Making the ‘Disappeared’ Reappear
By Constanza Vieira
http://ipsnews.net.nyud.net:8090/fotos/Colombiacorpse.jpg Carrion-eating bird on corpse
in Atrato River, Colombia.
BOGOTA, Jun 27 , 2008 (IPS) - "When they bring in (heads that still have) eyes, we close them, because it’s sad to see that look of terror, as if the killers were reflected in their glassy eyes. Those armed men stuck in the depth of the eyes of the dead scare us; they look like they want to kill us too.
"Because they ‘disappeared’ my brothers, tonight I’m waiting on the banks of the river, waiting for a body to come down, to make him my dead loved one. All of us women here in the port have lost someone, have had someone taken from us and killed, are widows and orphans.
"That is why we wait every day for the dead to be brought to us in the muddy waters, among the branches, to make them our brothers, fathers, husbands or sons…" reads the short story "Sin nombres, sin rostros ni rastros" (No Names, No Faces, No Traces) by Jorge Eliécer Pardo, the Colombian writer who won the "Without a Trace" national contest for short stories on forced disappearance this week.
The women in Pardo’s story collect the corpses, or pieces of bodies that have come floating down the river, gradually putting parts together until they have a complete body to "adopt" as their own family member, who is given the burial that they cannot offer their own missing loved ones.
The short story contest and a photography contest formed part of the three-day "Without a Trace" International Seminar on Forced Disappearance organised by the Fundación Dos Mundos (Two Worlds Foundation), which ended Friday.
"I have pulled dead people, even bodies without heads, from the Atrato river. I don’t know them, but I pull them to the bank so they can be buried, because it is a sad thing to see a human body being eaten by the ‘gallinazos’ (carrion crows)," Domingo Valencia, an amateur songwriter who lives on the banks of that river in the northwestern jungle province of Chocó, told IPS.
Dos Mundos, a local non-governmental organisation that supports young victims of violence and abuse, did not expect more than 50 stories to be submitted. But in the end, the jury had to decide between 427.
Reading them "was like opening Pandora’s box," journalist Guillermo González, a member of the jury, told IPS. He said he believes most of the stories are true accounts.
They contain "the hidden story, the one that isn't in the media, the one that reflects the tragedy of the families of the ‘disappeared’," he said, adding that he had to stop reading at 8:00 pm every night, "because if I didn't, I couldn't sleep."
In the stories, "there are no obvious, straightforward words denouncing atrocities, or morbid descriptions. Strangely, in this huge set of stories there is respect for words and for what happened, which is much harder-hitting than a raw description of what occurred," said González, the director of the Bogotá cultural magazine Número.
More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42993 ~~~~~Colombia Unearthing Plight of Its 'Disappeared'
By JUAN FORERO
Published: August 10, 2005
http://graphics8.nytimes.com.nyud.net:8090/images/2005/08/09/international/colo.184.1.jpgPanos for The New York Times
One of the graves dug up by
Colombian authorities on El
Palmar, a big farm outside
San Onofre. The dead are
believed to be militia victims.
SAN ONOFRE, Colombia - In one of the most horrific chapters of Colombia's long civil conflict, investigators are unearthing scores of bodies from secret graves dotting this humid cattle-grazing region near the Caribbean, the
victims of right-wing paramilitary groups now benefiting from generous concessions for pledging to disarm.
With dozens of people coming forward in recent months to complain of missing relatives, government and military officials now estimate that hundreds of poor farmers may have been killed and secretly buried in a terror campaign that began in the late 1990's.
The paramilitary groups, they say, kidnapped and killed their victims to seize land and in some cases weed out supporters of the Marxist guerrillas who have been fighting the government since the 1960's.
For years, fear kept the crimes hidden. But with the arrival this year of a new military commander who has secured the region, families finally began speaking out, despite lingering dangers that cost the life of one whistleblower earlier this year.
So far, 72 bodies have been recovered from El Palmar, a vast farm outside San Onofre that was used as a local base by the paramilitary forces, whose militias control several coastal states.
From the dark, moist earth, the authorities have also uncovered bodies in several other villages and are working to locate graves in five other states, said Elba Beatriz Silva, coordinator of the attorney general's human rights office, which is overseeing a gradual process of exhumations that may expand even further.
"A lot of people here have disappeared - sons, fathers, mothers, brothers," said Iván Wilches, 22, whose brother disappeared. "Every day there were people killed. They would pull them out of houses, breaking down doors. They would all wind up dead."
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/international/americas/10colombia.html~~~~~Colombia's Disappeared:
25 People a Week Go Missing
by Alfredo Castro
Bogota. The number of people being forcibly disappeared in Colombia each year is rapidly increasing and
according to a local human rights organisation state sponsored forces, both official and unofficial, are responsible for over 99% of the cases.New statistics released by the Colombian Association of the Families of the Detained and Disappeared -- known as ASFADDES -- show that last year some 1,283 people were taken away and have not been seen since. ASFADDES says that three of these people were disappeared by rebel groups while the remainder of the cases can be blamed predominantly on paramilitary and other state agents such as the army and police.
The average daily rate of disappearances in Colombia has increased from three to four over the past few years according to Gladys Avila Fonseca, the national coordinator of ASFADDES. Avila herself lost her brother Eduardo when he disappeared off a street in Bogota on April 20th 1993. Four days later, however, he was found dead outside the city having been severely tortured and since then she has dedicated her life to the cause of truth, justice and reparation at ASFADDES.
The statistics ASFADDES released show that between 1994 and 2001 there were 3,413 forced disappearances in Colombia. Gladys Avila also explained that ASFADDES has no way of knowing the true number of cases as their statistics only include those instances in which the family or friends of the victim denounce the crime, and that on many occasions, because of fear of reprisals, people stay silent.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/castro0729.html~~~~~Jan 28 2010
Army mass grave in La Macarena
Miami’s El Nuevo Herald and Spain’s Público have run stories in the past two days about a shocking find in La Macarena, about 200 miles south of Bogotá.
Residents say that after it entered the strongly guerrilla-controlled zone in the mid-2000s,
Colombia’s Army began dumping unidentified bodies in a mass grave near a local cemetery. The grave may contain as many as 2,000 bodies.
Público reports:
Since 2005 the Army, whose elite units are deployed in the surrounding area, has been depositing behind the local cemetery hundreds of cadavers with the order that they be buried without names. …
Jurist Jairo Ramírez, the secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, accompanied a delegation of British legislators to the site several weeks ago, when the magnitude of the La Macarena grave began to be discovered. “What we saw was chilling,” he told Público. “An infinity of bodies, and on the surface hundreds of white wooden plaques with the inscription NN and dates from 2005 until today.”
Ramírez adds: “The Army commander told us that they were guerrillas killed in combat, but the people in the region told us of a multitude of social leaders, campesinos and community human rights defenders who disappeared without a trace.”
El Nuevo Herald reports:
A spokesman of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) in Bogotá revealed to El Nuevo Herald that a mission from that institution’s Technical Investigations Corps (CTI) has already gone to the cemetery and confirmed the existence of “a large number” of cadavers in the grave, though it only made a few excavations.
“We became the site for the depositing of the war dead,” declared Eliécer Vargas Moreno, mayor of the municipality. …
Residents of La Macarena interviewed over the phone by El Nuevo Herald, under the promise that their identities would not be revealed, expressed their suspicion that among the bodies are relatives who disappeared during the last four years. They denied that the bodies are those of guerrillas and asked for the chance to prove it.
More:
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303ETC. 
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