RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Making the ‘Disappeared’ Reappear

[Judi Lynn]

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Making the ‘Disappeared’ Reappear
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 27 (IPS) - "When they bring in (heads that still have) eyes, we close them, because it’s sad to see that look of terror, as if the killers were reflected in their glassy eyes. Those armed men stuck in the depth of the eyes of the dead scare us; they look like they want to kill us too.

"Because they ‘disappeared’ my brothers, tonight I’m waiting on the banks of the river, waiting for a body to come down, to make him my dead loved one. All of us women here in the port have lost someone, have had someone taken from us and killed, are widows and orphans.

"That is why we wait every day for the dead to be brought to us in the muddy waters, among the branches, to make them our brothers, fathers, husbands or sons…" reads the short story "Sin nombres, sin rostros ni rastros" (No Names, No Faces, No Traces) by Jorge Eliécer Pardo, the Colombian writer who won the "Without a Trace" national contest for short stories on forced disappearance this week.

The women in Pardo’s story collect the corpses, or pieces of bodies that have come floating down the river, gradually putting parts together until they have a complete body to "adopt" as their own family member, who is given the burial that they cannot offer their own missing loved ones.

The short story contest and a photography contest formed part of the three-day "Without a Trace" International Seminar on Forced Disappearance organised by the Fundación Dos Mundos (Two Worlds Foundation), which ended Friday.

"I have pulled dead people, even bodies without heads, from the Atrato river. I don’t know them, but I pull them to the bank so they can be buried, because it is a sad thing to see a human body being eaten by the ‘gallinazos’ (carrion crows)," Domingo Valencia, an amateur songwriter who lives on the banks of that river in the northwestern jungle province of Chocó, told IPS.

Dos Mundos, a local non-governmental organisation that supports young victims of violence and abuse, did not expect more than 50 stories to be submitted. But in the end, the jury had to decide between 427.

Reading them "was like opening Pandora’s box," journalist Guillermo González, a member of the jury, told IPS. He said he believes most of the stories are true accounts.

They contain "the hidden story, the one that isn't in the media, the one that reflects the tragedy of the families of the ‘disappeared’," he said, adding that he had to stop reading at 8:00 pm every night, "because if I didn't, I couldn't sleep."

~snip~
Every 36 hours on average, someone is forcibly disappeared in Colombia, the seminar heard from Gustavo Gallón, head of the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ) human rights group, who described the situation as "appalling."

In the first five years after rightwing President Álvaro Uribe took office in August 2002, 1,259 people have fallen victim to forced disappearance, according to the CCJ, which said three percent of the cases are blamed on the leftist guerrillas.

"Public functionaries are compromised in one way or another in around 97 percent of the disappearances -- 28 percent as a result of direct perpetration by state agents, and 69 percent as a result of tolerance of, or support for, disappearances carried out by paramilitary groups," said Gallón.

The number of cases directly attributed to the security forces rose fourfold in the past five years, to 235 cases a year, compared to 58 cases a year between July 1997 and June 2002, said the legal expert.

The government frequently attempts to discredit these figures, but "we have not received any objection" since mid-2007, said Gallón, who explained that the CCJ’s figures are the result of two decades of work gathering information from "20 newspapers and magazines, direct denunciations, statistics from the vice president’s office, and other sources."

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42993

[Texano78704]

1. Los desaparecidos

Que descansen en paz.