By Valentina Arango Correa and Justice System Editors, EL ESPECTADOR, December 22, 2024
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Victims of the conflict, forensic experts, a Justice of the JEP, and a back-hoe operator are the firsthand witnesses to discovering that disappeared persons are definitely buried here in this part of Medellín’s 13th Ward. Here is a reconstruction of an unprecedented finding.
With the eye of an eagle on the hunt, the back-hoe driver inserted his blade to lift out a little bit of earth from La Escombrera in Medellín. He was the first to announce the news, “There’s something here,” he said, as he dropped the earth a few meters away from where they had just broken into the mountain. The expert operator dropped the tablespoonful of soil to the ground as carefully as if he were bathing a new baby. One of the anthropologists who had been sitting there for months, watching the mechanic move the back-hoe went up to the little hummock. “There’s something here,” he confirmed. He immediately called his colleagues over. “We’ve found something. We have a find.” “We have a body,” he added. Femurs, tibia, fibula, forearm, hipbone, bits of cranium with teeth, some clothing . . .There was no doubt: there were skeletal remains of at least one person.
“What body parts, and where?” asked Andrea Gómez Vásquez, the lead forensic anthropologist in the group designated by the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons (UBPD in Spanish) to look in La Escombrera for the bodies of the disappeared. A place to dump garbage, but at the same time, a quarry for the extraction of construction materials, and a symbol of the horror of the war. All in one place. A mountain in Medellín’s Ward 13, where, for decades, the families of the victims of forced disappearance have said their loved ones were buried in an evil strategy for not leaving any trace of the murders and tortures that took place between 2002 and 2004 in this northwestern part of the city. Last Wednesday, after the machine operator gave the first news, and the forensic team confirmed that there were human remains, there has been quite a commotion.
The back-hoe driver stood up next to the machine: “I’m not moving from this spot,” as a sign that he had turned into one more custodian of one of the most important forensic discoveries in this country. “We were in shock. We had to get used to the idea of what had happened. We were all just shaking. Between the criminologist on the team, and the company that was helping us with security, and the others, we cordoned off the site. We put on our suits. We picked up our brushes and started cleaning it up. We didn’t have any doubt,” related Clara Betancur Bustamante, another anthropologist in the group. While the experts were still gauging the excitement of making history, and moved by millimeters to protect the discovery, the head of the group took charge, and other officials of UBPD and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) focused on the most immediate urgency: letting the victims know.
“It didn’t make me mad. It made me happy. It made me sad, and it gave me hope that my comrades would be found, or my partner,” said Rubiela Triana, searching for her son, Diego Juan Cartagena, who was 13 years old the last time he was seen, on April 20, 2003. Ever since July 27, 2024, when the excavation on the mountain was initiated, she has gone every week to wait calmly for something to be found. She was there on Wednesday. “I cried. I hugged my comrades. I cried at their feet, as the saying goes. I told them that I wanted to scream,” but she didn’t scream, she said she was too shy to scream, and her reaction was smiling and weeping. Same as Rubiela, Luz Elena Galeano, spokeswoman for Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad (Women Walking for the Truth) says that these remains were the confirmation of the truth that they had repeated so many times, and no one had listened. “We are here with a hope that’s alive (. . .) I’ve been here since the 6th of May. I come three times a week, and now, with these findings, you don’t even want to move from this place,” emphasized Luz Elena.
Those that were not there were receiving a wave of WhatsApp messages and calls. Alejandra Balvin is searching for her father, Hernando Balvin, who disappeared in 2002, and her brother Adonis Balvin, in 2006. She first saw the invitation at the immediate press conference called by the two agencies. The word “discovery” seemed incredible to her.
Her friend, Juan Mejía, was looking for his brother, Hermey Mejía. Just that day he had marked the 22 years since Hermey was arrested and disappeared on December 18, 2002. She was greeted by “Hola!” through a message. “When I saw that ‘Hola!’, I thought: ‘It’s true’. So I instantly responded to the message by saying ‘Hola’! He answered me, “What next? It’s that I don’t know what to feel.” At that moment, I thought, “So, it is something real.” From a distance, because Alejandra was working to find other disappeared people in Pereira, she felt that combination of sensations and feelings that the victims of the 13th Ward say they have experienced since that Wednesday.
“I was imagining a lot of things at that moment. But that passed, and I have no words to explain to you what we were feeling. We had been searching for five years, and sure, you can begin to doubt. But what happened this week is the verification of the fact that the government is obligated to search for every disappeared person, regardless of the cost. The discovery breaks with the urban myth that has done so much harm to the victims. There definitely are people buried in La Escombrera,” said Gustavo Salazar Arbeláez, a Justice of the JEP. In this area, he is known as the Justice who listened to those who were searching, and championed the process of protecting La Escombrera. In 2019 he presided over the first hearing in Medellín that opened the door for the legal system to make the most important decision in at least two decades of investigations: issuing orders for interim equitable relief for the protection of the location and for the immediate commencement of a search for the human remains that might be found there.
The JEP signed the order on August 11, 2020, and that’s how the monumental task of searching for the disappeared in La Escombrera was commenced. After hearing the testimony of former paramilitaries like Juan Carlos Villa Saldarriaga (alias Móvil 8), and Carlos Arturo Estrada (alias El Zarco), who confirmed that they had used this location as a common grave, I had already tried it in the Attorney General’s Office in 2015. But that first exploration was not successful. The searchers and the victims’ organizations insisted that the searches be better and at a larger scale. It wasn’t a task for just anyone. Looking for human bone remains in La Esombrera could be the most important forensic challenge of any armed conflict.
Justice Salazar made the rough estimate: “There is precedent in the history of Yugoslavia for exhumations of some 8,000 bodies. Also in Guatemala, where they have recovered hundreds of victims. But what we are seeing in Colombia is a technical and extremely specialized search for human remains in an entire mountain.” To furnish greater dimension to the work of the UBPD and the JEP, Andrea Gómez, the group’s leader, explained the monumental task: “We have dug out approximately 40,000 cubic meters of earth. We estimate that we are carrying out 30-40 dump truck loads of earth every day. And there are days when we take out 50 or 60. That’s extraordinary.”
The team was occupied in this job of removing junk when the back-hoe driver called out last Wednesday. According to Andrea Gómez, they were within some 50 centimeters of reaching what anthropologists call “the level”, the site of forensic interest where the experts’ calculations show the greatest possibility of finding remains. Why? Because this is the level that in 2004 began receiving junk and construction trash, and so tons of junk were accumulating while, according to the legal investigations, armed groups were “disappearing” their victims. What the JEP has established is that the Cacique Nutibara and Heroes of Granada blocs were using this area to hide their crimes, as part of a context of “social cleansing” in Medellín’s 13th Ward.
The Truth Commission has documented that, on October 16 and 17 of 2002, the largest urban military action in Colombia, called Operation Orion, was carried out. Under the umbrella of that military strategy, undertaken by the Army in the final months of the administration of President Andrés Pastrana, around 1,500 troops and masked and hooded men took over the 13th Ward. The members of the Truth Commission reported that soldiers, members of the DAS,[1] and officials from the Attorney General’s Office deployed every kind of violence against the community: arbitrary arrests, selective arrests and disappearances, all of it supported by paramilitary groups. The Corporación Jurídica Libertad estimates that 92 people were disappeared in just that phase of Orion.
The paramilitary chieftain, Diego Fernando Murillo (alias Don Berna), has confessed to the details of that illegal alliance: “A number of our men were there; many of them were wearing hoods and masks. They pointed out some people and some of those were killed; others of them were captured and then disappeared.” The JEP was looking at that context when it issued the order to protect La Escombrera, and it calculates that there might be more than 500 disappeared people buried there. More than that, they reviewd complete files on the paramilitary violence in Medellín that were obtained from the Peace and Justice process, and also the stories told by Carlos Estrada Ramírez and Jorge Enrique Aguilar, demobilized from the Self-Defense Forces, and at least 43 interviews of victims who complained of the disappearance of their family members after Operation Orion. “We lacked empathy and feeling for the credibility of the victims,” admits Justice Salazar when he’s asked why the Special Jurisdiction waited so many years before doing something about La Escombrera.
“I never lost hope. In spite of the magnitude of the challenge, I knew that we would have to keep going. Even though we weren’t finding anything, this is also a reparation for all of these mothers who wouldn’t leave us alone a single day, rain or shine, they kept bothering us. All of it was worth the trouble,” concludes the leader of the anthropologists. “That night I felt we were close to where the bodies were. Just as we had taken over their files, I want to do the same thing with their remains. It’s one thing to talk about the experiences of the victims and of the searchers while I’m sitting at my desk; it’s something else to be there with them. I’m a Justice, but I don’t have the problem of holding up a lantern so the forensic workers can do their jobs,” says Justice Salazar. “Ms. Anthropologist, is the work you’re doing almost like that cliché about looking for a needle in a haystack?,” EL ESPECTADOR asked anthropologist Betancur. “No, it’s like looking for a microneedle in a gigantic haystack,” she responded. At the close of this edition, Friday night, authorities reported finding the remains of a third individual.
As night falls on La Escombrera on December 18, 2024, while Justices, forensic workers, authorities, and victims are descending the mountainside after a day in which all of their lives have been changed, a yellow moon appeared on the horizon and the constellation Orion could be seen directly above them in a sky that ricochets all the lights of Medellín. The one who sees this, in silence, is Justice Salazar. A matter of destiny perhaps, but also the confirmation of the truth that the operation that bears the name of this group of stars still owes a debt to the families of the 13th Ward.
[1] DAS was the Administrative Department of Security , Colombia’s security agency. It was dissolved in 2011.