Colombia Faces the Exhumation of 200k Unidentified Bodies

December 20, 2019
The Institute of Legal Medicine ensures that criminal justice investigations will determine cases of extrajudicial executions.

The daily life of Colombia walks on the edge of the confrontation with its recent past. Those years, the wounds of more than half a century of armed conflict, are periodically revived as happened on Saturday when the discovery of a mass grave in the municipality of Dabeiba, between Medellín and the Caribbean coast. 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, seeks the bodies of at least 50 people victims of extrajudicial executions perpetrated by the military between 2005 and 2007. The Institute of Legal Medicine received information on 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.

These are the vertigenous figures highlighted Tuesday by Claudia García, director of the forensic institute. “In recent years we have made a survey in all legal cemeteries, let’s say it somehow, and in the burials that are not legal in these clandestine graves, and we believe that the challenge we are facing is more or less of 200,000 bodies, where we have to look for the disappeared from the country,” she said on Caracol Radio. “The challenge is very great and we will have work for many years from the scientific point of view,” continued Garcia, who stressed the importance of the government’s involvement in carrying out that task.

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 peace jurisdiction 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 Legal Medicine, it will be the investigations of the justice system that establish whether civilians were killed 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.

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