Colombia Searches for its Dead
Apr 29 2007
Luz María Sierra
One year since the country began to excavate common graves, chilling information has come to light: the “paras” (paramilitaries) gave courses on how to dismember a human body, the recently formed “Black Eagle” paramilitaries have been digging up graves and throwing the remains into the rivers and victims remain fearful.
~snip~
They Gave Quartering Classes
When we decided at El Tiempo to do a special report on the phenomenon of common graves a scene began to repeat itself in our newsroom: one by one, reporters coming back from the field, returned mortified.
Few discoveries have shaken us so deeply and few are as difficult to write about: from the scale of the horror, to the way they died, and by the insatiable pain of the families, as well as—perhaps most unsettling—realizing the magnitude of the work that remains to be done throughout the country. Will a significant number of the dead be unearthed and identified to alleviate their families? Will we be able to mourn, as we should, to prevent a third chapter of extreme violence from enrapturing Colombia?
Paramilitary testimonies and the results of forensic teams lead us to conclude that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary umbrella group, not only designed a method to quarter human beings, they also took the extra step of actually giving classes on the subject, using live people taken to their training camps.
Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary commander that directed the barbarism of the Aro massacre in the department (province) of Antioquia in which 15 people were tortured and butchered over five days, has revealed previously unknown details of those acts. “They were elderly people and were taken in trucks, alive, with their hands tied…. They were divvied up in groups of five … the instructions were to take off their arms, their heads … quartering them alive,” reads the testimony in his file.
The evidence collected from cadavers so far does not indicate the use of chainsaws. “Among other reasons, because it wasn’t practical. The chainsaws would get caught on people’s clothing, which is why they preferred to use machetes,” explains one of the prosecutors specializing in the exhumations. Seventy percent of those exhumed on the Caribbean coast were dismembered by machete and the majority of the 106 bodies found in the department of Putumayo—where paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño exported his killing machine from his headquarters in the departments of Urabá and Córdoba—had received a gunshot to the head and were subsequently torn apart at each prominent joint of their limbs.
More:
https://nacla.org/node/1467
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