Caves, the new cemeteries:
El Tiempo, Bogota — A shoulder blade with the inscription: ‘Pray for us now and in the hour of our death’. This is the content of one of the graves of the paramilitaries (‘paras’). To arrive at this place, they (the investigators) had to walk two hours across open fields and put up with a sickening stench while descending with ropes more than 10 metres underground.
The ‘paras’ thought nobody was going to come there but on July 21 the authorities found four of their victims. The grave was camouflaged in a natural cave at a place called ‘White Stones’, just ninety minutes from Bogota. This find would have been impossible without the information of a former ‘para’ wanting to reduce his punishment, moral and judicial. The surprise was great when the skeleton of a dog and the remains of a boy and another adult appeared. The investigators are certain that there are other caves that the ‘paras’, acting in Cundinamarca province or its periphery, converted into cemeteries. More than 70 common graves have been found in small settlements. Cundinamarca has borne the actions of bloodthirsty ‘paras’ like the Eagle, the Indian and the Bird.
10.000: The number of people reported as missing in Cundinamarca since 1998.
‘The River Is An Accomplice’:
If the justice system in Colombia could call upon rivers to testify, Sinú, San Jorge, Cauca, Magdalena, Catatumbo, Atrato and San Juan would clear up hundreds of crimes of the paramilitaries.
For years, these armed groups used their waters to dispose of the victims. It was all a military strategy. Ramón Isaza, commander of Magdalena Medio, confessed at the beginning of the year that all his dead ended up in the Magdalena.The paramilitary boss, Salvatore Mancuso, said that the body of the indigenous leader, Kimy PernÃa, kidnapped in 2001 was dug up from a grave and thrown into the Sinú. But the strategy did not always work. The Cauca was perhaps the only river that did not swallow up all of the dead. At Beltran, a small settlement of fishermen, people killed in the North Valley are beached at the bend of the river, between logs and garbage. Narces Palacio, gravedigger, remembers burying some 500 bodies in common graves. ‘The bodies came at times in pieces; a foot arrived and later a head. Some had been tortured’. Blood does not stop flowing. The bodies keep coming down but the fishermen, under threat, no longer recover them. ‘Now one kicks them to keep them moving,’ says one of them.
The body parts of Santander Maussa, assassinated on 13 September 1981, were recovered from the Sinú in the settlement of Villanueva. Witnesses told the victim’s family he had been thrown into the river. His ends were found in the waters below and he was pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. In Chocó, the priests even went to a clairvoyant to find the bodies of Father Jose Luis Mazo and his Spanish helper Iñigo Equiluz who were drowned in the Atrato after being rammed by a paramilitary launch on 18 November 1999. Between 1996 and 2000 in this department, according to the diocese, these groups killed close to 800 civilians, indigenous people and Blacks, many of whom ended up in the rivers.
Of other victims, there remains no trace. Isabel MejÃa lost her son David Ortega of 17 years who went out to tend to coca. People who knew him told Isabel that the paramilitaries killed him when he was drinking beer near a jetty. ‘They told me that the ‘paras’ were not only content with killing him but also threw his body into the river so that apparently the fish could gobble him up,’ says MejÃa. ‘If only I could find something of my son to be able to bury him and feel better for the rest of my days’.
Another one who knows nothing of a family member is Emilio Vargas MartÃnez, who, since 1992, looks for his nephew, Carlos Lobo Vargas, thrown into the Sinú. ‘The ‘paras’ killed him because they said he had killed another person, but this was a lie,’ maintains Vargas. Uncertainty has dogged Jorge Núñez Hernandez, lawyer and brother of Boris Núñez, who was kidnapped on 17 May 2001 and who, according to witnesses, was murdered and thrown into the Magdalena. Jorge looked for Boris, of 36 years and employed by the mayor’s office, for eight months in settlements along the river below until they ordered him to say he would stop looking or they were going to kill him. So Boris became another of the 208 disappeared at the hands of these groups in Barranca whose bodies would have ended up in the river. ‘The river in this place is an accomplice, the river in this place takes away people, the tale of my brother is a tombstone of water,’ says Núñez.
2,000: People reported missing in Córdoba since October 2006… there are people missing in this department since the Eighties.
‘Ralito Is Just A Grave’:
The people of the town of Santa Fe de Ralito, once the seat of negotiations between the government and the ‘paras’, long for the authorities to dig up the earth where innumerable dead could be buried. And they better come fast, they say, as their principal fear is that the former ‘paras’ will move the bodies. Their distress is because in June 2004, days before the start of the process, Mancuso’s men entered ‘The School’, an old training base, with diggers and arranged for the removal of bodies towards the interior or threw them into the nearby rivers. The objective: to remove all evidence.
So, when on 12 March four trucks (of the investigative agencies) came through the Ralito way, its residents woke up from their stupor. Looking through the cracks of their homes and speaking with their eyes, as they are used to given the presence of the ‘paras’, they celebrated the arrival of the investigators. Later when the vehicles reduced their speed and made their way through the fields to the farm, ‘The Ducks’, 4 km from the earlier seat of the negotiations, they knew something important would start to happen. There, in the farm of Abraham Ganem, one of the most important landowners of Córdoba (his name uttered with reverence), they found four bodies. One was buried next to a tree and a stream which the dogs and servants of the farm used to pass through. And the rest, 50 metres from there. The officials dug up in a cemetery because another of the techniques was to bury people without following legal norms. There they found a fifth body.
‘Those five are nothing,’ the locals say, ‘At the training base, they killed three or four every day and buried them there. The dead are in other farms.’ And like a rosary of evil prayers, they reel off the names… ‘Ralito is just a grave,’ says an official. But this first dig has brought hope to the inhabitants that the attention will turn to them because, as they say, in Ralito only the dead have remained. (El Tiempo, 23 April 2007)
Abridged and translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee. El Tiempo, Bogota, is chronicling the massacres of the death squads.
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