Photo:Ovidio González - Presidency

"I recognize the responsibility of the State, and I tell the world that there was a State that broke the American Convention and is preparing to break the Rome Statute": President Petro​

A special greeting to the human rights defenders and representatives of non-governmental organizations, lawyers and groups who accompany us. Holman Felipe Morris Rincón, his wife Patricia, his mother Elsa, his children Daniela and Felipe, his distinguished family. Head of Office, José Raúl Moreno; director of the Administrative Department of the DAPRE Presidency, Nhora Yaneth Mondragón; lawyers for the victims and representative of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective (Cajar); ministers and officials of the National Government, congressmen of the Republic, special guests, media and in general everyone is with us today.

This type of act is not the first, there are already several. In El Aro I was precisely with the human rights defenders, because I have to speak on behalf of the State and it is the State, not just the government, that has to ask for forgiveness. And within the State, the people who committed the crimes against the Morris family.

Within the theory of forgiveness, a somewhat religious word, and within the theory of reconciliation, which is a social and not divine, but human forgiveness, within that theory that so many philosophers have talked about, there has to be a real, true forgiveness, a true reconciliation. Otherwise, falsehood leads to repetition. Forgiveness, reconciliation, non-repetition and truth go hand in hand. It is not a play on words, it is because contemporary history has managed to find this chain in social phenomena, in historical episodes of various societies: Ireland, South Africa, Germany itself, Spain, suffering from massive internal conflicts, millions of deaths, wounds that are created and that last for generations.

In the Colombian case, they can lead to revenge in new conflicts, even more bloodthirsty than the previous one, like a kind of whirlwind siphon, which throws Colombian society towards the underworld, towards self-destruction, towards extinction as a culture, as a nation, as a people. There is no town that I remember in its history that has repeated the siphon for so long.

And the siphon is a repetition, but increasingly expanded, increasingly worse, while in the case of a hurricane it is increasingly better, it expands, it moves things, it always has the sun as a reference and not the darkness. And our path has not been the hurricane, it has been the siphon. That is the Colombian history.

Siphon that resists. Siphon that has its rebellion in each of its turns. Now, the history of Colombia is not pessimistic, it is the history of the siphon that approaches destruction, but there is always a countercurrent, which peaceful or not, builds our history.

The circle comes back, we talk about peace again, we rebuild, there is almost always a treaty and a constitution. And so two and a half centuries have passed.

Here is a family that never picked up a gun to rebel. However, they call her a guerrilla, only because of how she thinks, how she writes, how she shows reality through audiovisuals, what counts. And what counts is the truth. What nobody wants to hear.

The public wants to see a football match, they want to see a prince dressing up in lies, because they want to be like that false prince. And that is why we have to interpret the realities of Colombia a little. But it is not the entire town, there is a countercurrent.

And that countercurrent has been growing and growing, trying to transmit the truth of Colombia. And the truth of Colombia is nothing but violence, victims, revenge, and again violence, victims, revenge. And when the countercurrent manages to open a space from time to time, peace once again becomes a possibility between the leaves and the sun, of finding a great nation. It seems possible, hope radiates and through hope real changes, transformation occur.

Society is somehow following an arrow that goes to the stars, not towards the siphon. Sometimes I talk about Bolívar's sword, now I have to remove Bolívar's sword from here. I repeat history, repeating history is part of what we must escape from.

And your story and mine, in that time at the French high school, which was my children's, equaled certain things. There are similar things, but it is up to you to request judicial forgiveness, win it, and it is up to me to deliver it in the name of the State. And I believe that there is not a single perpetrator here. What's more, of the State I am referring to the Congress of the Republic, which is no longer the one that exists, nor is it the one that is coming.

On July 20 it is installed. And it is not the Judiciary that is the author of the ruling, nor the traditional press, which is the victim here and does not want to recognize it.

Therefore, to evade reality, they do not tell the truth. From time to time, it obviously appears, but they do not tell the truth, because what is transmitted in the words, or in the voices, on television, in the traditional press, is the word of the owner, not the journalist. Because it is the owner who pays the salary, and if it is not the owner's word, he fires the journalist.

And then we move like a mirror, until we are able to break the mirror and go to the neighborhood, go to the sidewalk, go to the place where the victims of other social conditions are, because throughout the country there are victims, in the millions. Go to the entire society, not just the poor or the working, but also those middle classes that took away our vote, because they want to be like the prince who dresses up and has no ideas. Why is this happening? Because that's how societies are, we want to be better, live better, and forget that we are about to go into the abyss.

The movie Don't Look Up tells this very well. I don't know if you've seen it, but I saw it and it surprised me: Don't Look Up.

I don't know if you've seen it, it's about the press, and some politicians, and a president. They don't want people to look up, and people believe it, and they don't look because, if they look, they will see that a meteorite is coming a short distance away, which is going to wipe out humanity. Not looking up means letting the meteorite fall, the one that ends humanity. Only, according to the movie, the president and the richest of that society already had a spaceship ready to escape from Earth. And they escape, and they arrive at the planet they had chosen, and there the dinosaurs that were there eat them all, and humanity ends. Something similar is happening now, because we have lived a similar piece of history, and that piece of history has perpetrators.

The Liceo Francés school, which has struggled amidst the circumstances, how does it survive? I have had to raise four children from different generations. Or five, five, because I raised one called Alcocer Petro, he got that last name in recognition of my efforts. And I know well what happens there, I know from the beginning who the parents were, and I know now who they are.

From the beginning I loved going to the parents' meetings at the French Lyceum, and to the bazaars they held, because one met the aristocracy of the intellectual middle class there. It was Holman, it was the Uprimny, it was Antanas Mockus, I remember even Diego Bravo. They are people that I have seen again in my political life, who were brought together by thinking, and they put their children there to think. And it was not that expensive, it even seemed very cheap to me, but that was transformed by the parents themselves, and by the right that rose in the French Republic as well.

I'm not going to go into details, but I learned that an investment fund from Miami was selling the school. I don't want to be exclusive, but in Miami I have never found that people think, excuse me there. Returning that school that has had its own history, and seeing it converted into the investment of a Florida investment fund, is very similar to what is going to happen to the Colombian State, which today has become a kind of investment fund for the state of Florida.

It is a story that comes together and repeats itself, sometimes it scares me, because the same thing happened to my children. There are photos of them at the school door, and they entered the courses, or were let in, and people who were there took the photos. Overall, the school has helped me, even in the worst moments, and today one of my last struggles is to prevent the school from being sold to an investment fund from the state of Florida. So far I have succeeded, as president, but I will not return because there is no more son there.

I cannot predict my future, but the issue is the country: how a group of Colombian parents prefer, instead of an education that seeks to seek the truth, to a few greedy investors from a fund from the State of Florida to sell the school where their children have been. I reported that, but today we are in different circumstances.

The perpetrators should be involved in an act of forgiveness, because an act of forgiveness is from the perpetrator to the victim. Where are the DAS agents who lent themselves to this persecution, the same ones who killed Jaime Garzón? I have a theory that the persecution began when we found out who had killed Jaime Garzón. It is another of the great cases, another victim. I don't remember if it was my turn to give forgiveness as head of state, but he was my friend too, he had a restaurant in a house in La Macarena, I think it was called El Patio. There he looked out the window and asked us “how many years of prison are there gathered here?”, because we were conspiring. But he was a bigger conspirator than us, and they killed him first than us. And obviously Carlos Castaño killed him on the orders of a general, whose brother is going to be the new Minister of Defense.

I debated against the DAS for the death of Jaime Garzón, but it did not occur to me to search within the Army with the aim of taking revenge. Nor have I looked for those who tortured me when I was 25 years old, when they took me to the North Canton, where the cells are still located, I have seen them. The culprits are not those paid people, who made them do dirty work. I get nothing out of taking revenge on them, or anyone. But I cannot forget that the brother of the one who ordered the killing of Jaime Garzón is the one who now comes to direct the military forces, and I knew this because I received a complaint from his subordinates, who said that he charged a commission for the salaries of each of his subordinates. For me it is an accusation that must be defended, and the truth established. But he cannot be in charge of the entire public force, because then, under what line are the rifles going to be pointed?

I have always said in my speeches to soldiers that the rifle is not the most important thing, it is the human being. What the human being who points the rifle thinks will direct the shot. And I never allowed him to target the people. Furthermore, they were taught that these weapons belong to the people and were purchased with public money. There is already a debate trying to prevent the Colombian rifle from being called Jaguar. Maybe they will call it Tigre and it will be made in Israel, not in Colombia. It's where we're going. They already want to end the production of rifles made in Colombia. This implies the total loss of national sovereignty. I believe that several of the perpetrators against the Morris family do not all think that national sovereignty must be ended. But from August 7 we will be in a viceroyalty, classic, there is nothing to remove.

​It was not by popular election, today we know where, how and with how many votes they took the presidency from Iván Cepeda, who is present here. It was a fraud, it was a fraud, it was a fraud. I can even see the figure, 848 thousand votes were away from being able to do it.

I'm not going to fall into that debate now, but I wrote something yesterday, all of that is proven. It is in the United States where part of the investigation has to be done, because it is officials and citizens of the United States and Israel who stole the votes of all of Colombia, to put someone they consider their friend, their citizen, their subordinate, their servant. That is why I say that it is exactly a viceroyalty.

And what to do with the viceroyalty? Resist it, because the people will soon realize, as they did back then, that there is a José Antonio Galán and there is a Berbeo, and that the Homeland Boba is returning. And that here near the Astronomical Observatory they gathered to shout and conspire for freedom, and many were shot in the Plaza de los Mártires, and one of them left the famous "O long and black game" in his cell.

Excuse me, but I come from dramatic climate changes, I come from seeing the Pope, who is in a climate crisis with 45 degrees Celsius temperature in Europe, and we are going there, and we have to prepare. But the government has not even come to know our figures, the “elected” in quotes, because it is not an elected government, it is an imposed government. And we'll see what happens to a town when it has an imposed government.

Those who are in this imposed government are the victimizers, that is why they are not here. And the circumstances are already being felt, he is suffering from them. And before finishing these words, it must be kept in mind that the one who should be here is President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, he should have been invited. I know how difficult it is for him, it is not in my hands that he feels like revenge that his brother is imprisoned for a crime against humanity. I did not take revenge on him, I did not take him to the North Canton cell, where I was, nor the Model prison in the Commons courtyard, where I ended up teaching the prisoners to read and write and to direct them. We almost made a revolution there, in the ninth patio of the Model. And they are not going to take me to that again.

Álvaro Uribe Vélez should be here, because he is the one who should apologize for the actions of his DAS agents. It happened to me during an entrance to a movie at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán theater, we were going to do something and the journalists were lining up and everyone hated Holman. And I never understood why, they talked dirty to him, and they were all relatively friends of mine, but later I discovered that they weren't my friends either, you're deceived when they smile at you and put their hand on your shoulder and things like that. And that hatred cannot be anything other than hatred of the truth, the certainty that its job consists of manipulating and lying.

This manipulation and lie led to 300,000 deaths, unleashed by the hatred they created. They tell us that we have hatred because we distribute a property to the peasants, they say that we have hatred because we accuse in court to reach the truth, when what we simply seek is justice, truth and reconciliation, but they never reach real reconciliation. That is why I say that Álvaro Uribe should come to this event to ask for forgiveness, with one objective, to reconcile.

Another type of victimizers will be in these rooms, perhaps they will remove the painting of Bolívar because they don't like it. And these types of perpetrators are going to try to take revenge against us again, they already announce it, and we must be careful. I would invite the journalists who come to these acts of forgiveness to come with those who pay them their salaries, the owners of the media, whom I invited to a meeting to make a national agreement. but I think they didn't understand what it was for, because they believed it was to make more money and not to help build social justice. And Mr. Álvaro Uribe Vélez himself is going to be a victim of our perpetrators, because they are going to come here to take revenge.

A very beautiful book that I read after being a university student and after being imprisoned is called The Courage of Truth. It is a philosophical study by Michel Foucault on Socrates, and from there I extracted a lesson, that there is a word in Greece called parrhesia, which refers to the search for truth through courage, saying things that seem offensive but that are actually pleasant or flattering to those who listen to them. From there I understood why you have to have courage to find the truth, and why many journalists become victimizers of the truth, it scares them.

And from there also comes the word parrhesiast, which corresponds to the vocation of a lineage, with two alternatives: either convince the tyrant, or go to ostracism. Here we do not convince the tyrant, ergo, what would have to come is ostracism.

Except that the tyrants here are not eternal, nor do the ostracisms last long, and it is the circle that returns like a countercurrent. When the tyrant becomes a fascist, you don't have to make him understand why he has no brains, you have to defeat him. This has been the history of the 20th century. Fascism is not convinced, it is defeated. You can't have any dealings with him, because he comes to kill, because he wants to send you to the concentration camp and the crematorium oven.

And then there will be a holocaust. And Colombia has experienced holocausts in its cycles, and one of those holocausts is narrated in the book Violence in Colombia, study of a social process, signed by Germán Guzmán, Orlando Fals Borda and Eduardo Umaña Luna whose son, Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, was murdered for telling the truth. I knew both.

The book was addressed to President Guillermo León Valencia, grandfather of Iván Cepeda's opponent, and talks about the origin of the violence, when Valencia ordered the bombing of peasant coffee cooperatives. And here history is going to repeat itself, only it will not be the bombs of that time, but missiles. And they are not going to be the airplanes of that time, but jets.

That is what we are preparing for, a new wave of violence that I hope the Colombian people will not make last more than a year, so that once again those who love and have the courage for the truth can speak to the people of Colombia without fear, without fear, without revenge and without hate, without hating and without revenge.

Regarding case 13,014, Holman Morris and family against the Colombian State, on June 9, 2026, two months ago, a friendly settlement agreement was signed in which the State recognized its international responsibility for the violation of various rights, according to the American Convention on Human Rights that the next government wants to ignore.

Or end, because it is the OAS, it is the entire Inter-American System that they plan to end. And the State committed to implementing means of satisfaction, one of which is this, with the recognition act that is being carried out today.

So: on behalf of that State that has recognized having made the Morris family a victim, I recognize the responsibility of the State. And I tell the world that here there was a State that broke the American Convention and that is preparing to break the Rome Statute. And I want to file that complaint with the Special Justice for Peace, which they also plan to end.

And before the International Criminal Court, which is being persecuted by the fascists who rule the missiles in the world today.

Thank you, very kind for listening to me.