"Because they ‘disappeared’ my brothers, tonight I’m waiting on the
banks of the river, waiting for a body to come down, to make him my
dead loved one. All of us women here in the port have lost someone,
have had someone taken from us and killed, are widows and orphans.

"That is why we wait every day for the dead to be brought to us in
the muddy waters, among the branches, to make them our brothers,
fathers, husbands or sons…" reads the short story "Sin nombres, sin
rostros ni rastros" (No Names, No Faces, No Traces) by Jorge Eliécer
Pardo, the Colombian writer who won the "Without a Trace" national
contest for short stories on forced disappearance this week.

The women in Pardo’s story collect the corpses, or pieces of bodies
that have come floating down the river, gradually putting parts
together until they have a complete body to "adopt" as their own
family member, who is given the burial that they cannot offer their
own missing loved ones.

The short story contest and a photography contest formed part of the
three-day "Without a Trace" International Seminar on Forced
Disappearance organised by the Fundación Dos Mundos (Two Worlds
Foundation), which ended Friday.

"I have pulled dead people, even bodies without heads, from the
Atrato river. I don’t know them, but I pull them to the bank so they
can be buried, because it is a sad thing to see a human body being
eaten by the ‘gallinazos’ (carrion crows)," Domingo Valencia, an
amateur songwriter who lives on the banks of that river in the
northwestern jungle province of Chocó, told IPS.

Dos Mundos, a local non-governmental organisation that supports young
victims of violence and abuse, did not expect more than 50 stories to
be submitted. But in the end, the jury had to decide between 427.

Reading them "was like opening Pandora’s box," journalist Guillermo
González, a member of the jury, told IPS. He said he believes most of
the stories are true accounts.

They contain "the hidden story, the one that isn't in the media, the
one that reflects the tragedy of the families of the ‘disappeared’,"
he said, adding that he had to stop reading at 8:00 pm every night,
"because if I didn't, I couldn't sleep."

In the stories, "there are no obvious, straightforward words
denouncing atrocities, or morbid descriptions. Strangely, in this
huge set of stories there is respect for words and for what happened,
which is much harder-hitting than a raw description of what
occurred," said González, the director of the Bogotá cultural
magazine Número.

He added that in Colombia, "the violence of the 1940s and 1950s
reemerged because that wound never healed properly."

And the "institutions of the state, which have sponsored these crimes
to a large degree, have managed to keep them hidden."

It is the work of researchers, intellectuals, scientists, legal
experts and reporters "to close that wound, which is deep and present
in the soul of all of us, and of Colombia."

"Years of anxiety, bitterness and anguish" was the description of the
lives of those who have lost loved ones to forced disappearance
offered by Carmelo Faleh, secretary general of the Spanish
Association for International Human Rights Law (AEDIDH), one of the
speakers at the seminar, which was held at the Javeriana University
in the Colombian capital.

Three relatives of ‘desaparecidos’ (victims of forced disappearance),
sitting next to this reporter, all nodded their heads silently.

The seminar was organised for people like them, so that
"international experiences and those of Latin American victims’
organisations can inspire these women, people who have been orphaned,
and the hundreds of relatives of victims of forced disappearance who
have not had a chance to be heard in our country," Dos Mundos
director Fernando Jiovani Arias, a doctor and psychotherapist, told IPS.

Participating in the seminar were representatives of victims’
movements, forensic experts and human rights activists from
Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Spain, Switzerland, the
United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay.

Every 36 hours on average, someone is forcibly disappeared in
Colombia, the seminar heard from Gustavo Gallón, head of the
Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ) human rights group, who
described the situation as "appalling."

In the first five years after rightwing President Álvaro Uribe took
office in August 2002, 1,259 people have fallen victim to forced
disappearance, according to the CCJ, which said three percent of the
cases are blamed on the leftist guerrillas.

"Public functionaries are compromised in one way or another in around
97 percent of the disappearances -- 28 percent as a result of direct
perpetration by state agents, and 69 percent as a result of tolerance
of, or support for, disappearances carried out by paramilitary
groups," said Gallón.

The number of cases directly attributed to the security forces rose
fourfold in the past five years, to 235 cases a year, compared to 58
cases a year between July 1997 and June 2002, said the legal expert.

The government frequently attempts to discredit these figures, but
"we have not received any objection" since mid-2007, said Gallón, who
explained that the CCJ’s figures are the result of two decades of
work gathering information from "20 newspapers and magazines, direct
denunciations, statistics from the vice president’s office, and other
sources."

The CCJ sent the attorney general’s office a document referring to
452 cases of forced disappearance that occurred between December 2002
and November 2007, to inquire about the legal status of the cases.

The attorney general’s office responded that one of the cases had
gone to trial, another was in the pre-trial examination phase and
three were in the preliminary inquiry stage. "Some kind of
investigation" is also being carried out in 51 other cases, 125
others are not being investigated, and with respect to the rest, the
attorney general’s office "did not respond," reported Gallón.

The practice of forced disappearance, which was used during the
decade known as "La Violencia" in the 1940s and 1950s, reemerged in
the mid-1970s, but estimates of the number of victims vary widely.

Although forced disappearance was classified in Colombia as a crime
in 2000, the Human Rights Observatory of the Presidential Programme
for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law did not include
it in its 2007 report.

The National Commission for Reparations and Reconciliation, created
under the law that governed the demobilisation of the ultra-right
paramilitary militias, estimates that 20,000 people have been
"disappeared" in Colombia, while the office of the inspector general
(Procuraduría General de la Nación) puts the total at 11,000.

The Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (ASFADDES),
meanwhile, has recorded 7,136 cases that occurred between 1977 and
2004. But a report by the human rights group warns that the figure is
undoubtedly an underestimate, given the fear of local communities to
report disappearances. In interviews and statements, members of the
organisation talk about 15,000 victims.

In Gallón’s view, there is "a significant arsenal of judicial
provisions that should be acknowledged and valued. Many
functionaries, both civilians and members of the military and the
police, have good will and good intentions, but nevertheless forced
disappearance continues to be practiced."

The problem, he said, is that "no action is taken against the
perpetrators."

"Public policies are very important, but what is especially needed,
above and beyond documents, laws and legal mechanisms, is political
will," he said.

Participants in the seminar agreed that Colombia’s laws are
excellent, but that they are not enforced.

However, "the judicial sector has, little by little, made an effort
that I believe is unstoppable," said Javier Hernández, representative
in Colombia of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights.

"Victims can no longer be swept under the rug in Colombia," he
remarked to IPS.

The victims "have taught me, have helped me," said Spanish Judge
Baltasar Garzón, who was invited to the seminar. "Justice is a kind
of animal, a mastodon that takes a while to arrive, that needs a
boost, and that fuel, that food, comes precisely from the victims,"
he said.

Garzón, famous for taking on high-profile cases involving crimes
against humanity committed in Latin America, under the principle of
"universal jurisdiction", defined forced disappearance as "the total
humiliation of human beings to the very end."

"In this context of human degradation, it is the victims who are most
in need of protection," but at the same time, "justice cannot be
achieved without their support," said Garzón.

He urged people to "kick up a row about what is happening, shock
people about this problem, wherever it needs to be heard. The victims
are an awkward presence because they demand justice and bring to
light shortcomings in the system. If we are here, it is because the
state has not functioned as it should, through its institutions."

González said "the future is composed of the present and the past,
and the future cannot be built on top of millions of corpses. The
wound, first, must be cleaned and sutured."

"We can’t look forward if we don't have our backs covered," said
Garzón. (END/2008)

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