At a bend in a Colombian river, a woman salvages human remains from decades of conflict

[Judi Lynn]

At a bend in a Colombian river, a woman salvages human remains from decades of conflict

http://snsimages.tribune.com.nyud.net:8090/media/photo/2010-01/51542389.jpg

n this photo taken Oct. 27, 2009, Maria Ines Mejia points to the Cauca River bank where
she recovered several hundred bodies over more than a decade in Marsella, Colombia.
Mejia's story highlights a daunting challenge for Colombia at a historic juncture:locating
and identifying victims of a three-decade war that ripped the country apart. With murders
sharply down and fears of retribution subsiding, thousands have come forward to chronicle
killings and disappearances and lead authorities to common graves. Colombia's chief
prosecutor's office has compiled a list of 26,564 Colombians murdered since in the
mid-1980s by 714 confessed killers from illegal armed groups. (AP Photo/Frank Bajak)
(Frank Bajak, AP / October 27, 2009)

FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press Writer
3:30 p.m. EST, January 9, 2010

MARSELLA, Colombia (AP) — At this bend in the Cauca River, an eddy urges debris ashore. The rocky bank is scattered with sticks, reeds and plastic bottles, and vultures pick at the sodden, shiny white carcass of a small dog.

It is here that the bodies wash up.

While hardly Colombia's only river repository for human remains, the Cauca may well be its most prolific. It carries the bodies of drug gang toughs, of peasants dismembered by death squads, of innocents killed for being kin to somebody's rival.

Who the victims were or why they died never mattered much to Maria Ines Mejia. She simply fished them out — a few hundred or so — and tried to treat them with dignity. What began as a job no one else wanted evolved into a vocation.

"I pulled out legs, arms, torsos," says Mejia, 50. "Or heads alone. You'd find everything there: Entire bodies. Little pieces. Big pieces. Some in sacks. Others in baskets. Tied up. Heads sheathed in plastic."

Mejia's story highlights a daunting challenge for Colombia at a historic juncture: locating and identifying victims of three decades of conflict. With murders sharply down and fears of retribution subsiding, thousands have come forward to chronicle killings and disappearances and lead authorities to common graves. Colombia's chief prosecutor's office has compiled a list of 26,564 Colombians murdered since the mid-1980s by 714 confessed killers from illegal armed groups.

That task is casting a spotlight on people like Mejia, the low-level civil servants who became guardians of the nameless dead.

"They are the unknown heroes," says Maria Victoria Uribe, an anthropologist with Colombia's National Commission of Reconciliation and Reparation.

It is always safer to push a body back into a river. That way, it may break apart, and the bones may settle to the river bed. But for 13 years, Mejia pulled the bodies out — until great personal risk made her stop.

___

Mejia, a farmer's daughter, began her job in 1992, when she was named secretary for a rural district that included the riverbank. The job paid $250 a month.

"It was tough, in one respect, because they never equipped me. I bought the boots. I bought the gloves," Mejia recounts at her 6-acre (2.5-hectare) coffee farm, in her simple tin-roofed home an hour's drive from the river.

She never asked for money. But a grateful man once transferred $100 into her bank account, and a woman from Cali gave her a pair of overalls after she recovered a dead relation.

The eldest of four sisters, with a post-secondary education amounting to a few secretarial courses, Mejia had no training in forensics. Her written records on the corpses — preliminary autopsies of a sort — were initially riddled with errors.

"Sometimes I'd write down 'orifice caused by firearm' when the hole might just as well have been made by a raptor," she says.

The more bodies Mejia pulled from the river — she remembers four in a single day — the more comfortable she became around the disfigured and decomposing. She loaded them into Jeep Willys for the ride up to the morgue in Marsella.

She says she felt they were hers, like family.

"To leave (a body) for the dogs and vultures to finish off, I just can't do that," she says.

More than once, Mejia and her husband Ancizar Lopez would be in a boat on the Cauca — he loves to fish — and she'd spot a limb, grab it barehanded and pull it to shore.

More:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-lt-colombia-retrieving-the-bodies,0,631631.story

[gbscar]

1. Whatever else one might say, it's good that some of these many deaths aren't forgotten. n/t