Hidden graves give up their secrets to geologists

[Judi Lynn]

Hidden graves give up their secrets to geologists
Publication Date:
Thursday, August 8, 2013 - 09:00

As of April 2013, more than 61,000 people were registered as missing in Colombia, many of whom are feared to be victims of the country’s narcotics-fueled gang wars and, presumably, buried in clandestine graves. Now a new study comparing the most effective remote sensing tools for finding hidden graves may help bring justice for victims and closure for families.

Until recently, the main tools available for searching out hidden graves in Colombia were a metal pole — used to probe for areas of unconsolidated soil that might contain remains — along with a metal detector and dogs trained to sniff out human remains.

“The lack of geophysical tools has cost excess time and money and returned a limited success rate,” says Carlos Molina, a forensic geologist at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and lead author of the new study, presented at the American Geophysical Union’s Meeting of the Americas in Cancún, Mexico, in May.

To encourage the use of geophysical tools — such as ground penetrating radar, electrical resistivity, bulk ground conductivity and gradient magnetometry — for finding hidden graves, Molina and colleagues began conducting a series of experiments to determine which remote sensing methods work best in Colombia’s variable soil types.

More:
http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/hidden-graves-give-their-secrets-geologists

[Peace Patriot]

1. "victims of the country’s narcotics-fueled gang wars"??

Yeah, if you consider the Colombian military and its death squads, the Pentagon, the DEA, the CIA and all those "private contractors" shoveling up the SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS in U.S. taxpayer money, to be "gangs."

I do. But I don't think this article writer does.

[newfie11]

2. Exactly what I was thinking

Thanks for bringing it up.

[Judi Lynn]

3. That's their new Great Lie: the violent ones are simply small criminals,

so small it's hardly worth mentioning. Calling them "gangs" leaves people with the image of disorganized, unfocused, teenaged, clumsy, temperamental kids. That clearly isn't the case.

In trying to shift the perception in this direction, they hope to move it ALL away from where most people knew it led in the first place.

Even the human rights organizations said, back when officials started using this ruse, that the new "gangs" contain all the old death squad narco-trafficking monsters who were torturing, terrorizing, mutilating, murdering great numbers of people in the first place, and they were proven to have direct lines to the Colombian government so long ago.