For Luz Elena Galeano, whose husband disappeared two decades ago in Medellín’s conflict, joining 40 other women to monitor daily excavations at La Escombrera has become routine. The debris landfill on the city’s outskirts has yielded the remains of six people in the last eight months.
The effort is part of an ambitious forensic project by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a tribunal established in 2018 to investigate and prosecute crimes that happened during Colombia’s armed conflict, often by rebel groups who kept hostages for ransom.
These families have come to symbolize the search for the more than 120,000 people who disappeared in Colombia between 1985 and 2016.
In the future, when the excavations at La Escombrera are finished, the searching families want a memorial to be built in honor of all the disappeared.
“We want all this pain to be captured there ... and for the story to be told truthfully and respectfully to the country,” said Restrepo.
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