Identifying those left missing during Colombian conflict a daunting task
Online News Editor
March 17, 2023 2 minutes read
Bogota, Mar 17 (EFE).- More than 100,000 families are currently engaged in the drawn-out, emotionally draining search for a loved one who went missing during Colombia’s decades-old armed conflict, a quest made more difficult due to the ravages of time and the dismemberment of bodies found in cemeteries and other grave sites.
“Both violence and the passage of time erase people’s identity, and that makes (forensic) studies difficult,” Carlos Antonio Murillo, deputy director of the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, told Efe.
Crushed ribs, femurs, skulls and other body parts arrive at the offices of that entity in Bogota due to a gruesome particularity of the Colombian conflict: the mutilation of murdered victims to eliminate all trace of those crimes.
The forensic work involves anthropological and odontological studies and other analyses to determine the victim’s gender, age and height, and whether he or she died of a blow or a gunshot, for example.
More:
https://www.laprensalatina.com/identifying-those-left-missing-during-colombian-conflict-a-daunting-task/