MEDELLIN, Colombia (AP) — Luz Elena Galeano intently watches as the earth is sifted for clothing, documents and bone fragments, hoping for a sign of her husband, who disappeared two decades ago during the urban conflict that tore apart the Colombian city of Medellin.
It has been a daily ritual for Galeano and 40 other women who take turns monitoring the soil excavated from La Escombrera, a debris landfill on Medellin’s outskirts, where the remains of six people were found in the last eight months.
The effort is part of an ambitious forensic project by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a tribunal established in 2018 to investigate and prosecute crimes that happened during Colombia’s armed conflict, often by rebel groups who kept hostages for ransom.
The Associated Press was granted access to La Escombrera, where excavations that began in July 2024 have confirmed the site is a mass grave, as families had claimed for decades.
“You could still see the ropes they were tied with and how they were all in a fetal position,” said Galeano, 61, who has been searching for her husband since he vanished in 2008.
No one knows how many more bodies could be there, but nearly 500 people have been reported missing in that part of the city since the 1970s.
“The discovery of human remains was very important in letting the country know that we are not crazy, that we are not liars,” said Galeano, a spokesperson for Women Walking for Truth, an organization for victims of forced disappearances in Medellin founded in 2022.
These families have come to symbolize the search for the more than 120,000 people who disappeared in Colombia between 1985 and 2016.
Galeano is searching for her husband, Luis Javier Laverde Salazar, whom she last saw on Dec. 9, 2008. Their last contact was a phone call in which he told her he would be home for dinner. She believes he is buried in La Escombrera and was disappeared by paramilitaries.
The shadow of military operations
La Escombrera sits on a steep hillside in the Comuna 13 district, a once strategic location for moving drugs and weapons. At the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, it was fought over by guerrillas and paramilitaries — groups that emerged to combat the leftist insurgents— with the latter eventually gaining control in the early 2000s.
Between 2001 and 2004, Colombian security forces carried out 34 military operations in Comuna 13 in an attempt to take control. Some of these operations have come under scrutiny due to alleged human rights violations against the civilian population, which have been denounced by victims and are now being investigated by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
“La Escombrera was a paramilitary base since at least mid-2002,” said Justice Gustavo Salazar, who is leading the investigation with the special tribunal. “People detained by these groups were taken there to be interrogated, tortured, or simply killed and buried, under the belief that their bodies would never be found.”
According to Salazar, the peak period of disappearances in 2002 aligns with the paramilitaries’ dominance in the area. At the same time, construction waste was being dumped at La Escombrera, a site once used to extract sand before being filled with rubble. While he believes the paramilitaries are the likely perpetrators, he doesn’t rule out the possibility that other illegal groups also concealed bodies there.
Former paramilitaries, who have taken part in the peace process since 2003, have admitted to killing and burying people in La Escombrera. They were later convicted.
The court used these testimonies, alongside investigations by the Attorney General’s Office and satellite images, to define the excavation area in early 2020 — a significant milestone after a failed excavation attempt by the Attorney General’s Office in 2015.
Salazar said the tribunal is investigating the alleged involvement of security force members with paramilitary groups, but no charges have been filed to date in the Escombrera case.
A pain to be captured
Margarita Restrepo, 62, lives in fear that her 17-year-old daughter, Carol, is buried in La Escombrera, a site she can see from her home every day. The thought that her daughter could be buried so close to her after 23 years of searching is agonizing.
Carol disappeared on Oct. 25, 2002, during Operacion Orion, a military operation in Comuna 13 carried out by police, soldiers and aerial support at the start of the administration of then- President Álvaro Uribe.
The discovery of human remains in La Escombrera ignited a debate in Colombia. The conservative party Centro Democrático defended Uribe’s security policy and Operation Orion, arguing the disappearances didn’t happen then and accusing the peace tribunal of political opportunism. In contrast, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first left-wing leader, saw it as confirmation of the state and paramilitary violence he has long condemned.
Restrepo’s fear was reignited in July when two bodies were discovered in La Escombrera. One, she was told, belonged to a young woman between 16 and 18 years old who had “perfect teeth,” a detail that matches her memory of her daughter. Now, she waits for the forensic and DNA results.
Authorities have found graves as shallow as 50 centimeters, but with highly preserved skeletal structures. That has allowed them to be identified and returned to their families.
In the future, when the excavations at La Escombrera are finished, the searching families want a memorial to be built in honor of all the disappeared.
“We want all this pain to be captured there … and for the story to be told truthfully and respectfully to the country,” said Restrepo.
Despite the ongoing search efforts, the women are not satisfied.
“Since 2001, we’ve been reporting that there may be more than 350 bodies, but we haven’t been heard,” said Galeano as she looked down from the top of the landfill to a neighboring mountain where she believes there are mass graves that have never been excavated.
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