On 9 November, in the city of Santa Marta on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, President Gustavo Petro delivered the following speech in an official ceremony to recognise the state’s responsibility in the extreme violence enacted against the left-wing Patriotic Union (UP) party during the 1980s-2000s. The UP was formed in 1985 under the terms of a peace agreement between the Belisario Betancur government and the FARC guerrillas. However, the agreement collapsed as the army and paramilitaries launched a campaign to exterminate the party, with close to 6,000 UP members and supporters murdered in the subsequent years. Until now, the state had never acknowledged its role in the violence. Read the Spanish transcipt here.
Remarks by President Gustavo Petro Urrego at the public ceremony acknowledging international responsibility in the case of ‘members and militants of the Patriotic Union vs. Colombia’
Santa Marta, 9 November 2025
Respectful greetings to the victims, survivors and families of the Patriotic Union political party, to the social leaders, labour unions and trade union organisations, to the ethnic peoples, Afro-descendant communities, peasants, indigenous peoples and ordinary people who have contributed to the defence of human rights.
Corporations and victims’ organisations, in particular the Reiniciar Corporation, the Justice and Human Rights Commission and all the associations that have accompanied the processes of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition.
Ambassadors, diplomatic corps accredited in Colombia, Vice-President of the Republic of Colombia Francia Elena Márquez Mina, Secretary-General Angie Rodríguez Fajardo, Director-General of the National Agency for Legal Defence of the State César Palomino Cortés, ministers and officials of the national government.
To the representatives of the Attorney General’s Office, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and other State institutions, members of the Congress of the Republic, senior officers of the Armed Forces and the National Police, international delegations, the academic community and cooperation agencies present, national and international media, and in general to all those who accompany us today in this act of recognition and remembrance.
It is good, sometimes, yesterday, the day before yesterday, 7 November, and today, to remember what happened in 1985, because in 1985 the Patriotic Union was founded.
What happened in 1985?
In 1985, there were the events at the Palace of Justice, which yesterday and the day before yesterday dominated the national press with a single perspective.
[n.b. The Palace of Justice siege in 1985 saw the M-19 guerrilla movement occupy the palace before an army raid on the building killed over 100 people including guerrillas, judges and workers. The week of Petro’s speech was the 40th anniversary.]
Today, Colombian society asks few questions. Much of that society was not even born then. Today’s young people do not know what happened in 1985. The reason why? Because if we explained the reason why, perhaps the people of Colombia would not allow those events to be repeated and they would change the history of Colombia in a definitive way.
That is precisely the discussion we are having in these weeks, in the months to come: whether we return or change and follow other paths, perhaps more promising, perhaps more hopeful, perhaps more joyful.
Joy. Colombia undoubtedly needs hope and joy.
The State is not here today
The past sometimes brings us pain, but we must recover that past; we cannot forget it because we may fall back into the abyss.
The State is not here today. The Executive is here, which is why I wanted the military leadership to accompany me. Everyone is here.
It has meaning, a lesson, because in the life of peoples, we all learn in one way or another, sometimes through hardship.
It has significance, which is that the security forces, together with the civilian government, are perhaps the only ones present at an event ordered by a court of justice that has national validity, is part of our Constitution, and ordered the State of Colombia to make an act of forgiveness, to ask for forgiveness, not to offer it, but to ask for it, because it is jointly responsible for political genocide.
The State is jointly responsible for political genocide
The term political genocide is not yet widely recognised in international law.
It is genocide because, according to the accounts of the Truth Commission – the real Truth Commission, because now there are many and not all of them tell the truth – the Conservative Party made one and told its truth, which is not the truth, and its vision of history was widely disseminated yesterday and the day before yesterday through magistrates from the Conservative Party, because that is how we must speak.
Fascism is the violent elimination of difference.
But, in my opinion, the Conservative Party has a responsibility that it has not yet come to terms with.
I do not want to repeat history. But on 9 April 1948, long before 1985, fascist ideas became the stuff of national conservative newspapers and journals.
That was the beginning, perhaps even earlier if we want more history, of a problem that still accompanies us today.
Those fascist ideas are nothing more than eliminating difference, so as not to fall into intellectual theories etc that differentiate one fascism from another, why the Italians were different from the Spanish and the Spanish from the Germans.
For me, fascism is eliminating difference through violence.
The Colombian people are hard-working and resilient
Colombia has seen in recent decades, perhaps a little further back, because [Jorge Eliecer] Gaitán had already made the ‘March of Silence’ before 9 April, obviously before his assassination. Gaitán had already organised a march of silence because they were committing genocide against the liberal peasantry, as at that time the majority of Colombians were nothing more than farm workers.
We are the children and grandchildren of farm workers, which is why the Colombian people are hard-working and resilient, because you have to be very resilient to bend your back under the sun, to put the hoe in the furrow, sometimes every day.
A lonely country that seems to be killing itself
We can go further back, because not far from here I was telling the international delegates who came to CELAC [i], there was the banana plantation massacre led by a general of the republic in 1922, and it was precisely Jorge Eliécer Gaitán who raised the issue in the Congress of the Republic, as a representative to the Chamber for the first time. For that, they took his life.
We have no further written history of a representative debating a massacre in Colombia.
How many representatives and congress members, myself included, have had to debate the massacres in Colombia? Well, this dates back to 1922 and the debate of 1928, if my memory serves me correctly.
And we could go further back and we would only be repeating the story of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The sad story of a lonely country that seems to kill itself, when it is in the midst of the exuberance of life, when the flashes of vitality erupt like a volcano, both in nature and in human beings, and that is why we dance as we dance, and we can admire this greenery that surrounds us and this blue like perhaps no one else in humanity.
So much exuberance that, in the midst of loneliness, we kill each other.
Has the Conservative Party asked for forgiveness?
And so it has been since the beginning of the republic and before: war after war, fratricide after fratricide, and yet, as the song says, here we are. But so much blood cannot be shed, it is ineffective.
We cannot spill so much pain, because in the end peoples are exterminated, nations die and Colombia does not deserve to die as a nation.
That is why, after those times of violence, I would ask the Conservative Party: have you apologised?
Why does no one ask? Why are we, the victims, the ones who have to apologise to the perpetrators?
I was young, 24 or 25 years old, on 7 November 1985, and I had been tortured and was being tortured in prison.
And they ask me to apologise. Why? Because I wanted a different country and thought differently from those who governed Colombia?
The UP and the M-19 placed their hope in the people
1985 marks the beginning of the Patriotic Union, and undoubtedly two different destinies, two currents, ways of thinking and feeling.
The Patriotic Union and the M-19 in 1985 placed their hope in the people. In 1984, we talked about peace. The M-19 signed an agreement from the barricades in August 1984 and the FARC also spoke of a peace agreement and formed a political movement to demonstrate that peace could be achieved in Colombia.
It was a very different time from today, but we spoke of peace for the first time in a long time, since the era of Liberal and Conservative violence.
They murdered 300,000 people with blood and fire
The Conservative Party was the government, as it was in 1948, and it allowed the murder not only of the Liberal leader, but of thousands and thousands of liberals in the countryside. It even publicly stated that liberalism in Colombia had to be ended with blood and fire.
Well, they tried to end it with blood and fire and killed 300,000 people in the countryside, and that is called genocide. They have not apologised for it.
We invited them, and that was in 1985, to make peace in Colombia.
In a second wave of violence, which was no longer the red flag and the blue flag killing each other, but rather a people who wanted social justice in one of the most unequal societies in the world.
I wonder, what was the terrible sin in the most socially unequal country in the world: to ask for equality, justice, rights?
The answer was, for some, military encirclement.
Why did what happened at the Palace of Justice happen?
Because, of course, of the M-19, because of their belief in militarism and machismo, said journalist Ana Carrigan in her book. Believing that we could win the war militarily, and perhaps if we had won the war militarily, we would have been worse than we are today.
We are better because we did not win the war, but rather we learned to embrace, love and seduce the national majority. That is why I am President of the Republic.
But why did they kill the Patriotic Union? Why did they kill the magistrates?
The press says: it’s because the M-19 killed one, one out of ten, and I believe that they killed none, because there were no shots in the bodies of the magistrates that came from an M-19 weapon, according to science, not belief.
I can’t say much about that, because I was tortured in prison, but they ask me and I answer.
Why did they kill the magistrates? Why did they destroy everything?
Why didn’t the press yesterday talk about why they killed, not the ten, but the nine, so as not to get into arguments? Why?
Ah, because Pablo Escobar put up the money to take over the Palace. Nonsense: Carlos Lehder, third or fourth in Pablo Escobar’s cartel, confessed that he had nothing to do with it.
He’s not the doorman, the drug trafficker’s driver, he’s one of the bosses. I shouldn’t talk about this, they say, but if it wasn’t drug trafficking, why did they kill the magistrates? Why did they destroy it? Couldn’t they talk? Wasn’t he proposing to talk? What was the reason?
The oligarchy did not want to distribute wealth
And the reason, in my opinion, I may be wrong, of course, interpreting the history of Colombia, the reason was simply that the oligarchy of Colombia did not want to distribute wealth to the Colombian population, nothing more than that.
It did not want to abandon that immense social inequality.
It seemed terrible to it to lose any of its wealth.
It seemed terrible to it to hand out a bowl of soup. A glass of milk.
It seemed terrible to it to talk about agrarian reform, about land for the peasants.
It seemed terrible and horrible to it to talk about pensions or better wages, as the people were demanding at the time.
That was what made them give the order to raze the palace.
They did not want change.
Of course, there were military personnel who wanted to shoot, because two years earlier, they had tortured ten thousand Colombian citizens trying to find out who belonged to the M-19 because they hated us, just because we had done things that had made us popular among the Colombian people.
And they didn’t want change, it was that simple. 1985, 1989, 1991, there are only six years between them.
And in the space of six years, the Constituent Assembly was held and another Constitution now governs, in quotation marks, we repealed the 1886 Constitution in 1991, which was anachronistic and full of anti-democratic dictatorship.
And so, I ask myself: why did the lords of the oligarchy not want to hold a National Constituent Assembly in 1985 and spare us thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths or, as one general said, litres of blood? Why?
Thousands of Patriotic Union militants murdered
Because of that inability to end the war, if only because there is a motor of greed that drives violence and more greed and more violence, concentrating wealth in a bloody manner.
Because the 1991 Constitution was made, yes, and it is full of rights. But what happened in 1992? What happened in 1993, 1994, 1997, 2000?
This happened: thousands of Patriotic Union militants were murdered.
How can there be a democratic Constitution and at the same time an ongoing extermination of an entire political party?
I confess, and I know how hard it is for me to say this, but I am not dead because I went to the mountains. It is not because of anything else, because all those who stayed behind trying to build a legal alternative were murdered.
When I arrived at the Congress of the Republic for the first time in 1991, the first Congress after the Constituent Assembly, I think it was in December, I found a Patriotic Union bench, I found my comrade Manuel Cepeda, Senator of the Republic, and others.
The demonstrations turned into mourning and funerals
How many of them are alive? None. And they were a parliamentary group.
I didn’t know them, I was in hiding before, but we started going to the funerals and when I came out of hiding and left the clandestine activity, I went back to the funerals.
This had never happened in Colombia before, but the demonstrations had turned into mourning and funerals.
We had to bury Bernardo Jaramillo and we had to bury Carlos Pizarro León Gómez: one from the Patriotic Union, the other from the M-19.
‘85, ‘89, ‘90, ’91, Constitution and Constituent Assembly: ‘91 to 2000, the great paramilitary governance destroying the Constitution, ravaging the countryside and killing 90,000 peasants, even in chambers. I’m not talking about gas chambers, but ovens, where ceramics were made and human bodies were put in alive, as in Cúcuta.
Despite so many deaths, violence and pain, we won
Remembering all this is sometimes sad, but we must compare it with today.
Because despite all that, despite so many deaths, so much violence, so much pain, we won.
Here, a song speaks of victory, because we did win.
2022, Presidency of the Republic, popular triumph, legitimate majority of the Colombian population after so much.
And I was asking why the Conservative Party had not apologised, because today we are facing the same facts. You only have to look at the pages of today’s press.
What appears? A magazine with a cover showing me in an orange suit, which they say is the one worn by prisoners in the United States.
Once again, they are telling us that they are going to kill us
In other words, we emerged from a peace process that created a Constituent Assembly. They killed an entire left-wing party, the Patriotic Union, along the way. Those of us who survived now win the elections and once again they are telling us that they are going to kill us, but it is the same thing.
They want to eliminate this popular alternative and prevent it from winning the 2026 elections again, and they want to do so with violence once more.
So I ask the Conservative Party: is that why you have not apologised? Because it wants to repeat the sad history of the physical and violent elimination of difference in Colombia, which is not a minority, but a popular majority and has always been a popular majority, because Gaitán was a majority, because Rafael Uribe Uribe was a majority, because ANAPO was a majority and because we are a majority. They always kill the majority to continue ruling as minorities. It’s called oligarchy.
Attempting to imprison the president in the US is violence
And isn’t trying to send the democratically elected president to prison in the United States, a foreign country, the worst kind of violence?
It is better to die fighting on a street corner than to be taken prisoner to a foreign country that has nothing to do with what one thinks, but has a lot to do with the history of Colombia, ever since they took Panama away from us and stole it.
Violence.
Why am I talking about the Conservative Party? Because what they are doing, and excuse me for not getting to the point yet, but I have to say it: it is conservative militants who are influencing a man named Berni – Bernardo in Spanish – Moreno.
Personal revenge, vendetta like the Mafia
He is the one who says in the magazine that he is showing Trump the way to put Petro in prison. Do you know why he is doing it? For personal revenge, vendetta like the mafia.
[Gabriel] García Márquez said ‘we are killing each other in circles of revenge, we kill each other out of pride.’ Circles of family and regional revenge etc, over and over again.
Well, this is a family that wants revenge on the President of the Republic for one simple reason: in my first debates in Congress, I went up against Mr. Moreno Alberto, not Bernardo, Alberto Moreno, who stole the Banco del Pacífico with his partners and later became president of the IDB.
Money laundering, land flipping and paramilitarism
My first debates in Congress were against money laundering, which was established by flipping property, the use of land in the Sabana de Bogotá, from rural use by farmers to urban use. They speculated with such high real estate interests that they even turned a property worth 300 billion pesos, the San Simón estate near Chía, into three million, with a single signature from Andrés Pastrana’s Minister of the Environment, Juan Mayr [Maldonado], who was later accused by a paramilitary of collaborating with the paramilitaries.
The business belonged to a man named Ángel Gaitán Mahecha, from Chía, founder of paramilitarism in Colombia and emerald miner, who was later killed by the paramilitaries.
A business run by conservatives from the elite, Alberto Moreno
In the laundering of dollars and the flipping of land in the Sabana de Bogotá, the Amarilo Group [was involved], which also belongs to the Moreno family. And who was the political boss? Andrés Pastrana, the president who also enriched himself with plots of land in San Simón.
On which list does Mr Andrés Pastrana appear? No, I’m not saying he appears on the list, he appears as a friend of Epstein.
Paedophile clan wants to end democracy in Colombia
And now the business is really taking off. A paedophile clan wants to end democracy in Colombia. Harsh? Yes.
But that’s the reality. And to prevent the list from coming out, they send in armoured vehicles to kill fishermen from this city and threaten the neighbours.
Whether he’s a dictator or not, how can the people of Colombia applaud the invasion of their brother, who is not the president but the people of Venezuela?
When would we be such traitors and sellouts that we would betray our own blood, or the people of Ecuador, or the people of Panama, or the people of Venezuela, who are not our own people?
Petro is not Duque, who wanted to invade Venezuela
They want the president to do what [former president Iván] Duque, that coward, wanted to do: lend Colombia’s land so that from there they could invade a sister country that shares our history, because Bolívar was born there and came to die here, in this city.
That cannot be!
A President of Colombia who does that will be cursed by future generations, because he will never be forgotten as a traitor.
And I do not belong to those who wanted to kill Bolívar.
The Venezuelan government has had many criticisms, but I do not mock the people of Venezuela, nor do I set a trap for the people of Venezuela to fall into the trap of an invasion that is only after their oil.
What they want is more greed and violence to turn this beautiful corner of the South American continent into a Syria, an Iraq, a Libya full of slaves, slave trading, new blacks.
They don’t want Epstein’s list to appear
No, the list of [Jeffrey] Epstein’s friends, who don’t want the list to appear in the United States, want to use violence here so that the people of the United States don’t think about their own government, but instead become xenophobic, racist and believe in ideas of a superior race and other false ideas. They use us so to avoid discussing their own problems.
What the President of Colombia has done is denounce drug traffickers for decades, and the drug traffickers he has denounced have always been in political power in Colombia, in the State.
The Colombian oligarchy and drug traffickers murdered the UP
The genocide of the Patriotic Union, which brings us together here in this act ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, is the product of an alliance between drug trafficking and the Colombian state, though obviously not all of its officials.
But here are the figures for the thousands of deaths. Who is responsible? According to the ruling, 74% was paramilitarism and the rest was the state.
And if 74% was paramilitarism and the rest the state, what is, or was, paramilitarism in Colombia if not a private army of the drug traffickers?
Thousands of members of the Patriotic Union were murdered by the alliance between the traditional political power of the Colombian oligarchy and drug trafficking.
And now they accuse us of being drug traffickers! Hypocrites!
Any of the Colombian senators and politicians who went to Miami to try to pave the way for the forcible removal of the popularly elected president of Colombia have relatives and businesses linked to drug traffickers.
And [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio doesn’t want to believe it even though he also has a relative who is a drug trafficker.
They are all involved in drug trafficking in their immediate circles and families
They dare to accuse us of being drug traffickers when we have never ruled this country, when we have spent decades denouncing the alliance between the oligarchy and drug trafficking that was formed exclusively to destroy popular organisation in Colombia, to destroy the left-wing parties and to stifle any progressive attempts, as they had done before without drug trafficking, by murder.
We are gathered here as victims, and I, as President of the Republic, am also a victim, and this puts us in a difficult situation, [César] Palomino [Cortés], legally speaking.
We are victims of the alliance between the national oligarchy and drug trafficking and they are trying to make us victims again.
That is the cover of Cambio magazine.
This president of Colombia was tortured, unjustly imprisoned and persecuted after he came out of hiding and persecuted even while he was president of the Republic, because I cannot put the public spectrum that the Constitution says is inalienable to broadcast this programme because the magistrates have already banned it.
Only the people of Alejandro Santo Domingo, the people of Ardila Lule and the people of Luis Carlos Sarmiento, that is, of the oligarchy, can speak. The President of Colombia cannot speak.
Where are the presidents of the courts?
Question: And where are the presidents of the courts who criticised us yesterday? Why are they not here today? Are they not part of the state? Is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights not also a court of Colombia? Is it not necessary to comply with the rulings, and is it not a ruling to apologise to the Patriotic Union for fourteen acts against the victims of the Patriotic Union?
Fourteen acts that I will list.
One. Violation of freedom of expression, association and political rights.
Two. Violation of the right to life.
Three. Violation of legal personality, personal integrity and freedom, and forced disappearance. Crime against humanity.
Four. Violation of the rights of children.
Five. Violation of personal integrity, attempted murder, threats and harassment.
Six. Violation of personal integrity, torture.
Seven. Violation of personal freedom.
Eight. Violation of the right to honour.
Nine. Violation of the right to freedom of movement and residence, forced displacement.
Ten. Violation of personal freedom and judicial guarantees and protection through improper prosecutions.
Eleven. Violation of personal integrity through torture in improper proceedings.
Twelve. Violation of judicial guarantees and protection due to failure to investigate torture.
Why did they destroy the Palace of Justice?
Do you know why they destroyed the Palace of Justice? Because it contained the torture files on ten thousand Colombian citizens, and they burned them. That is the whole truth.
They destroyed an institution of the democratic state just so that the torture would not be tried, just so that there would be no peace agreement that would force the surrender of land at the cost of social injustice.
And even today, so many years later, the same thing is happening.
Where is the pension law? Where is the health reform? Where is the agrarian jurisdiction that was agreed upon in the peace process? Or where is the truth and where are the perpetrators who killed the Patriotic Union being tried?
The majority in Antioquia, the majority in Urabá, banana workers, the majority of whom founded the Convivir [civilian armed groups], and those who founded the Convivir had the endorsement of the governor and later president of this republic, Mr Álvaro Uribe Vélez.
That is the truth. And so we have to hide it.
Uribe had to be tried for crimes against humanity
The thing is, and this is my argument, he had to be tried not only because witnesses were bribed, but for crimes against humanity, consecutive massacres, the founding of paramilitarism in Colombia.
I am not speaking out of hatred. I told him personally: brother, let’s both go to the JEP [Special Jurisdiction for Peace]. The truth is what must be prioritised.
I told him personally: I am not interested in having him tried outside, I am interested in protecting him, his children and his property.
I am even interested in an act of reconciliation, as the philosopher Derrida said: social forgiveness.
The social forgiveness that I defended in the election campaign was turned into a pact with drug traffickers in prisons, as if it were true when I was a priest who went to prisons to ensure that the perpetrators did not kill people in the communities from prison.
I am not here to apologise, I am here to accuse
And that is the evidence they send to the United States, which I did not even know about. But I am not here to apologise, I am here to accuse.
Because the response they have given to our generosity, the response they have given to being absolutely loyal to the rules, the response they have given to decency, to argument, to the attempt to reason in a society where violence could be more, is betrayal.
The members of Congress and political leaders who went to Miami to seek a way to win the elections in Colombia, even destroying the person of the President of the Republic of Colombia, are criminals. And they must be brought to justice, Mr Palomino. Because that is not what the 1991 Constitution and the democratic pact are for.
We have been generous. Sometimes I wonder: didn’t Salvador Allende think the same way we do? Didn’t Salvador Allende say no when he was accused of arming trade unionists and workers in Chile, thinking that the constitutional pact had to be respected, and Chile ended up in the hands of a dictatorship for 40 years or so?
We have to respond in a different way, not with weapons, I believe, and I hope I am not mistaken.
How do you respond to anti-democratic insults?
To those insults that Andrés Pastrana’s conservatives, Epstein’s friends, his business partners through his brother, Senator Bernie Moreno, are hurling at us in the United States, using quite violent machinery to destroy this small democratic dream that was the government of change in Colombia, using it and treating it so disrespectfully that they are even trying to take the President of Colombia prisoner to a US jail. How do we respond? That is the question today.
And how do we Colombians respond to such an anti-democratic insult, to such treason against our country? From those who already sold Panama for $13million dollars and stole the money.
How do we respond to them?
And I cannot say more, being consistent with what my life has been, than with the people. It is up to us to rally the people.
The era of domination is over
The people will decide whether Colombia’s history will be broken again as it was in 1985 and sink into fratricidal violence, or whether we are capable, by uniting the people, of resisting the threat and building a true democracy that can shout to Latin America that the era of domination is over and that this continent treats free peoples with respect, respectful of one another.
This is called guarantees of non-repetition.
As head of state, without the state being here, but with us, the military and police leadership and the civilian government, on behalf of that state that is not here and the one that is here, I ask for forgiveness from the Patriotic Union because this state was jointly responsible for the political genocide.
If the golden eagle attacks the condor, the American jaguar awakens
I ask the people who are here and those who are listening to me beyond, because we have to go from village to village, from municipality to municipality, that not only are there elections coming up in which I cannot participate, but there is also a defence of dignity, of national sovereignty, that when they come here to threaten us, I do not accept threats, we will rise up by the millions, because the prophecy is true: if the golden eagle attacks the condor, the American jaguar awakens.
And we are jaguars, males and females, we are jaguars, consciousness, we are awakening and they will awaken us, perhaps by force. That awakening will be hurricane-like and stormy perhaps, but it will be happy and joyful. We will be jaguars dancing for the dignity of Colombia. We will be jaguars dancing to revive Bolívar, who is still anchored there to that fascist monument they built for him in Bolívar’s estate. We will be jaguars to leave behind a hundred years of solitude. There will be millions here who, without weapons, will rise up against the threat of those linked to Epstein’s list.
I apologise on behalf of the State.
We will not allow ourselves to be manipulated by paedophiles. We will build democracy, we will build dignity.
And I am not talking about Trump, make no mistake: I am talking about Andrés Pastrana, who has organised this smear campaign against the President of Colombia through his friend Bernie Moreno and his brothers, who are the thieves that were in his government: Banco del Pacífico and land speculation in the Bogotá savannah, denounced by the current President of the Republic.
I ask for forgiveness on behalf of the state so that your dead may live again through the struggle of the people to come.
It is a way to revive, we all know it, we do not die, the energy definitely continues.
Now there are millions of us, they cannot kill us.
The second law of thermodynamics in physics says that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is transformed. And the energy of these thousands of people who were members of the Patriotic Union and had dreams in the years between 1982 and 2000, that energy is here again, multiplied by thousands.
Now there are millions of us. Now they cannot kill us. Now we are the heart, the hope of the Colombian people. Now we are a flag held high, and we will not let it fall. We will not let them insult it. We will not let them spit on it with blood.
We will rise up with dignity, with our hands, because the hands of millions and millions will stop the paedophiles.
Thank you very much for listening to me.