Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Disinterring the ‘Disappeared’

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, Feb 20 2007 (IPS) - It took Colombia 12 years to pass a law that made forced disappearance a crime and nearly seven more to launch a concrete plan to search for the victims. “This is a big stride,” Gustavo Gallón, head of the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), told IPS.

The National Plan to Search for Disappeared Persons “is aimed at identifying measures, mechanisms and instruments to help locate the ‘disappeared’,” said Ombudsman Volmar Pérez.

The National Institute of Forensic Medicine and Science will now coordinate a unified registry of victims of forced disappearance, putting an end to “the tremendous dispersion of statistical data, in which every state body had its own lists,” Pérez told IPS.

The single registry was created in 1978, and regulations for its implementation were adopted in 2005, but it had not begun to function until now.

Pérez pointed out that, according to the national plan launched on Feb. 15, “the families of the victims of forced disappearance will play a key role,” because they will have access at every stage: the gathering and analysis of information, the search itself, the recovery and identification of the bodies, and the final reburial of the remains.

“The judicial authorities will be obliged to provide them with the necessary information in order to guarantee the families’ rights,” he added.

The ombudsman is the chair of the National Commission for the Search for Disappeared Persons (CBPD), which drafted the plan. The commission was created by the July 2000 law that made forced disappearance a crime.

The CBPD is made up of representatives of the Presidential Programme for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, the Attorney-General’s Office’s human rights unit, the Procuraduría General de la Nación (office of the inspector general), the national forensic institute, the Defence Ministry, the Presidential Programme for the Defence of Freedom (Fondelibertad), the CCJ, and the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Asfaddes).

“It’s been difficult to find ways to coordinate efforts among the different government bodies,” said Gallón. “Designing this plan was a real odyssey. Every agency had its reservations, and argued that it couldn’t do this or that…lack of coordination is actually a strategy.”

A large number of crimes against humanity have been committed over the past decades of armed conflict in Colombia and continue to be committed today, mainly by far-right paramilitary groups with close ties to the security forces, and to a lesser extent by left-wing guerrillas who took up arms in the 1960s.

Many of the paramilitary groups, which emerged in the early 1980s, demobilised last year after closed-door negotiations with the right-wing government of Álvaro Uribe.

Neither the state, nor human rights groups or victims’ associations, nor religious organisations know how many people have been “disappeared” in Colombia.

For example, the data bank on human rights and political violence, put together by the Centre for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), has compiled information on 2,121 forced disappearances committed by paramilitary groups over a 16-year period (1988-2003).

Inspector-General Edgardo Maya said last week that the figure he has is 11,000 cases of forced disappearance in the past 20 years. But he added that he was sure the figure was inaccurate.

Over the past year, as a result of the paramilitary demobilisation process, human remains seem to be sprouting out of clandestine cemeteries that served that purpose for decades, many on estates that were turned into torture centres, a widespread phenomenon that public opinion was unaware of until recently.

Many of the burial sites have been located using information provided by “repentant” paramilitaries keen on obtaining legal benefits like lenient sentences – a maximum of eight years – in exchange for full confessions of their crimes against humanity. The benefits are offered by the Justice and Peace Law, which is governing the paramilitary disarmament process.

The locations of other graves have emerged as paramilitaries who were already in prison have sought reduced sentences by cooperating with the courts, while yet others have been found as people living near the torture centres and clandestine cemeteries, or the families of the “disappeared”, some of whom always knew where their loved ones were buried, have finally dared to begin speaking out.

The extent of the killing has been revealed as individual graves are discovered, one next to the other, as well as common graves.

The work undertaken by the teams of forensic anthropologists is extremely complex. First, the experts must have information on whose bodies are being searched for. And the field work not only takes extensive planning, but is also carried out in dangerous conditions, which put the investigators and sometimes even their families at risk.

The work is often so dangerous that the forensic teams are forced to pull out of a given area. At other times, due to a lack of funds, only two or three bodies are removed from common graves, and the rest are left buried.

Government officials have acknowledged the need for greater human resources to be assigned to the task, as well as improved facilities for the transportation and storage of remains, given the overwhelming amount of evidence and the fact that the teams are overworked.

By August, the morgue in the northern city of Barranquilla, for example, was completely packed.

In the meantime, the bodies keep appearing. In just one year of activity, the forensic teams operating under the Justice and Peace Unit have found the remains of over 2,000 people.

But exhumation is just one step towards the identification of a body. The key questions investigated by forensic experts – who, where, what happened – go unanswered if there is no information about the victim.

Colombia did not even have a specialised course of study for forensic anthropologists until 10 years ago, when the public National University began to offer a degree.

“Thousands of new Antigones are demanding the right to bury their brothers,” said Inspector-General Maya at last week’s launch of the new national plan.

In Sophocles’ classical Greek tragedy, Antigone is condemned to starve to death in a sealed cave after she buries her brother’s body against the orders of the king, who said the remains of his enemy were to be left “unburied, a corpse for birds and dogs to eat, a ghastly sight of shame.”

The official acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation and of the very existence of the crime of forced disappearance, and the adoption of mechanisms to confront the phenomenon, “were opposed by the armed forces up to the very end,” the CCJ’s Gallón told IPS.

Six draft laws on forced disappearance had been introduced in Congress since 1988. Four floundered in the legislature, one was objected to by the government of César Gaviria (1990-1994), under pressure from the military, and the sixth was vetoed by former president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), even though he had promised to support it.

“Fortunately the fight was waged in Congress…and the bill was reluctantly approved,” said Gallón.

The plan will initially be tested in the area “with the greatest concentration of graves and forced disappearances,” Carlos Rodríguez, CCJ director of operations, told IPS.

“We are going to push for this to get off the ground immediately: for the funds to be assigned, and for the necessary coordination, political will and effectiveness to be present,” he said. “We will see if there is a commitment to implementation. The families of the ‘disappeared’ and human rights organisations are going to be watching closely to see if this happens, and if it doesn’t, to tell the national and international community.”

The law making forced disappearance a crime also gave rise to the creation of an “urgent search mechanism”, which waives all formalities and red tape and gives the judge or prosecutor who receives a complaint that someone has been forcibly disappeared 24 hours to investigate, either by telephone, fax or email, or by going directly to the spot where the person might be found.

Any civilian official or member of the security forces who does not cooperate could face the risk of being dismissed. But so far, “the urgent search mechanism has not led to the location of a single ‘disappeared’ person,” said Rodríguez.

For his part, Gallón said “It’s a very important mechanism. An international innovation that exists nowhere else. But it is rarely applied. The public and judicial officials themselves are unfamiliar with it, and see is as strange” because it is so streamlined and agile.