The news was given this week by the Colombian government through the Missing Persons Search Unit (UBPD): after 20 years of tracking and excavation, the human remains of three people were found at the site known as La Escombrera, in the west of Medellín, the second city of Colombia.
For two decades, relatives of nearly 500 people considered missing by the national government itself had indicated that this was the place where the remains of their loved ones were.
La Escombrera – so called because it was one of the rubble, concrete and steel dumps of the construction industry in the city – is located near Comuna 13, a conglomerate of neighborhoods that was hit by an urban conflict between guerrilla commandos. and paramilitaries that worsened in the early 2000s.
The armed confrontation had its greatest moment of tension in October 2002, when the Colombian army’s Operation Orion took place, with the idea of eradicating the guerrilla commandos that controlled large urban areas.
However, the operation was infiltrated by paramilitary commandos who, according to the Truth Commission report published in 2022, committed extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances.
Many of the bodies, it is estimated, were buried under tons of concrete in La Escombrera.
For years, several local media considered La Escombrera “the largest open pit in the world.” But despite the efforts of relatives and some excavation attempts in previous years, the search had so far been in vain.
“We weren’t crazy. “We have told the truth,” Luz Helena Galeano, a relative of one of the people who disappeared in Comuna 13 and whose remains are believed to be in La Escombrera, told the Colombian newspaper El Espectador.
According to the UBPD, the discovery of the remains of three people occurred near one of the “prioritized polygons” by the authorities within the landfill, created with the idea of optimizing the search task.
The first report of skeletal remains, belonging to two people, occurred last Wednesday. A third discovery was reported this weekend.
“Within the framework of the precautionary measures to protect burial sites carried out by the Section, in full coordination with the Search Unit for Persons Reported Missing, the first bone structures that could correspond to missing persons in the context of the context were found. of the armed conflict in La Escombrera in commune 13,” said the magistrate of the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP) Gustavo Salazar, spokesperson for the organization, when the news was announced.
“This intervention takes 146 days of work in which 36,450 cubic meters of soil have been removed. In charge of this process is a forensic technical team composed of a lead anthropologist, three professional anthropologists, a forensic assistant and a surveyor,” he added.
Chronology of a search
“Today I want to be brief. I would like not to say too much so as not to disturb the silence of the absent mothers who scratched this mountain of rubble with the strength of love, memory and torn hope. I would like not to say a word because the vowels have a profane sound in this place synonymous with impunity,” Salazar said.
The magistrate was not exaggerating. Almost literally many mothers and relatives had scoured the land of La Escombrera to find their children and other loved ones.
Although during the 1980s and 1990s there were important confrontations in Comuna 13, it was with the arrival of the new century that the name of La Escombrera began to resonate.
Especially after Orion.
“The State decided that it had to regain control of Comuna 13,” Jenny Pearce, professor of Latin American Politics at the University of Bradford, told the BBC.
“But he did it in alliance with paramilitary groups. And the paramilitaries then arrived and made at least 200, 300 people from the area ‘disappear’, which means that the bodies of La Escombrera belong to victims of what can only be considered a state crime,” he added.
However, despite the complaints of relatives, the idea of finding skeletal remains in a place that has an area of nearly 18,000 square meters, where mountains of concrete rubble were deposited every day, was titanic and almost impossible.
Until advances in forensic anthropology technology, the same one that managed to identify the bodies of missing persons by the military and civil regimes in Argentina and Guatemala, made it possible to draw up a work plan in such a wide space.
Furthermore, another contribution was added to the technological possibilities: in mid-2014, almost 12 years after Operation Orion occurred, Juan Carlos Villa Saldarriaga – alias Móvil 8, a former paramilitary commander who had participated in the operation – not only confirmed that yes bodies had been deposited in La Escombrera, but it also gave precise coordinates of where to start excavating.
Thus, that same year, excavation areas, known as “prioritized polygons,” were determined.
Thousands of tons of concrete and rubble were removed with a huge excavator.
But in that first attempt, which lasted two years, only remains of textiles and shoes were found.
In 2016, during Federico Gutiérrez’s mayoralty, the excavations stopped. According to a company hired by the mayor’s office itself, in La Escombrera “there were no bodies.”
“He invented it and brought some Spaniards who said that it was not necessary to search here because the georadars had shown that there were no bodies, but today we are showing them that we had the truth since we began to raise our voices,” said Luz Helena Galeano.
However, the creation of the JEP after the signing of the Peace Agreement gave new impetus to the search starting in 2023, where not only new excavations were ordered but also prevented debris from continuing to be dumped in this place.
And the first findings were made the previous week.
“I have mixed emotions, but it is important to show an entire country, which knows the history of Commune 13, that we have always told the truth. We have resisted because we were neither crazy old women nor guerrillas,” Galeano said.
According to what was stated by the national government, through the JEP and the UBPD, the process of identifying the bodies will now be carried out by the Legal Medicine office.
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- The mother who has been searching for her son under 18 tons of rubble for 15 years
- La Escombrera: the landfill that keeps the secret of the missing people of Medellín