To Joseph Biden President of the United States of America on December 28, 2024
Mr. President:
The association that we constitute, part of a broad international community whose membership and high mission is indicated by its name, vehemently exhort Mr. President, in exercise of the constitutional power vested in him at the time of the end of his term, and as a gesture of goodwill to the peoples of the world, to grant a PRESIDENTIAL Pardon to Mr. JUVENAL OVIDIO RICARDO PALMERA PINEDA (SIMÓN TRINIDAD).
Ricardo Palmera Pineda, also known as Simón Trinidad, is a signatory of the Peace Accord in Colombia. We consider that his presence in Colombia, besides being a humanitarian fact, due to his long sentence, is of great relevance since he can play an important role in promoting the fulfillment of the Peace Agreement, one of the pending commitments and his contribution could be extended to other processes within the framework of Total Peace. The Peace of Colombia is the Peace of the Region.
Mr. Palmera Pineda has been in prison for 21 years in very difficult conditions, as psychologists and scholars of the prison regime to which he has been subjected have concluded. However, this has not undermined his moral conditions or ideological convictions, which speaks of his integrity as a man of principles.
Mr. Juvenal Ovidio Ricardo Palmera Pineda has been subjected to an implacable penitentiary regime reserved for those who are considered the greatest and most dangerous enemies of the United States of America. Allow us to tell you, Mr. President, categorically, that absolutely nothing in the political and military action of our client, makes him worthy of that qualification. Not even in the slightest part.
Mr. Juvenal Ovidio Ricardo Palmera Pineda was a professional economist, member of the social and cultural elite of the Colombian department of Cesar. In that capacity, he worked as a university professor, manager and advisor of important banking and financial entities. Having been a militant in one of the traditional political parties that had held power in Colombia for almost two hundred years, faced with the ominous situation of injustice, poverty and official violence that he saw around him, one day he decided to form an alternative civic and popular movement that advocated overcoming the state of affairs that afflicted him. This movement, which soon gained great popular support, in turn joined a new political movement that burst with great force in the national political scene as an alternative to the traditional two-party system.
That movement to which Mr. Palmera Pineda joined was the Patriotic Union. Of civilian character, left-wing and of course unarmed, it was constituted and operated within the framework of Colombian legislation. The immediate electoral success it obtained in its first outing, the 1986 elections, caused the most retarded military and militarist sectors of Colombian society to initiate a merciless process of extermination of its militants and leaders, which only ended when they achieved the disappearance of the movement. This, Mr. President, has just been confirmed by the judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which condemned the Colombian State for the extermination of the Patriotic Union, ordering political, economic, moral and cultural reparations to the collective, as well as to each of its members – family members – victims.
Mr. President, it was in that context, seeing his friends and comrades murdered, both from the social movement he created and from the Party to which he belonged, when Juvenal Ovidio Ricardo Palmera Pineda decided to join the FARC. The paths of legal political action for an opposition and leftist project in Colombia were closed. Brutally closed.
In the guerrilla action of the FARC, the capture in an area controlled by the insurgency, of three North American military contractors who were carrying out electronic espionage actions in the framework of the armed conflict in Colombia, when their light aircraft was shot down. And it was based on that military operation in which, in a trial plagued with irregularities, inconsistencies, an impudently political criterion and undue pressures to the Grand Jury by the Judge – confessed by some of them – , he was sentenced to sixty years in prison and presented as a trophy and enemy number one of the United States.
In reference to the above, about the whole trial and conviction of our protégé, it is absolutely indispensable to make to you, Your Excellency, Mr. President, the following fundamental request in this measured petition:
Juvenal Ovidio Ricardo Palmera Pineda was not at any time involved in the military operation that resulted in the capture of the three American citizens. He was in another territory far away, not having command or jurisdiction in the territory where the events took place, so this operation could not have been planned or programmed by him. It was a product of chance, of the unforeseen circumstances of the irregular armed struggle.
Our client was not a member of the Secretariat of the FARC, the highest authority of that guerrilla group, so as to be able to affirm that the kidnapping or retention of the three of his fellow citizens gave him any political responsibility whatsoever. Nor was he commander of the Front – he did not even belong to that Front, one of whose units shot down the plane and held the three Americans. The Fronts were the organic and operative divisions of the guerrillas in the national territory.
The political and military action of Simon Trinidad was at no time aimed at the institutions or the people of the United States of America. It was for the change of the Colombian political system, characterized by exclusion, favoritism and injustice.
This is our very measured request. We hope, Mr. President, that you may accede to it, in the confidence that you will be moved by humanitarian feelings of High Justice that would be to your credit in the memory of the signatories and the Colombian people.
Cordially yours,
Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity.