Salvatore Mancuso, a Colombian warlord, was released from prison on Wednesday after repeatedly petitioning judges for his parole and promised to help the government reconcile with illegal armed organizations.
Mancuso, a leader of a cattle rancher-founded paramilitary group, was repatriated from the United States in February after serving a 12-year drug trafficking sentence and three years in an immigration detention facility while officials decided whether to send him to Colombia or Italy, where he is also a citizen.
Mancuso returned to Colombia and appeared before several courts, eventually alerting prison authorities that he had no current detention orders. The country’s courts had convicted him guilty of over 1,500 murders and disappearances during one of the most horrific episodes of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict.
Human rights organizations and Colombian government officials hope Mancuso will cooperate with the court system and reveal information regarding hundreds of crimes committed in rural Colombia throughout the 1990s and early 2000s by paramilitary groups fighting Marxist rebels. Mancuso’s United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC in Spanish, fought Marxist guerrillas.
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In multiple hearings before Colombian courts, some of which were held by teleconference while he was in US jail, the former warlord discussed his interactions with politicians, as well as the suspected involvement of high-ranking officials in war crimes.
Mancuso was born into a wealthy family in northwest Colombia and was a successful cattle rancher. He began working with the country’s army in the early 1990s after his family was threatened by rebel groups demanding extortion payments. He subsequently moved from supplying intelligence to the military to commanding operations against Marxist militants.
Mancuso, who appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2008 for a story about Chiquita Brands International paying paramilitaries nearly $2 million, helped negotiate a deal with the Colombian government in 2003 that reduced prison sentences for over 30,000 paramilitaries in exchange for handing over their arms and demobilizing. As part of the agreement, the paramilitaries were required to admit truthfully to all crimes or face far heavier sanctions.
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Despite his role in the deal, Mancuso was extradited to the United States in 2008, along with other paramilitary leaders wanted on drug trafficking charges. He was jailed in 2015 for aiding the transport of over 130 tons of cocaine to the United States. Prosecutors accused him of using cocaine trafficking to fund his armed organization CBSNEWS stated.
According to US federal prosecutors, Mancuso, also known as El Mono and Santander Lozada, admitted that his organization transported cocaine to Colombia’s coastal areas, “where it was loaded onto go-fast boats and other vessels for ultimate transportation to the United States and Europe.”
Colombian prison officials said Wednesday that they had told the National Protection Unit, which is in charge of protecting people at high risk of harm or attack, of Mancuso’s release so that it could follow procedures to ensure his safety.