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#14505490
The dump that holds the secrets of the disappeared
by Linda Pressly
BBC News
29 December 2014 Last updated at 21:32 ET

Once the murder capital of the world, the Colombian city of Medellin, has been transformed into an attractive and vibrant city. But on the outskirts there is a dump where people say the truth lies buried - the bodies of dozens of people who were "disappeared" in years of bloody civil conflict.

Margarita Selene Restrepo stares out over the corrugated roofs of Comuna 13 - one of Medellin's poorest and most violent districts. From here, a few steps from her home, she can see a huge, deforested, earthen scar on the hillside opposite. In Spanish it is known as la escombrera - the dump. And Margarita can just make out areas recently fenced off with flimsy green plastic.
"Every day when I look across there it causes me such a lot of sadness. If she's there, she's so close. Yet at the same time, she's so far away."
Margarita is talking about her daughter, Carol Vanesa Restrepo. She was 17 when she disappeared in October 2002, and her mother believes her remains are buried in a disused part of the tip. She hopes that one day soon they will be exhumed.
And she is vigilant - every day she checks to make sure no more waste is deposited anywhere near the green cordons.

For many years, Comuna 13 was under the sway of left-wing guerrilla groups. The state had little influence here, but Operation Orion - launched just before Carol Vanesa disappeared - would change that.

"The state decided it had to take back control of Comuna 13," says Jenny Pearce, professor of Latin American politics at the University of Bradford.
"But the way they did it seems to have been in alliance with paramilitary groups. And the paramilitaries subsequently went in and 'disappeared' at least 200-300 people from the area. So the bodies at la escombrera are the victims of what can only be called a state crime."

Locals remember the operation and its aftermath as a period of "absolute terror".
"There were more than 1,000 men from the state's forces, two helicopters and more than 800 paramilitaries," says Jeihhco, the founder of a cultural centre in Comuna 13. "They came in indiscriminately on the pretext of getting rid of the guerrillas."

When the army withdrew after four days, the paramilitaries became the new lords and masters of Comuna 13. Carol Vanesa Restrepo and two of her friends have not been seen since.

Families of the disappeared - women like Margarita - have been calling for la escombrera to be excavated for more than a decade. Now the city's government has begun technical assessments of part of the site identified by a former paramilitary commander, known by his alias, Movil 8.
"He grew up in Comuna 13, so he knew the area well and was able to identify places he thought bodies had been dumped by using landmarks like trees and electricity pylons," says Jorge Mejia Martinez of the Medellin mayor's office, who is overseeing plans to excavate the site.

There is uncertainty about the number of people buried beneath the tons of earth and rubble collected from building sites and dumped here. It is believed some were discarded here before the killings in 2002, and that the paramilitaries were not the only perpetrators.
"The story began much earlier with the left-wing guerrillas," says Martinez.
"Other criminal groups have been active too, and bodies may have been brought from other parts of the city, and even from the wider region."

Some even believe the disposal of human remains is still continuing.

Medellin became the most murderous city on the planet in the days of Pablo Escobar - the man who industrialised the processing and export of cocaine in the 1970s.
But Escobar's Medellin Cartel didn't disappear when he died in a police shootout in 1993. It mutated. Its associates - and their successors - became paramilitaries who fought guerrillas and continued trafficking drugs. They also reinforced existing criminal organisations. And they formed new ones.

Though Medellin's homicide rate is at one of its lowest points for three decades, the number of forced disappearances has increased, says Fernando Quijano, director of Corpades, an institute that monitors violence in the city.

To a visitor, though, Medellin now feels very safe. The transport system includes a state-of-the-art metro system, and cable cars. There are tech hubs, museums, dozens of new schools, and also library parks. Comuna 13 is home to the Parque Biblioteca San Javier - a vast, airy multi-level, multi-purpose building. It is a place for study, cultural events, and education - a meeting point for the community.
The transformation of the city has been called the "Medellin Miracle", and there is much pride at what has been achieved. At the heart of the urban philosophy is the aim of including the excluded, a desire to bring governance to districts like Comuna 13, and connect people to the city.
"People come to Medellin to see those buildings that we defined and created," says Sergio Fajardo, who was mayor of the city when it underwent much of this transformation, and is now governor of the larger Antioquia region.
"Those buildings gave our people hope that things could happen, that elegant things could happen, and that the most beautiful places could be where they lived. That's a message of dignity, and it's powerful."

Yet, despite these improvements, la escombrera with its secrets still concealed, looms over Medellin. And, as Fajardo says, there are "many escrombreras" throughout Colombia.

Over nearly six decades, almost a quarter of a million people have been killed in the country's civil conflict - the majority of them civilians. In Medellin, numerous people have a story of violence and loss.
At the city's Parque de la Vida ("park of life") building, part of the University of Antioquia, a group of women have gathered weekly for the last seven years. They meet and they sew. The women make dolls. And each of the figures represents a loved-one killed or disappeared.
Maria Lucely Durango has stitched her son, a 17-year-old murdered in 2011 when he crossed the invisible line in his neighbourhood that marked rival gang territory. She has dressed Juan Felipe Henao Durango in a graduation gown - the representation of a son who would never fulfil his promise.
Joining the sewing circle has been valuable therapy for the women, and helped them accept their bereavements. Often their stories are a demonstration of how cruelly indiscriminate the violence of Colombia's civil conflict has been: one mother lost a son to left-wing guerrillas, and a son and a daughter to the paramilitaries - the armed groups acting in opposition to those guerrillas. But most of the women who attend the group lost their loved-ones in paramilitary operations.

So will the families of the disappeared of la escombrera see their loved-ones disinterred? Three areas for excavation have so far been identified by Movil 8.
"In areas one and two, we're recommending that the excavation goes ahead," says the engineer who has been assessing the site, Gabriel Jaime Cardon Londono.
"In area three, we don't think it would be safe because it would mean digging down a lot deeper - about 25m. Any kind of movement of the earth here would be much more dangerous."
There are not only physical challenges. The cost could be prohibitive - $4m or $5m according to an estimate made in 2010.
"We hope it will be possible to reduce that figure," says Jorge Mejia Martinez. "But whatever the cost, the decision of the mayor's office is to unearth the truth that is hidden here."

For Jenny Pearce la escombrera is illustrative of how Colombia has experienced violence over many decades.
"It's emblematic of impunity, of the lack of a rule of law that says to people you can't murder someone, throw them on to a rubbish tip and get away with it. La escombrera shows the layers and layers of violence from all armed groups going back decades. There are people who want to show the city's overcome its worst decades - of course, Medellin wants to move on. But until the past is addressed, and there's security that people can trust, that's difficult."

Margarita Selene Restrepo lives at one of the highest points of Comuna 13. It is a very steep climb. But it has been made easier in part by another Medellin innovation - an escalator that has replaced 350 of the steps that rise almost vertically. Now, that part of the journey to Margarita's home takes just four minutes, compared to the hour it might have taken before. She is not impressed. For Margarita, investment in the city's infrastructure highlights the lack of commitment to victims like her.
"If the government cared about us, they would have done something about la escombrera," she says.

If the exhumation goes ahead, there is at least a chance Margarita will find out what happened to her daughter that day in October 2002.

I don't really get what's so dangerous about digging that deep. What, is "La Esecombrera" at the foot of a mountain that will cause a landslide or something? But then how did the killers dig so deep to bury the remains of their victims in the first place?
Unless there's important details this article is leaving out, I agree that it sounds like a load of BS.

Medellin, 10 years after ‘Operation Orion,’ still looking for answers
posted by Adriaan Alsema
Colombia Reports
Oct 16, 2012

Medellin on Tuesday commemorated the 10th anniversary of Operation Orion, a military offensive in the western Comuna 13 that successfully removed left-wing rebels, but ended up installing paramilitary groups still terrorizing the area.

Immediately after October 16 2002, when the operation began, the military offensive was criticized because it was carried out in one of Medellin’s most densely populated areas. While the army, police, air force and paramilitary groups combated left-wing urban militias, the then approximately 100,000 residents of the slums were caught in the crossfire, leaving hundreds injured.

The operation became even more controversial later, when locals began telling stories of how hundreds of residents had been detained but were never tried, how dozens of neighbors were disappeared by paramilitary forces during and after the operation and how the paramilitary Bloque Cacique Nutibara (BCN) had been collaborating with the army and police to secure paramilitary control over the area.

And even now, ten years down the line, inhabitants still don’t know why they were put in the middle of a battlefield, what happened to the people who disappeared since the four-day siege, and why paramilitary groups — and not the state forces — used the siege to consolidate disputed territory and imposed a terror the community had never before seen.

Comuna 13 before Orion
Throughout the 1990s, the Comuna 13, or San Javier, was actually one of the least violent areas in Medellin with a homicide rate well below that of the city average.
Unlike other parts of the city where the right-wing AUC had incorporated vigilante Convivir groups and combos previously loyal to Pablo Escobar, the western wing of the city was controlled by communist urban militias called the Armed People’s Commandos (CAP). The FARC and ELN — at that time at the strongest point in their history — had also reached the periphery of Colombia’s second largest city and, together with the CAP, had taken control over strategic entry and exit point of the city.
The situation changed drastically when in 1999 several blocks of the AUC began an offensive to push the left-wing illegal armed groups away from the zone that connected Medellin to Uraba, a paramilitary stronghold on the Caribbean coast and an important port for the import of weapons and the export of cocaine.

The paramilitaries’ counter-insurgency offensive, however, spiraled out of control and caused unprecedented violence in the comuna.
While Medellin’s average homicide rate had been steady around 170 per 100,000 inhabitants around the turn of the century, the homicide rate in the Comuna 13 tripled between 1997 and 2002, going from a relatively low 123 to a staggering 357. In that same period, forced displacement went from three cases to 1259.
After controversial ex-Mayor Luis Perez took office in 2001, Medellin police and the national security forces tried to violently enter the neighborhood on ten occasions to end the war between guerrillas and paramilitaries, but without result; the violence continued.

Operation Orion
Two months after being inaugurated, then-President Alvaro Uribe held a security council in Medellin on October 15, 2002 and publicly ordered the commander of the locally stationed 4th Brigade, General Mario Montoya, and the Medellin Police Commander, General Leonardo Gallego, to begin an offensive that would once and for all oust insurgent groups from the Comuna 13.
More than 1,000 soldiers and policemen, supported by armed helicopters, attacked the area 24 hours later. Heavy combat lasted until October 20 after which the police and military had successfully expelled the communist militias from the comuna. Witnesses, local media and BCN commander and Oficina de Envigado chief “Don Berna” have said the police and military were aided by paramilitaries.

Speaking before Colombian prosecutors in 2009, the former paramilitary warlord said “the self defense forces of the BCN arrived at the Comuna 13 as part of an alliance with the 4th Brigade of the Army, including General Mario Montoya, of the army, and Leonardo Gallego, of the Police.”
“Several of my men entered with the security forces. [They were] hooded because a lot of people from there knew them,” the paramilitary leader testified from his U.S. prison in 2009.

The battle left hundreds of civilians injured. The amount of civilians killed remained unclear as official counts contradicted others and some civilian casualties were reported as guerrillas killed in combat. Additionally, approximately 70 people disappeared.

Aftermath
Following the siege, Operation Orion was praised by authorities as one of the most successful offensives against illegal armed groups to date. The year after the siege, the homicide rate in the Comuna 13 dropped from 357 to 72 and the mayor claimed 72 hostages were rescued from the slums, an assertion that was later denied by other officials.

However, residents and human rights organizations began complaining about security forces torturing civilians, arbitrary detentions, disappearances, and that Don Berna, and not the security forces, had taken full control of the comuna 13, continuing violence against what the BCN considered guerrilla sympathizers.
“What they did was replace one illegal armed group by another,” Maritza Quiroz of the Corporacion Juridica Libertad, an NGO monitoring human rights in the Comuna 13, told Colombia Reports Monday.
The spectacular drop in homicides that followed Operation Orion was not the result of a successful military operation, but “because Don Berna ordered to stop the killing,” a local community leader said.
Instead of leaving dead bodies on the streets, the BCN turned to disposing the bodies in a dump site up the hill called “La Escombrera,” keeping the homicide rate low.

According to the Corporacion Juridica Libertad, some 140 people disappeared from the neighborhood between November 2002 and February 2003. This claim has been corroborated by locals, Don Berna and the local ombudsman’s office that has said that some 150 bodies are expected to be buried. Some media have claimed more than 300 people have disappeared from the Comuna 13 since Don Berna took control.
Nevertheless, official figures on the amount of people who have disappeared since Orion are not publicly available and local authorities have failed to fulfill its promise to investigate the dump site and locate and identify the remains of those who disappeared.

The forced displacement that started after the paramilitary incursion in 1999 also continued after the paramilitary groups had taken control. A 2011 study showed that between 2003 and 2009, almost 3,500 people were displaced from the comuna. City-wide, forced displacement more than doubled since then.

The excessive homicide rate that spurred Orion returned after Don Berna’s extradition in 2008. Warring factions of the Oficina de Envigado, later joined by neo-paramilitary group the Urabeños, secured that by 2011 the Comuna 13’s homicide rate was higher than before the arrival of the paramilitaries.

Inhabitants of what once was one of Medellin’s most peaceful comunas have received the assistance of an independent international commission that has vowed to take locals’ testimonies and clarify what has happened during and after Operation Orion while former Generals Montoya and Gallego are under investigation by public prosecutors over their alleged collaboration with Don Berna.

I think Gen. Montoya resigned and Gallego was dismissed and barred from public office for 5 years.
Pretty weak sauce for helping to perpetrate massacres. Unless there's significant rightist political pressure (former Pres. Uribe is supposedly still pretty popular for instance) to be "fair". I.e. "Why let the guerrillas off the hook but punish patriots for fighting back against them?". That sort of thing.
#14506506
Uribe is a senator and heads a very important political faction. The articles you posted show many different figures for the number of disappeared in the days when the security forces fought to gan control of the area. The number 300 isn't supported, it's mere speculation, sounds like a propaganda claim. I'd say the real figure is closer to 130 disappeared. Given their record, it can be easily speculated that at least half were people caught in the turmoil, mere bystanders, and half were leftist urban guerrillas.

This is fairly common in a country undergoing an insurgency. For example, in Kosovo the UN documented 2000 deaths due to sectarian violence in the three years prior to the NATO bombing, which left over 600 dead and 3000 wounded civilians who had very little to do with the conflict itself. Thus the NATO atempt to (suposedly) end a sectarian conflict killed innocent people in large numbers, and at a much faster rate, than the supposed problem they were trying to solve.
#14506633
All the more reason to unearth the remains and thus find out how exactly how many had died.

Exact numbers are hardly ever know for sure, but all the same atrocities occurred. It wasn't that long ago that Colombian military units vetted by the US State Dept. were later discovered to have committed "false positive" killings.

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