By Paulina Mesa Loaiza, EL ESPECTADOR, August 26, 2026
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The Jesuit priest dedicated his life to the search for the disappeared and to the direct struggle against all the forms of violence in a country at unending war. His work with the communities most stricken by the conflict turned him into one of the most important human rights defenders in the country. He died in Bogotá at the age of 82. This is how his friends remember him.
Father Javier Giraldo died in silence. That’s what those have said who were with him in the clinic where he was taken after a fall at his home in Bogotá. They say also that his last night on earth was peaceful, and that he chose the first hours of the morning for his departure. He was 82 years old and had experienced a collection of battles. He dedicated his life to defending the rights of the communities most buffeted by the conflict and to confronting the military that was violating their rights. His friends remember him as a walker of a thousand paths; he was walking in a countryside drowned by abandonment, and he marched through the streets carrying on his shoulders the hopelessness of the families of those who had disappeared.
And, like every good hiker, he knew how to stop and rest. Besides the surrender of his legs, this priest surrendered his ears, his eyes, his hands, his words, and his heart to the victims. They tell how, in an action of love, Father Javier Giraldo left them a legacy of the dignity of one who was always searching for the living among so many dead. The struggle for a justice that so frequently had been evaded is the inheritance that communities now receive like an embrace in the midst of the pain, the abandonment, and the emptiness. It’s like an invitation to continue defending life, truth, and hope. The priest, who always came down from the pulpit and pushed through the trails of Colombia on the back of a mule, has gone, leaving his vestments woven with dignity and courage.
He was never a man behind a desk or deep in documents although he had studied philosophy and theology at Javeriana Pontifical University and was specialized at the University of Paris. Nor was he the classical priest who gives a sermon in church. More likely he was talking about Christ in the mountains and the jungles. Since he was very young, he understood that the religious vocation was ingrained with justice and the doctrine of “effective love” (“action over words”) that he learned from the priest Camilo Torres, whose remains he had searched for more than 60 years until he found them in early 2026. For decades he was a part of the Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP) and was complaining of human rights violations by the paramilitaries, as well as accusing high officials of the Army for permitting that.
The pain of others was the feeling he always felt, even though you never saw him looking sad or discouraged. He was one of the first people to talk about forced disappearance in Colombia in 1982. Father Javier Giraldo told how he couldn’t believe that this phenomenon, which he had already heard about in France and Argentina, could be replicated in his country. At that time, he recounted all the classified ads in the newspapers from families looking for their loved ones. He went to their houses, one by one, and told them that they were not lost but had been disappeared, and that he could help to find them. He would go out marching every week, and then he organized the Association of Families of Missing Detainees (Asfaddes in Spanish). Now these families are also known as Colectivo 82.
Yolanda Sanjuan is the sister of Alfredo and Humberto, disappeared in 1982 by agents of the government. She remembers that the first time she saw Father Javier Giraldo at the door of her house in Bogotá, she thought he was a savior with a mischievous grin. She tells that he was also a man who was tireless and walked along with her, carrying bags full of photos of the disappeared, bags that weighed more—or the same—as if he were carrying the disappeared themselves in the bags. One night, before she had heard the news of his death, Yolanda wrote a message thanking him. “He showed us how to crawl, to walk, and to run to defend ourselves. Thanks for the solidarity, the dedication, for being our love and our compass. Your legacy will remain in our lives forever,” she wrote.
At 9:20 in the morning of this August 25, Teresa, also Yolanda’s sister, wrote a WhatsApp message to all her contacts: “The Priest died.” The night before, she had asked, as an entreaty, that he not depart without first seeing her brothers appear. She remembers that he had said to her, with a loving look, that she should never lose hope that the disappeared would reappear, “they will appear some day”. For Teresa, Javier Giraldo was her family in the pain, with searching, and with counsel. When she learned of his death she was left with one regret. Just a little more than a month ago she had seen him walking down the street. He was walking behind her toward a hotel on 74th Street in Bogotá and she couldn’t get to him to greet him and say good-bye. Teresa breathes a sigh and can only say that she feels terrible.
Father Javier Giraldo’s work was also crucial in shedding light on the massacres of Trujillo (Valle del Cauca) that took place between 1986 and 1994, and ensuring that the Colombian government admitted its responsibility in the crimes committed against more than 100 people. He also filed complaints about the connections between members of the Armed Forces and the paramilitary organizations in Magdalena Medio and Urabá at a time that just talking about that would be synonymous with your death. In return for that effort, he received death threats, endured stigmatization, and had to experience periods of exile. But he never abandoned the communities where he deposited his testimonies and his confidence.
In 1996, he reached Uraba in Antioquia to work as a member of the Justice and Peace Commission. There he investigated the case of Rito Alejo del Río, then the commander of the Army’s 17th Brigade, and the case of Farouk Yanine Díaz, a general who was the former commander of F2. In 1997 he began to accompany the community of San José de Apartadó (Antioquia). A group of campesinos in that district (corregimiento), with the hand and help of Father Javier Giraldo and a number of legal organizations, declared themselves to be neutral in the conflict. However, on February 21, 2005, the town was the victim of violence by the Army and paramilitary groups that perpetrated a massacre in which 3 children and five adults were murdered.
This is how the Community remembers it: “He traveled all these paths with us, with the great pain and the suffering, asking nothing for himself; absorbing and suffering along with us, the executioners, the siege, the most atrocious persecution by those who hate life. Many voices demanded killing and silencing him, to extinguish his voice, and because of that persecution he had to go into exile.” And they added: “His life is a seed that plants hope, the opportunity to keep on being the Peace Community, in spite of the adversities. In every massacre, murder, displacement, there was the priest, giving us encouragement, and the hope to dream that another world is possible.”
In a column written in December 2009 by the columnist Alfredo Molano Bravo for this newspaper, the writer knew how to depict with exactitude Father Javier’s vocation and his closeness to the communities who had suffered the most. “Javier is, in the essential sense of the word, a Just Man. And that’s why he’s also a severe judge of the crimes committed by the guerrillas. His mission has been painful, terribly painful; he has a certain fixed smile that is with him everywhere: from San José de Apartadó to Trujillo, from Casanare to Urabá. He’s lived among the people in the towns, he knows their tragedy, he shares it, he lives it, and he fights it.”
The priests that follow the steps of Father Javier Giraldo also remember him through the pain and the hope. Father Henry Ramírez, a Claretian missionary, says that he felt privileged to hear his teachings that later turned into the movement of priests of the Church of the Poor. “I’m not talking about Javier’s death, I’m talking about Javier’s path, and he’s continuing to walk that path. A good hiker knows that you have to stop and rest in order to keep on walking the path. The resurrection is the hope that Javier is not dead. He is present and he is with us. There is sorrow, but Javier is not gone,” said Father Henry, while he wept.
The path that Father Henry was talking about also had tests of faith. In 2009, Father Giraldo left in writing one of the most difficult decisions of his life: he would not continue to participate in the legal proceedings in which he had lost confidence. After nearly three decades of accompanying victims, he said he had seen how testimony was manipulated, complaining witnesses ended up being persecuted, and files were used to serve the fabrication of truths to cover up the impunity. “They turned me into a criminal because I dared to seek justice,” he wrote. For him, the truth and the legal system could not be reduced to words stamped on a trial record, nor to empty formalities. They were ethical obligations.
That’s why he maintained that “the ethical conscience of humanity is committed to the search for truth and justice,” where nobody is obliged to collaborate with institutions that, using those words, are protecting falsehood and injustice. That conviction was with him until his last breath in Bogotá, although he had wanted to spend his last days in San José de Apartadó. Manuel Chacón, a member of the collective, Sons and Daughters for Justice and against Silence and Forgetting, photographed him during one of his journeys to that community. In the picture, Javier Giraldo appears as he lived: going up a trail on the back of a mule and smiling. The image seems to condense his way of life in the world: moving ahead on a difficult path to get to people that need to be heard. The priest traveled that path until his legs couldn’t carry him any longer.
Memories from his friends and people close to him
Adriana Arboleda—-Corporación Juridica Libertad
Javier is an incredible man. He is a man of history and he will transcend history because he, like Fabiola LaLinde, taught all of us who defend human rights through his example, through his stubbornness, through his testimony. He wasn’t one that talked about human rights but really his life was exclusively dedicated to that. He’s the man from whom we learned how to search for the disappeared, with whom we learned how to establish memory, to document, and with whom we learned courage and the importance of solidarity with the victims. He’s the man with whom we learned about the “effective love” that Camilo Torres talked about. He’s also someone very important in the history of this country in the truth commissions, in historic illumination, the rights of the victims, with his arduous labor dedicated day after day, and without any desire for prominence or to stand out, but rather simply moving with love and solidarity with the victims. We saw him many times in Río Frío, in Trujillo, in Medellín, in the 13th ward, and in the community of San José de Apartadó, elbow to elbow with the women, the men, the children, making truth, justice, and reparation possible. His memory is here, and the only way to pay tribute to him is to be able to do what he did: keep struggling in the midst of this country’s turmoil, with so much regression in rights, and keep believing that that utopia of life, of dignity, and of solidarity is possible.
Rafael Barrios—José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective
I had the honor and the pleasure of meeting Father Javier Giraldo in 1978 when I joined the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective. Father Javier was one of the precursors, along with Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, of human rights in Colombia and at the international level, including the U.N. and the Inter-American System of Human Rights. He accompanied us in the cases we litigated with Eduardo Umaña such as the Palace of Justice case where he played a fundamental role so that the truth came to light and justice was done. The human rights movement that we have today was also consolidated with him; not only in the opening of other organizations of human rights defenders, but also organizations of the victims of serious human rights violations, like Asfaddes. This priest had the particularity of not accepting recognition or awards. Recently President Gustavo Petro proposed decorating him with the Cross of Boyacá and he didn’t want to accept it. Petro himself said that in his speech when he made the proposal, that the priest kept a distance from this kind of recognition. He was a great person for us, a great fighter for human rights. May he rest in peace.
Sebastián Escobar——José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective
We remember Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit religious and a human rights defender who had a distinguished struggle for justice for the victims and against impunity. I particularly remember him as a person who took a strong stand to dispute the position of the Colombian government for their guarantee of impunity for their serious human rights violations, and for his position of rupture in the face of what he thought was a legal system that was eager to charge and criminalize any people who criticized it and defended human rights, but moved at a snail’s pace against massacres and the injustices committed by the government. Javier leaves a legacy and a profound education for those of us who are continuing in those directions where we defend life and defend the victims of serious human rights violations and defend those who are fighting for a much better country and world.
Hilda Maritza———–Collective 82
Words do no justice to the deep void in our pathway left by the loss of Father Javier. It was a privilege to know him when I was just a little girl. His forcefulness, his endurance and determination sustained the hard road of struggle that so many families had to endure in seeking justice for the forced disappearances in Colombia. I harbor very vivid memories of his words, his kindness, and above all, his immense courage. They are memories I can never forget.
Father, rest in peace in the arms of our Lord. May your legacy endure forever in our hearts, and may your courage always illuminate our pathways. He was a Titan, an Indispensable!
Pablo Cala———Finding the Disappeared Foundation
I met Javier Giraldo in 1994 in a pilgrimage to Trujillo in Valle Department for a commemoration of the massacre in Trujillo. Listening to him there, I felt a strong transmission of energy, of hope, and of a way of life. From that moment I began to reach out to the Inter-Church Commission for Peace and Justice (At that time it was called Inter-Congregational.) and when I arrived in Bogotá in ’96, I got started completely in the work of the Commission and I was there for 17 years. For all that time, Javier was the inspiration and the model, not only for me but for several generations of human rights defenders.
When I left the Commission, I was doing some work in Bajo Aguán in Honduras, systematizing reports for the U. N. Rapporteur on the extrajudicial executions. That’s when I got a call from Javier with a petition: he needed me to go and work in Guaviare on some memory procedures that he had the idea of starting, and he needed somebody that was living out there. I told him: “Javier, I can’t suddenly be going around out there and living full time in that place, but we could talk about some ideas.” From that moment in 2013 we started a process in Guaviare that began with a memory procedure and ended up with the creation of the Humanitarian Exhumation Commission, which was an antecedent of what is now the Unit of Search for the Disappeared (UBPD in Spanish).
Javier personally took to the proposal to Havana, where he told how he had been able to recover six bodies without the help of the Attorney General’s Office, using a humanitarian Commission for exhumations, what is consisted of, and how the searches needed to be done without judicial involvement. And he brought proposals from other organizations. That was one of the antecedents. We went back to Guaviare on a couple of occasions after 2016, when the Agreement had already been signed. Javier is an honorary member of the Finding the Disappeared Foundation, a role in which he supports what we do. His most recent support was at the end of February when after open heart surgery and two or three months of recuperation, he made his first trip out of Bogotá in the work of human rights accompaniment.
Father Henry Ramírez——-Claretian Missionary
Javier is a walker of a thousand roads, of the thousand trails in Colombia. He walked Carmen de Chucurí, Bucaramanga, San José de Apartadó, Trujillo, El Castillo, Villavicencio, the Páramo of Sumapaz, and the Paramo of La Cerna, searching. He’s a walker that decided to stop in order to keep on walking; the good walkers know when to stop. In Javier we have a theological, spiritual, and intellectual legacy. Colombia can now say that it has an all-encompassing intellectual that has supported the building of this country, and is humble, because many people may never have heard of him. The victims and those who suffered the destruction in the war do know him, in a government that, as he has taught us, continues to be terrorist and predatory. Javier Giraldo taught us to have joy and patience when Generals of the Republic were persecuting and defaming him. He never lost his joy and his composure. He closely accompanied the families of people who had been disappeared in the Palace of Justice. There are thousands of paths and also thousands of Camilos, and he was a searcher until he was able to find the body of Camilo Torres. Today we can’t deny our sadness, but I don’t feel emptiness because Javier left us a legacy and a presence that breaks through time and space. As a man of faith, he inspires us. There are many who feel this farewell as a continuation of his path.
He unmasked the entire phenomenon of paramilitarism in Colombia, with the voices of the communities and the victims, a legacy for which we still need more evidence. He used scientific rigor as he listened to the communities, so that their voices spoke with scientific, legal, and methodological rigor in recounting their complaints, communications, and historical certifications. His support of Colombia’s truth is fundamental, and his writings are a benchmark for continuing the search for the disappeared. What he did with the Data Bank of Political Violence in this country, developing it at first with the Inter-congregational Commission for Peace and Justice and with Cinep is an enormous legacy. He dared to say things that at that time no one else dared to say about the responsibilities of the government and its officials in the crimes. He was a brave man. His courage is the way we stay firm and keep going, united in hope and love. Javier makes us feel that we’re not alone, but rather that we have to stick together. Right now there are still a lot of “Javiers” to go on with the history, writing, digging, and searching for the disappeared. It’s a legacy that we will keep on enriching because Javier is still present.
Peace Community of San José de Apartadó
Physically, Father Javier has left us. But his memory, his legacy, his journey, his humility, his simplicity, his fervent spirit, his hope, his faith in living, all stay with us. He accompanied us in the hardest and the saddest moments.
He traveled these paths with us, with much pain and suffering. He surrendered himself to be with us and suffer at our side, from the executioners of harassment and the most atrocious persecution of those who hate our life. Many times, they tried to silence him, to kill him, to put an end to his voice, and because of that persecution, he had to go into exile. But his urge to be with the victims, the oppressed, and those of us who had no voice brought him back home. In every massacre, murder, displacement, there was the priest, giving us encouragement, giving us strength, giving us hope to dream that another world was possible.
An honest man, transparent, coherent in his life, in his words, in his ideals, with so much clarity. That clarity in the search for justice before different legal settings, tribunals, and courts. In searching for a truth, explaining the truth to tribunals that never found it, because he was facing a world of injustice, the one that we were all facing in our country. For those of us who knew him and had the opportunity to walk with him, his leaving us has caused a great deal of anguish, a lot of pain, an enormous void.
His life is a seed of hope, an opportunity for us to keep on being the Peace Community in spite of all the adversities. His teachings and his life are with us in our lives forever.
Clemencia Correa
Javier, I don’t know what life will be like without you. I will miss you, I’m sure of that. It’s hard to believe that now you are gone, although you will always be on my pathway, just like hundreds or thousands of other people.
My way of life has been marked by your experience, your wisdom, your love for the poor, for those who have been the victims of political violence; with you and along with others, I became aware of the terror in the way this system of social control in Colombia has tried to silence our voices and I learned what it means to fight for dignity even in the situations that make the people vulnerable.
You have walked communities and regions; demanding truth, justice, and reparation. In Meta, with family members and survivors of the massacre at Truillo, building a monument of memory for the victims of the horror of Trujillo. You walked in Chocó, with the communities of self-determination, life, and dignity at Cacarica that were victims of forced displacement; so many transits, so many canoes. And especially your gamble for the Community of San José de Apartadó, clearly, as you called it on several occasions, a Community that had been attacked unceasingly, viciously, by those with impunity in their viscera. We will never stop telling about the many families of the disappeared and the murdered that you have accompanied all over this country.
Your heart, Javier, gained strength last year to keep on fighting for our country, feeling concern about what we were all confronting, and leaving your mark on every city, and every territory that you were traveling through. Your new heart allowed you to find the remains of Camilo Torres and redefine him as a priest who left the legacy of unconditional love. You accompanied the young people who were stigmatized as criminals because they marched in a demonstration, so they could remember your routes and keep on walking in the midst of so much injustice that you have had to live through. And that strategy of listening always allowed you to share your vision of seeing the light and the hope in the midst of the darkness.
Javier, again and again, thousand thanks! You are and will be the indispensable one that we will have as a guide to keep us from missing the North Star, the one who is infinitely ethical and doesn’t care for the cameras or the spotlight; he accompanies, from below, with and for the people affected, and he is the heart that continues to beat among all of us in Colombia and the world.