Former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso was deported to Colombia on Tuesday after 16 years in prison in the United States and promised to cooperate with Colombian justice in connection with hundreds of crimes, authorities announced, AFP and Agerpres said.

A former far-right commander must answer for hundreds of displacements, disappearances and murders committed in the 1990s and early 2000s by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC), a paramilitary group that aims to curb the advance of extremists left partisans.

According to images released by Interpol in Colombia, the 59-year-old Colombian-Italian national emerged from the plane’s escort handcuffed and wearing a bulletproof vest, but with a smile.

He has promised to tell the truth about his past criminal connections to politicians and businessmen, immigration officials said.

However, the left-wing government of President Gustavo Petro named Mancuso “peace manager” in mid-2023 as part of the government’s negotiations with several armed groups, including the descendants of paramilitaries such as the del Golfo clan.

This appointment presupposes his dismissal, the Ministry of Justice stated at the time.

He has been heavily criticized by the opposition, and victims’ families hope his return will shed light on the fate of hundreds of victims of the conflict that has ravaged Colombia for more than six decades, pitting guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitaries and the Colombian army against each other. one against the other.

“I remain available to the national government and the armed organizations that are trying to dialogue with it (…) to support the necessary peace talks, regardless of their complexity,” Mancuso assured in a statement published in the local press.

Rodrigo Londono, a former FARC guerrilla commander who signed the historic peace in 2016 and a former arch-nemesis of Mancuso, called on X to “reconcile the country and publicize all responsibility for the armed conflict.”

Having laid down his arms in 2006 together with thousands of his comrades in arms under a peace agreement with the then president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), Salvatore Mancuso was handed over in 2008, contrary to the terms of the agreement. The American authorities sentenced him to sixteen years in prison for drug trafficking. .

At the time, Mancuso said his extradition to the United States was ordered to avoid exposing the financiers of the paramilitary groups.