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

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

simply does this out of decency and respect for the dead...thanks for posting

In fact, I think that none of the statements in this sentence are true:

"With murders sharply down and fears of retribution subsiding, thousands have come forward to chronicle killings and disappearances and lead authorities to common graves." --AP

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Excerpts from a Human Rights Watch report on Colombia dated 2009:

"Though the number of killings (of trade unionists) annually has dropped from its peak in the 1990s, when the paramilitaries were in the midst of their violent expansion, more than 400 trade unionists have been killed during the Uribe government. In 2008 the number of killings went up again, to 41 as of October, according to the National Labor School. Unionists working in the education sector comprise a high proportion of the victims."

---

"Successor groups to paramilitaries, which never fully demobilized, appeared increasingly active, threatening and killing civilians, including trade unionists and human rights defenders. Reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the military remain frequent. Internal displacement of civilians has been steadily rising in recent years – in 2008 the number of people affected may have reached its highest level in decades.

"Colombia's justice institutions have in recent years begun to make some progress in uncovering the truth about paramilitary abuses and accomplices. But in 2008 the administration of President Álvaro Uribe repeatedly took steps that could hamper the investigations.


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"The Uribe administration claims that paramilitaries no longer exist. While more than 30,000 individuals supposedly demobilized, Colombian prosecutors have turned up evidence that many of them were not paramilitaries at all, but rather, civilians recruited to pose as paramilitaries. Law enforcement authorities never investigated most of them.

"Meanwhile, new armed groups often led by mid-level paramilitary commanders have cropped up all over the country. The Organization of American States (OAS) Mission verifying the demobilizations has identified 22 such groups, totaling thousands of members. The groups are actively recruiting new troops, and are committing widespread abuses, including extortion, threats, killings, and forced displacement. In Medellín, for example, after a steady decline in official indicators of violence, there has been a surge in homicides, apparently committed by these groups.

---

The Uribe government and the military are in fact obstructing investigations of the these murders.

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"In May 2008 Colombia extradited most of the paramilitary leadership to the United States.....

"...the extraditions may prove fatal to obtaining justice for paramilitaries' human rights crimes. The extraditions happened at a time when several of the commanders were coming under pressure from Colombian prosecutors and courts to answer difficult questions about their abuses and accomplices. The sudden extraditions have interrupted the process of confessions and interrogation in Colombia and eliminated commanders' incentives to cooperate with the Colombian investigations.

"In October two of the extradited individuals, known as "Cuco Vanoy" and "Gordolindo," received prison sentences of over 20 years each for their drug trafficking crimes, pursuant to plea bargains. They have ceased providing information to Colombian authorities about their human rights crimes, and it is unclear whether their plea bargains require that they cooperate in that regard."

--

"In recent years there has been a substantial rise in the number of extrajudicial killings of civilians attributed to the Colombian Army. Under pressure to demonstrate results, army members apparently take civilians from their homes or workplaces, kill them, and then dress them up to claim they were combatants killed in action.

"The Attorney General's Office is currently investigating cases involving more than a thousand victims dating back to mid-2003. The Defense Ministry has issued directives indicating that such killings are impermissible. But such directives have been regularly undermined by statements from high government officials, including President Uribe, who for years publicly denied the problem existed, and accused human rights defenders reporting these killings of colluding with the guerrillas in an orchestrated campaign to discredit the military.

"In September 2008 a scandal broke over the disappearance of 11 young men from Soacha, a low-income neighborhood of Bogota. Their bodies were found in the distant northeastern state of Norte de Santander, and the military – initially backed by President Uribe – claimed they were combat deaths."

--

"Human rights defenders, journalists, local community leaders, and victims of paramilitary groups, as well as trade unionists, are frequently the targets of threats."

(SNIP)

"High-ranking government officials continued to make public statements accusing human rights groups and defenders of collaborating with guerrillas. Such statements create an environment of intimidation that makes it difficult for human rights defenders to carry out their legitimate work."

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,COL,,49705fa64e,0.html

So few opportunities to see any serious, honest information on this subject which has been COMPLETELY ignored by our corporate media, except for praise of Uribe, and crap to support the appalling support, financial, military, covert, this country has plowed into Colombia for decades, at the great, fatal expense of thousands, and thousands of lives, and the life-long trauma, horror, despair, and grief of their loved ones.

Thank you. Will be saving this material for my own files, without a doubt.

:mad: