The retired general of the Army had been acquitted in the first instance
31 years and 10 months in prison. That is the sentence to which Iván Ramírez Quintero, retired general from the Army, and Fernando Blanco Gómez, also retired colonel, were sentenced in the second instance for the forced disappearance of Irma Franco in 1985. It is one of the strongest convictions so far for the bloody seizure of the Palace of Justice of Bogotá by the extinct M-19 guerrilla and the subsequent and even more bloody military takeover of the symbolic building.
Irma Franco was a member of the M-19. Law student, 26, was in the secretariat of the Council of State, in the Palace, when a commando of that guerrilla took over the most important judicial precinct in Colombia. It has not been fully clarified why it was there at that time. Some say that it was a coincidence, that he was looking for information for his thesis; others, that he was doing a surveillance job for the group. The capture and subsequent resumption, in any case, threw the country into a crisis, and resulted in the death of about 94 people and the disappearance of 12 others, including magistrates, visitors and guerrillas. This Wednesday, almost 39 years later, the High Court of Bogotá reported that it agreed with the Prosecutor’s Office in its appeal against a sentence of the 51st criminal court of the Bogotá circuit that, in December 2011, acquitted Ramírez and Blanco Gómez for the forced disappearance of Irma Franco.
According to the sentence published by Caracol Radio, Ramírez, in coordination with Colonel Edilberto Sánchez Rubiano, ordered the military under his command to take the people who rescued alive to the Casa del Florero museum, diagonally to the Palace. In the historic house, the military carried out reconnaissance, identification and interrogation work. Irma Franco arrived there, according to the Court’s ruling, and she was never heard from again. That is why the sentence is not for crimes such as torture or homicide, but for forced disappearance.
Jorge Franco, Irma’s brother, spoke in front of the sentence. In a video that has been disseminated by the Collective of Lawyers “José Alvear Restrepo” (CAJAR), an NGO who has advised victims of the Palace during these decades, he assures that he is not in favor of high penalties because he understands that all people are human beings with families. But he explains that in this case the conviction is justified, “more when they do not collaborate to tell the truth and more to know where they hid or what they did with Irma’s remains. A minor penalty would have been much better for us, but with the truth and with the remains of Irma,” says the victim of the disappearance, a crime that has the particularity of creating a permanent anxiety in those who wait for years for the arrival of their loved ones without being able to tackle a grief.
Eduardo Carreño Wilches, co-founder of CAJAR, has celebrated the judicial decision. In a video, she points out that the Court agrees with her allegations: “Irma Franco was captured alive and was in the Casa del Vorero, where she was guarded by members of intelligence and counterintelligence of the army. In addition, the soldier who guarded her informed the family about this capture, and members of the army confirm the presence of Colonel Iván Ramírez [later promoted to general],” he says. The criminal and human rights defender concludes with a reflection on the decision of justice: “Unfortunately it is late but, as they say, late but justice arrives.”
Iván Ramírez has more pending accounts with justice. He took advantage of the transitional justice agreed with the FARC, but the Special Justice for Peace, the relevant court, expelled him in August 2022, after finding that he did not collaborate with his objectives of achieving truth and justice. “The person appearing has not complied with the true commitments previously assumed and has ignored the conditions established […] to accept his submission. Ramírez Quintero even expressed his intention to avoid the process dialogued with the participation of the victims,” the court explained in a press release. That expulsion earned Ramírez more problems. In May 2023, the United States Government banned him from entering his country, for “serious human rights violations.”
In addition, Ramírez has been pointed out by Salvatore Mancuso, one of the main heads of the paramilitary demobilized of the AUC, to have collaborated with that illegal group. In his statements to the JEP about joint operations of the self-defense with the public force, he mentioned that they had the support of the retired general for the massacre of El Aro (Ituango, Antioquia), committed in October 1997 and one of the bloodiest of the conflict, with 17 dead and 5,000 displaced. “(The plannings) began from the Castaño House when Pedro Juan Moreno, Secretary of the Government of Antioquia, asks for them to General Iván Ramírez and from there to the IV Brigade.” He also said that Ramírez was one of the soldiers who supported the paramilitaries in the kidnapping of Leonor Palmera, sister of Ricardo Palmera, leader of the extinct FARC known as Simón Trinidad. The connivance was such, according to Mancuso, that Ramírez “opened the doors to all the battalions and brigades” attached to the First Army Division.
Ramírez has always denied his responsibility both in forced disappearances in the Palace and in any act committed by the paramilitaries. “I did not help expand paramilitarism,” he said in a hearing cited by the JEP in December 2022 in the framework of another case related to the genocide of the members of the Patriotic Union (UP).
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