Secrets of Colombia's civil war

[Judi Lynn]

Secrets of Colombia's civil war
By JUAN FORERO
The Washington Post
Article Last Updated: 08/28/2008 01:47:34 AM PDT

ANORI, Colombia — A team of forensic anthropologists painstakingly dug up the bodies — two from the town's decaying mausoleum, others from the moist earth in the cemetery, a couple from a field nearby. The preferred method of death: a single gunshot to the head. One young man had been beheaded, his skull now nowhere to be found.
Victims of Colombia's slow-burning but brutal civil war, they had been killed by right-wing death squads and left on roadsides and in ditches around this northern town. Their impoverished relatives, too fearful to report the slayings, hastily buried the bodies and never told authorities.

The scene had been repeated across Colombia for a generation, as illegal paramilitary gunmen, often working closely with army units, killed thousands of people in their war against leftist insurgencies and, in most cases, disposed of them in shallow, unmarked graves. With Colombia's economy booming and its government feted from Washington to Paris for its recent success against Marxist guerrillas, the disappearances of mostly peasant farmers, in a campaign that intensified in the 1990s, have been largely overlooked.

But government teams have been digging up the bodies and opening a window onto the calculated savagery that long marked this conflict. The remains of more than 1,500 people have been recovered, with DNA testing used to identify 400 of them.

Attorney General Mario Iguaran, whose office oversees the exhumations, said in an interview

that authorities think more than 10,000 bodies might still be scattered across the country.

More:
http://www.montereyherald.com/ci_10324073?source=rss