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Colombia More than 200,000 Unidentified Bodies Found in Secret GravesThe crimes of Colombia's military during more than half a century of armed conflict are being exposed with the discovery mass graves in which unidentified bodies were dumped. The latest was uncovered on December 14 in the municipality of Dabeiba in the Las Mercedes de Dabeiba Catholic cemetery in the department of Antioquia. The newspaper El País writes: "There the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the court born of the agreements between the State and the FARC to investigate the most serious crimes of the war, is searching for the bodies of at least 50 victims of extrajudicial executions perpetrated by the military between 2005 and 2007. The Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science has so far received information about 17 cases. But the dimension of the drama of disappearances goes further. The country faces, according to calculations of this public body, the exhumation of around 200,000 unidentified bodies." Claudia García, director of the forensic institute, pointed out that these are the staggering figures. "In recent years we have surveyed all legal cemeteries, and -- let's put it this way -- burials that are not legal in these clandestine graves, and we believe that the challenge we are facing is looking for the country's disappeared among more or less 200,000 bodies," she said on Caracol Radio. "The challenge is very great and we will have work for many years from the scientific point of view," she added, stressing the importance of the government's involvement in carrying out that task. At present, the forensic institute is focusing on the pit found in Dabeida, first by autopsying the exhumed bodies. The team will then cross-check data with the information of relatives of missing persons, to compare genetic profiles. "We will work without interruption and by the third week of January we will have made the first steps, rather than finishing the job because it is complex," Garcia said. The report in El País continues: "Systematic disappearances still embody the most vivid memory of the conflict and affect thousands of families. That is why the work of institutions such as the JEP or the Search Unit is key to trying to close the wound. Extrajudicial executions, wrongly called false positives, only represent a percentage of those cases. As highlighted by the head of the Institute for Legal Medicine, it will be the investigations of the justice system that establish if they were civilians assassinated by soldiers and then presented as guerrillas killed in combat in exchange for awards and compensation. In the midst of an amalgamation of estimates on the thousands of victims of this procedure, official data offered by the Prosecutor's Office indicate that between 1998 and 2014 there were more than 2,200 executions of this type. The vast majority took place during the two terms of former president Álvaro Uribe." Further on the newspaper writes: "The spectre of the crimes committed in the past by the Armed Forces returned this year to shock Colombia and became again, for the first time since the signing of the peace and the beginning of the demobilization of the FARC, a central focus of the political debate. The succession of complaints -- from a directive, already withdrawn, that opened the door to a system of incentives to improve statistics in the Army, the accusations against the commander of the ground force, to the concealment of the death of minors in a bombardment of dissidents of the former guerrillas -- cost Defence Minister Guillermo Botero his job a month and a half ago. His successor, former Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo, has asked to guarantee the protection of former military officers who cooperated with the JEP and whose testimony was decisive in locating this mass grave." The newspaper quotes the JEP as saying that "preliminary indications are that these were men between 15 and 56 years old, residing in Medellín, among whom would be found people with disabilities." It concludes: "Since the proceedings began last June, the judge has heard 160 testimonies from uniformed men who voluntarily came forward to help clarify what happened. Thanks to their stories, nearly 400 victims of extrajudicial executions have been identified." (Based on El Pais article as reported in Orinoco Tribune, December 20, 2019. Quotations translated from original Spanish by TML.)
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