The Minister of Labor of Colombia, Antonio Sanguino, surprised the country with an unusual request to the armed group ELN and with the revelation of information about his life. He asked the illegal organization to tell the whole truth about why it killed his brother Juan Antonio Sanguino 40 years ago and to reveal the place where the body is. On the other hand, he also said that he himself, together with his brother, militated in that group in a clandestine manner.
On the occasion of the commemoration, this Thursday, April 9, of the Day of the Victims of the Conflict, Sanguino addressed an open letter to the Central Command of the ELN, the highest leadership body of that group, especially to the leaders alias “Antonio Garcia,” alias “Nicolas Rodriguez Bautista,” and alias “Pablo Beltran,” to whom he began by saying that this was not an easy communication for him, who since his adolescence has been a committed militant of the left.
“I have spent almost 40 years pondering the way in which I must approach you to demand truth and reparation,” Sanguino tells the ELN leaders in the letter. “I am speaking of the forced disappearance of my brother Juan Antonio Sanguino Paez, which occurred in June 1986 at the hands of a structure of the ELN in Bogota.”
According to the minister, the last two records of his brother’s whereabouts that he has been able to gather in these years “were a clandestine meeting that he attended in a cafe located in front of the Jose Celestino Mutis Botanical Garden of the capital of the country with an ELN contact, as well as a message he left me by telephone in Bucaramanga, where I lived at that time, warning that he was passing through the city and that upon his return he would contact me. That return never occurred.”
Sentenced to death and disappeared
The minister also says that he learned that his brother was going to a guerrilla school in the Camilo Torres Front that operated in the south of the department of Cesar, “an indispensable requirement to assume his responsibilities as a new member of the Regional Directorate of the ELN in the capital, a designation he had received in the first months of that year.”
He adds that he understands that once there, in some camp of that guerrilla front, his brother Juan was subjected to a misnamed “revolutionary trial,” and sentenced to death “after having been accused and supposedly found guilty of leaking information as an agent of the Military Forces.”
“As you know —the minister tells the ELN leaders—, Juan and I shared at that time militancy with the ELN. A member of the Directorate of the Northeastern War Front informed me of that painful event in October 1988, two years and four months later. I was never given the truth of the facts, much less was the body of my brother Juan handed over to me or was I informed of its location.”
Afterwards, the high government official maintains that “this silence has remained, despite the multiple dialogue processes carried out in the last 40 years between the ELN and the State, in which, in many of them, the search for humanitarian agreements to address cases and situations like these has been included.”
“I want to publicly ask you to grant me what has been denied to me in these 40 years of ELN silence,” Sanguino requests of the ELN. “I ask you to give me the full truth of what happened. I request that my family be handed the mortal remains of Juan Antonio. I ask that this handover take place through the Unit for the Search of Disappeared Persons. I also demand that you make to my family the corresponding request for forgiveness for this murder.”
The secrecy of the ELN, traditional in that group, has increased as a consequence of the rupture, in January 2025, of the peace negotiations with the Government. For that reason, it is not known whether they will give any response to Sanguino. For many analysts, if that group does not listen to a representative figure of the Government who is also from the left, the suffering inflicted on other victims, who are mostly ordinary citizens, must be even worse.