PBH / colombia (travelguide, pictures) / post

dead in Colombia

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/feeds/ap/2006/08/01/ap2919389.html

Paramilitary thugs hauled Rafael Barbosa from his mother's home on a Good Friday, accusing him of making off with bags of cocaine found floating in the Caribbean. Toughs from the same gang "disappeared" his brother Freddy soon after, because he had taken up with one of the gunmen's sisters.

The Barbosas, humble farmers and craftsmen then in their 30s, are among thousands of Colombians who have disappeared in the past decade in a war spearheaded by landowner-backed militias, known as paramilitaries, that boiled over in the countryside even as life got safer for upper-class urbanites.

Now, five years after the brothers vanished, ex-paramilitary fighters seeking to benefit from reduced sentences under a government amnesty are leading authorities to clandestine graves in vast areas they once controlled, including the coastal ranching town of San Onofre. At the same time, some victims' relatives, previously terrorized into silence, are now mustering the courage to signal the location of burial grounds.

The Barbosas' distraught mother can finally hope for closure.

"What is it that we want?" Maruja del Carmen Pestana said plaintively under a corrugated tin roof being pounded by a tropical rain. "That they tell us where the bodies are buried."

More than 400 bodies have been unearthed at more than a score of locations in the past 18 months, nearly a quarter of them since early June. Hundreds are thought to be buried at San Onofre, where 87 have been unearthed since last year.

The discoveries have plunged Colombia into a crisis of forensics: Investigators simply can't properly store and identify so many remains, and have no single registry to match names to victims. In many cases there aren't any bodies - just bones, some clothing, a watch, some jewelry. Most of the uncovered remains are at least three years old, and sometimes are exhumed carelessly, destroying evidence.

"I think we're on the verge of an overflow in which graves and bodies are going to appear that could overwhelm the state," said Eduardo Pizarro, president of the government's Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation, which was created eight months ago by the same law that has prompted 30,000 fighters to demobilize.

While leftist rebels are responsible for some forced disappearances in Colombia's "dirty war," investigators and human rights activists blame the vast majority on the paramilitaries who emerged in the 1980s to fight the leftists but whose victims have more often been peasants who resisted extortion or were accused of sympathizing with the rebels. The violence was compounded by land disputes and the intrusion of drug-running into what began as a political war.

Digs are going on throughout Colombia in areas that until recently were rural fiefdoms of paramilitary gangs that tortured and dismembered victims with a wink and a nod from local authorities, police and military officials.

Investigators were led to most of the remains at San Onofre by relatives and townspeople. Some were on a ranch where paramilitary boss Rodrigo Pelufo, now a fugitive wanted in eight murders, was said to tie victims to a rubber tree and torture them before killing them. Also dug up nearby was the car in which two federal investigators were traveling when they disappeared in 2001. Their bodies remain missing.

Two mass graves revealed by ex-paramilitaries have yielded 46 bodies since early June - 34 in Dibulla in the far north, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range; and 12 in the far south, outside Mocoa in the largely lawless jungle province of Putumayo.

Investigators say the doomed were delivered to the Dibulla site in a white Toyota 4X4 where their bodies were cut up with machetes. At the site outside Mocoa, they said, one L-shaped pit yielded the remains of a father and his pregnant daughter. They believe more than 300 other bodies lie in Dibulla and nearly 50 outside Mocoa.

Investigators were led to both graves by former midlevel paramilitary commanders, said Leonardo Cabana, director of the human rights unit of the federal prosecutor's office.

By cooperating, the men - their names kept secret to prevent reprisals - are seeking reduced jail terms of 5-8 years as opposed to a possible 40 years. It's unclear whether top paramilitary commanders could also qualify for reduced sentences if implicated in the crimes without having admitted to them.

Prosecutors, who spoke on condition of anonymity because their work often makes them targets of vendettas, say they found signs of an effort to hide the evidence - graves dug up at Dibulla just a few days before investigators arrived.

Colombia has some of the world's most skilled forensic anthropologists, but the prosecutors' Technical Investigations Unit has only eight digging for bodies, and it is hurrying to train more in DNA and exhumation techniques.

Foreign governments led by Spain and the United States are helping, but a single DNA test costs $600, and is anyway pointless without a relative's DNA for comparison.

Because Colombia's nearly half-century civil conflict is still raging - leftist rebels remain potent in some regions, like the paramilitaries funding themselves with cocaine trafficking and extortion - the number of disappeared is seriously underreported.

A U.N. team that visited Colombia last year said reasons include a lack of trust in the judicial system and a history of ties between authorities and the paramilitaries.

Colombia's nonprofit Association of Relatives of the Disappeared Detained recorded 7,300 cases of forced disappearances between 1997 and 2004. Only one-tenth of the bodies have been found, said the group's secretary general, Esperanza Merchan. She estimated the total number of disappeared at 15,000.

A 2000 law created the National Commission for the Seeking of Disappeared People and authorized it to build a "unified registry" of the missing. But only now has it purchased the necessary software, according to the commission's technical secretary, Marta Mireya Moreno.

Besides, disappearances continue to be reported, "and this pokes a big hole in the government's claim that the conflict is winding down somehow or that the paramilitaries have demobilized," says Maria McFarland, the Colombia specialist for Human Rights Watch-Americas.

Truth commissions have belatedly tried to reconcile the fates of thousands who disappeared in dirty wars in Guatemala, Peru and Chile. But Colombia presents a unique challenge.

"Our war's not over, yet we're undergoing a peace process," Moreno said. "And within the conflict we're investigating and identifying the missing. So, what can you do?"

By CuriosJoe on Aug 2, 2006, 06:32 in Friendly Talkzone.