Investigators exhume the nameless dead of Colombia's half-century-long civil war

Source: Associated Press

Investigators exhume the nameless dead of Colombia's half-century-long civil war

As part of the peace process with Farc rebels, the search is under way, in places like La Macarena, for 45,000 who died without record during the conflict

Associated Press in La Macarena
Friday 26 February 2016 13.41 EST

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The cemetery in La Macarena has long been a symbol for leftist critics of the government. Its location, a few feet downslope from a military base belonging to the elite Omega Task Force, one of the largest recipients of US counterinsurgency aid, fuelled tales that it held untold numbers of civilians killed by the military and dressed up as guerrillas to hide human rights abuses. Colombian media took to calling it the world’s largest mass grave.

It is unknown how many of the dead were civilians. In a fatal omission that speaks to longstanding institutionalised neglect and corruption in Colombia, authorities at the time made almost no effort to identify the dead or investigate how they were killed.

Such distinctions matter little to Jesús Antonio Hernández, who for three decades was the village’s gravedigger. During the worst of the bloodbath starting in 2002, after earlier peace efforts broke down and the government launched a major offensive, helicopters would unload as many as 10 corpses a day on the base’s airstrip, which is the dusty jungle crossroads’ only paved surface.

“It was very sad,” Hernández said, wiping away sweat as he wielded a spade helping undo his burial work. “People were buried without their loved ones. I just put them in a bag and interred them.”

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/26/investigators-exhume-nameless-dead-colombia-civil-war