An appeals court in Colombia’s second largest city Medellin sentenced the former finance chief of the now-defunct paramilitary organization ACCU to 40 years in prison.
The Medellin Superior Tribunal overturned a ruling by a lower court that had absolved Jacinto Alberto Soto, a.k.a. “Lucas,” for the assassination of three prosecution officials in 1997 and 1998.
The appeals court ruled that Lucas shared responsibility for the murders that had been ordered by paramilitary commander Carlos Castaño and had been carried out by “La Terraza,” a Medellin gang.
As the ACCU’s financial chief, Lucas was responsible for paying the paramilitaries’ expenses, including the “services” of the assassins involved in the murders, according to the court.
In fact, Lucas “was in charge of relations with businessmen, cattle ranchers, industrialists, who provided economic resources, as well as with civilian, police, military and judicial authorities to whom they paid bribes in exchange for information on operations and the status of investigations against ACCU members and their finances.”
This became clear in April 1998 when colleagues of the assassinated prosecution workers found Lucas and the ACCU’s entire financial administration during a raid on a parking lot in Medellin.
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The Truth Commission, which also looked into the Padilla Parking casa, revealed in September of 2022 that Lucas’s records contained the information of 423 people and 58 companies that financed the ACCU.
“Almost all of Antioquia’s society was permeated by the paramilitaries that operated hand in hand with drug trafficking,” one of the investigators told the Truth Commission.
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Corruption inside the Prosecutor General’s Office impeded progress into Lucas and the financiers of the AUC and ACCU for decades.
This changed during a peace process that followed the demobilization of the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC.
Prosecutor General Luz Adriana announced last month that the prosecution would again try to prosecute “the most economically powerful third-party financiers” of the ACCU and the AUC.