El Tiempo, Bogota — Though alive, Rosalba Velasquez says she has died four times: once for each of her children who have disappeared. She has almost completed a decade looking for them in piles of bodies and police lists, but to no effect. Worse than the deaths, she maintains, is not being certain if they threw them into the river, to the vultures or dug up the grounds to bury them there. ‘The last is the most possible,’ she says, strong but embittered.
‘Have you brought me bodies, lad?’
‘Yes, ma’am but none of them are yours,’ the driver (of a digger), then working in a gold mine and occasionally carrying back bodies he found on the road, would answer. It was the end of the Nineties and many of the dead were thrown alongside roads with signs warning against picking them up. ‘The lad,’ says Rosalba, would bring what he could and unload them like stones on the platform in front of the morgue’. There Rosalba got used to the smell of death. ‘I turned over the bodies, touched them, and none was mine,’ she says.
The paramilitaries had taken away two of her children and told Rosalba not to ask of them. They were Jairo and Freddy, the second and third of her children, of 29 and 28 years. The last time their mother saw them was the dawn of 21 July 1997, 15 days after the burial of Guillermo, her eldest one, who had been assassinated by FARC guerrillas. It was the first time Rosalba thought she would die. She stayed strong but her husband could not deal with the grief. ‘After the funeral of the eldest one, he sat down in the dining room, opened a bottle of brandy and kept drinking for 14 days till his blood stopped flowing,’ says Rosalba.
That was when death knocked at the door again, dressed in a poncho, a hat, hand in the belt. Rosalba opened the door, as always with a dry smile. ‘Lady, call Freddy, we need him for some information,’ said ‘Poison’, a paramilitary boss, short and with green eyes. At that time the boy was sleeping. She managed to make out the man who they had brought in the backseat of the ramshackle van. It was Jairo, her other son. They accused him of being an informant of FARC. Rosalba panicked. She could not hear what he was saying behind the glass frosted with his breath but knew exactly what he was shouting: ‘Mother, don’t let them kill me’. She entered the house crying. ‘Escape, Freddy, escape, escape…’ But he said no. ‘I’m not at fault and neither is Jairo. Go and tell them to wait for me because I am putting on my shoes. If they want to kill me, they have to come in and do it here because I’m not going without my shoes’.
What followed were long days of searching up in the mountains in the company of Wilmar, her remaining son. They asked here and there, in one town and another, but to no avail. ‘It was as if they never existed’. Then came years of solitude. Wilmar had enrolled in the army with the task of avenging the death of his brothers and to recover their remains. But the paramilitaries also got rid of him. It was in 2002, when he went to meet a man who apparently knew where they had buried his brothers.
The hope of finding the remains of some of her children came the nearest when the prosecutors went to La Viborita where they had been told they could be. They dug up the earth and found nothing. Rosalba says that after so many years she no longer has the hope of recovering the remains of her sons through clothing, but she certainly expects they will be found and the DNA evidence will give her the peace for which she has waited ten years. (El Tiempo, 23 April 2007)
‘I Dream of Finding Him under the Branches’
‘On 20 November 2004, Luis Abil, my son, left to work and four days later I was told they had killed him together with eight other boys. We went to look for him in the mountain, in the cemeteries and in the morgue, but to no effect. I think he was one of the last to disappear before the Calima (paramilitary) group demobilised. Every now and then, I dream that I am raising the branches and then find Luis in the mountain. I wake up distressed and only pray that at least they did not torture him like they did to my brother. They killed Paulo on 29 November 2002, together with eight other peasants. One of them gouged out one of his eyes.’ (Alicia Carrillo, mother of Luis Abil)
‘I Show Her Photograph Everywhere’
‘From the day itself when they took her away, on 14 August 2001, I walk with her photograph and show it at every public act. I go to churches, meetings about the disappeared and even to shows when I see a camera recording there. The day she disappeared we were at a solicitor’s with her three children. A fat black man with big arms signalled to her, said he was from the F2 (a branch of the Colombian police) and took her away. I went there and they said they did not have her. Even worse, on 21 August that year, the 34th birthday of my Angela, they called and told us that Carlos Castaño (a notorious drug lord and paramilitary chief) had her. Each time that day, I think she will turn up.’ (Raquel George, mother of Angela Torres).
‘I Will Go to Hell and Back’
‘If I have to go to Hell to rescue her, I will go there,’ says Pastora Mira Garcia with a slow and sure voice. As each ‘good source’ tells her, ‘Pastora, on the other side they speak of some graves,’ a cold current runs through her body. She asks for details, grabs machetes and goes to find the remains of her daughter, Sandra Paola Montes. The first time she decided to excavate a grave was a year ago. Once the paramilitaries handed in their weapons, she contacted one of their men and travelled, without her family knowing it, to Ibague, where they gave her the first information. ‘I was tired of being like an orphan before the authorities which makes one at times like an ineffective victim and threw myself into doing it alone’.
The aborted searches have had a contrary effect on her. In place of discouraging her, they have made her into a tenacious woman. Now she leads a programme of the victims and runs a university course on managing grief. Sandra was a physical education student and lived with a man till he decided to get mixed up with the paramilitaries, says the mother. One day at a checkpoint, an armed group took her and her daughter of six years from a bus and forced her to live in a settlement where it had a presence. ‘They returned the girl to me the next day, bitten all over by mosquitoes, but they kept Sandra for almost a year. They wanted her to work with them and did not let her move from there. I managed to get someone to inform me of her till 6 February 2002 since when nobody has come to know anything,’ she says. (Pastora Mira GarcÃa, mother of Sandra Paola Montes) [El Tiempo, 24 April 2007]
Abridged and translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate