyone will know about. Bateman, that night, spoke with his hands, with his arms, with his eyes, “fixing his penetrating gaze in the same direction in which he launches a violent flurry of words. And he laughs. He always laughs, laughs out loud at the fear and danger that never leave him for a single moment of his harrowing life as a fugitive. He laughs at the war and at the scare that people get because of it, he laughs at the mortar attack against the Palace of Nariño (“it was the artillery division for the first time,” he told us), but he assures, however, that loves peace, who desires it and believes in it. He laughs at everything and everyone, as if no obstacle in the world were capable of intimidating him, as if he believed himself to be an immortal superman whom no one could lay hands on or force him to change the course that was indicated, as if laughter were the weapon you like to shoot the most. One can fear or hate him, one can not agree with him at all, think that he is a lost madman or simply an idealist who, in the struggle to conquer his chimera, chose the wrong course, but it is impossible to deny the value and the honesty of someone who risks his life every day and every night for an ideal as noble as his country. This was what we thought, sitting next to him, that night of July 22 “.
Pacheco spent three days with the revolutionary leader. He was later released without any kind of physical damage, although not much can be said emotionally. A kidnapping is a kidnapping. The whole country went like crazy looking for him even under the stones and that photograph of him with Bateman went down in history. The presenter’s face, expressionless, as if frozen, with a gun pointed behind his head, and Bateman’s, smiling, as if nothing had happened.
The case was reopen
41 years have passed since that episode. In Spain, a judge named Joaquín Gadea has decided to reopen the case of Pacheco’s kidnapping to convince the family of the deceased journalist to file a lawsuit against Gustavo Petro, the current candidate for the presidency of Colombia, who would have belonged to the M- 19 during the period in which Pacheco was kidnapped.
File photo. Colombia’s presidential candidate for the leftist Historical Pact, Gustavo Petro, watches a polling station during the first round of the presidential election in Bogota, Colombia, May 29, 2022. REUTERS/Santiago Arcos
Gadea has taken the initiative after giving an account of an ongoing process against the left-wing politician, in which crimes against humanity and war crimes are attributed to him. The case was reopened on May 19, 2022, with a 21-page resolution, in which it is ruled out that the Spanish National Court has the authority to investigate the alleged crimes, but in which the possibility of continuing with the clarification of what is related to the kidnapping of González Pacheco in 1981.
For the operation to prosper in the National Court, Spanish law requires that the case be promoted by the Prosecutor’s Office, which has opposed the admission of the procedure, the victim herself, who has already died in 2014, or her relatives. The magistrate has given the order to the Police to check if González Pacheco had Spanish nationality during that time, which is unlikely, since he had Colombian since he was very young. He arrived in the country when he was 4 years old. He has also ordered that relatives or descendants be contacted to talk with them about the existing possibility of a reprimand against Gustavo Petro. Likewise, it has requested that it be investigated whether the presidential candidate has a statute of amnesty or pardon granted by the national government, or whether he has been previously investigated for kidnapping, convicted or acquitted.
Petro won the first round of the presidential elections on May 29 with 40% of the vote, followed by the Santander candidate, Rodolfo Hernández, with 28%. In Colombia he has never governed the left, and in the second round, which will take place on June 19, it will be decided if it will be the first time for a politician of this ideology to lead the country.