Colombian women only find empty graves

[Judi Lynn]

Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Colombian women only find empty graves

Norah, Irleny and Marcela have been searching for the bodies of loved ones who were assassinated by paramilitaries. SEMANA joined them for two days when they were convinced that they would finally find the bodies.
March 12, 2009

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They say that the earth changes color when it contains bones and human remains. It becomes brown, almost black. It’s easy to know when one is in front of a mass grave- no matter whether the bodies have been there for two months, four months or 15 years. “Also,” says Norah Tamayo as if she were talking about a formula for seeking the dead, “if you touch the earth, it’s soft, as if it’s been broken up into pieces.” She is a small woman and uses rain boots five sizes too big. She is on the edge of a desolate mountain in the Magdalena Medio region of Colombia looking for the body of her husband. She is convinced that this time she will find it. Her two children, who had stopped praying, hope that their mother brings them good news.

Today the women aren’t there alone. One behind the other are a prosecutor, three investigators, four agents of the technical investigation unit (CTI), four soldiers, an Army captain, an informer and, behind them, Irleny Valencia, who, like Norah, has been searching for her brother in law’s body for nine years.

It’s possible that this is the most important hike of their lives. An informer and a demobilized paramilitary who don’t know each other agreed on the location where Byron Velásquez, Norah’s husband; José Yandú, Irleny’s brother in law and Gonzalo Serna, Marcela’s husband could be buried. Marcela could not join them because she didn’t have anyone to watch her two daughters on that day.

They have been waiting for this exhumation since the paramilitaries stopped a bus in San José del Nús and took the three men because, according to them, they were guerrilla collaborators. Their wives say that that is not true. They were street vendors in Medellín and ticket scalpers. In fact, that weekend they were coming back from a Shakira concert in Bogotá and were preparing a trip to Cali for a horse fair. “They did very well with bull fighting and horse events,” says Norah. “My Byron would come home with 700,000 pesos from just one weekend.”

At nine in the morning, when they arrived in San José, Captain Lozano, in charge of security, told them to wait until one in the afternoon because there had been fighting between soldiers and guerrillas in the area. While they waited, Norah began to tell her story. The first thing that she did was to find out in which town they had stopped her husband and a week later she went there. She sat in the waiting area where they parked the buses and began to ask about Byron. “After a little while a man came up to me and said ‘I am Commander Arrieta. I’m sorry, but your husband was executed.’” She says that she became full of rage and of questions that she posed to Arrieta. When? Why? Where is his body? Arrieta told her that they didn’t return bodies and ordered her to leave the town.

More:
http://www.semana.com/noticias-print-edition/colombian-women-only-find-empty-graves/121669.aspx