With an estimated 120,000 people missing after decades of civil strife, finding them has become a national mission.
The concrete box standing in the middle of the kitchen seems to have no earthly reason for being there. It's curious: too low for a table, not really a seat, and yet it dominates the space like some crude sarcophagus in an ancient burial chamber. The mystery of what, or who, may lie inside is what we've come to find out.
But there's none of the romance of an archaeological expedition on this dig. This is more CSI than Indiana Jones. The team about to crack open the box with pickaxes and shovels are crime scene experts from Grube, a forensics unit in Colombia's national prosecutor's office. They have a grim task — to find, identify and return the missing victims of Colombia's long-running civil war.
We've come to a small farm in the country's rural north, just outside the town of Tierralta. We're here, it's hoped, to find a body.
In Colombia, it's estimated over 120,000 people are missing, presumed dead, after six decades of armed conflict between leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups and government forces. The country's notorious drug cartels only added to the body count. The sheer volume of missing people is a collective trauma the Colombian government hopes to ease by finding the bodies and returning them to the families, a task it has made a national priority.
Warning: This story contains graphic content that may be distressing to some readers.
"Finding the bodies is very important for Colombia," says Marta Ruiz, a former journalist who spent 15 years covering the country's armed conflict. For families of the missing, it's "an open wound, impossible to close, painful," she says. "For every missing person there are 15 to 20 survivors with suspended lives. The country has a lot buried and we have to look for them and we have to dig them out and we have to heal."
Grube is one of several search units created to find the bodies. It's a mission they take to heart. "Just not knowing what happened to your loved one has destroyed many families in Colombia," says Miguel Villadiego, a young prosecutor leading the dig. Since Grube was established in 2006, it has recovered over 10,000 bodies, returning many to their families. "In a way it helps the living victims to heal every time we can deliver a body to them so that they can mourn properly."
Miguel has been planning to search this place for months, ever since he received a tip-off from a former resident. "The information we received was that in the kitchen there was a kind of concrete construction … and that there, in that place, apparently there were human remains," he says. "The person who lived here left the next day."
"The country has a lot buried and we have to look for them and we have to dig them out and we have to heal."
— Marta Ruiz
In Colombia, digging up the past can be a dangerous business, especially for an out-of-town prosecutor like Miguel, who hails from Monteria, the regional capital about an hour's drive away. We're joined by a squad of burly Technical Investigation Team (CTI) officers brandishing military-style weapons, along with a detachment of Colombian Army soldiers from the local barracks.
Miguel is coy about why he's wearing a bullet proof vest at all times. But it's well known one of Colombia's most powerful criminal networks, the Clan del Golfo drug cartel, still runs the cocaine trade in this area. Each morning before digging can start, a bomb squad searches the property.
These digs are a significant investment for the Colombian government. Miguel's team of forensics experts have come from all over the country. It takes a unique combination of brains and brawn to do this kind of work: there's an anthropologist, topographer and a photographer, along with a highly-trained cadaver dog named Kefir. He might be the only one not expected to pick up a shovel. Each member of the team takes it in turns to hack open the concrete box and start removing the soil.
There's never any guarantee they'll find anything, but Miguel has confidence in his informant. "You always feel some pressure in the development of this type of mission," he says. "We feel the pressure of not being able to find the truth or not finding the bodies of the missing people. We are carrying on our shoulders the mission of this search."
One thing is not in doubt — Tierralta's tragic history in the armed conflict during the 1990s and early 2000s produced a lot of missing people, and some still living here know where the bodies are buried.
Living alongside the killers
The town of Tierralta has no traffic lights. Motorcycles negotiate its grid-like intersections in a chaotic cross-weave. In the heat of the day, people gather in the streets outside rows of stifling concrete homes. It's a loud place for a town of just 95,000. After dark, it gets even louder. Dance clubs pump Latin anthems into the narrow streets; pulsing beats that ruminate in your chest. Day or night, the one constant is the humidity. This, after all, is Colombia's swampy lowlands, a far cry from the crisp, mountainous climes of the capital Bogotá in the south.
Some find relief in the Río Sinu, the broad river that skirts the edge of town on its way north to the Caribbean Sea. Kids leap into the current and float downstream. For those with longer memories, it's a scene that evokes harrowing images from the town's troubled past.
"We used to swim here, we played, we fished, like those children you see around here," says Helmer, leaning against a railing overlooking the water. "The time came when these rivers were no longer clean waters. No, it was rivers of blood. You'd find corpses. You'd find heads floating. You'd find death."
When Helmer grew up in Tierralta, the Colombian state barely existed here. The town was under the control of a paramilitary group, which waged a brutal war for control of the area's rich grazing lands and cocaine smuggling routes. Not all their victims were enemy combatants. Locals went missing too.
All over Colombia, the paramilitaries styled themselves the "autodefensas", or self-defence forces, a coalition of right-wing militias formed to counter leftist guerillas like the FARC, the country's biggest insurgent group which had taken over large parts of the country. In reality, life under paramilitary "protection" was hellish. They ruled towns with terror, violence and extreme paranoia.
"There was a woman who was killed [in Tierralta] for being pretty," recalls Helmer. She was a visitor from Bogotá whose looks had marked her as an outsider. To the paramilitaries, she was a potential spy. "The commander said she must be from some group and that's why they executed her. Thirty-one people died that day. The dead passed by here in the river."
Helmer knows first-hand the atrocities committed by paramilitaries. He was once one of them.
He grew up in a poor rural family, one of eight kids raised by a single mother. As a boy he ran errands for the police, buying them coffee and cigars. "I wanted to be a police officer, not a paramilitary," he says. But he had little choice. At 15, he was "summoned" to a farm and forcibly recruited. "Once you were there, there was no turning back," he says. "There was a saying that went, 'If you're not good enough to kill, you were good enough to be killed.'"
The crimes he confesses to are chilling. He once murdered a man just so his brother would come to the wake, so he could kill him too. "The real objective was not the dead person but the one who was far away," he says. "[You] kill this one so the other will come." Another time, he dragged a man from the church pews during prayer and assassinated him in a corner. "I was around 17, 18 years old. I was at a stage where I thought that with a gun, a rifle in my hand, I was everything," he says.
The bodies were often disposed of in remote places where only the killers could find them. "What we used to do was bury them, mass graves, whether in the mountains, on the beaches, in the backyards of the houses," he says. In war, he says, bodies become an object just like any other. "To bury a body fully extended you'd have to make a big hole. So you'd say, 'No, let's dig a small hole.' You'd chop the limbs off and put them in there. The smaller the hole, the less work."
He recounts his deeds without shame or pride. They were the mundane realities of war. "Confirmed kills, I've killed 60 people for sure," he says.
In the mid-2000s, the Colombian government moved to disband the paramilitary groups. Under president Alvaro Uribe, they were promised lighter prison sentences in exchange for demobilising, confessing their crimes and helping families find the missing. Some former soldiers have since become informants for search groups like Grube.
Helmer spent 15 years in jail, just three months for each of the victims he claims he killed. These days he's living and working in the community again, and helping the authorities find his victims. "We owe it for what we did," he says. "It's like a way of telling society, I am not proud of what I did. Every time I have the opportunity, I meet … a person who was a family member of a victim, I beg for pardon."
But many Colombian families are still waiting for information. In the nearby town of Valencia, Maria Agua's ordeal has stretched on for over 23 years now. Her son Luis was 21 when he disappeared. She knows in her heart he's dead but she can't rest until she knows how and why. "That kind of anguish is something that you can't get rid," she says. "Not when going to bed or when getting up."
The last time she saw Luis was September 17, 2001. He went around the corner to help some friends load bananas onto a truck and was kidnapped by men on a motorcycle. Maria believes he was forcibly recruited by paramilitaries. "[Luis] was supposed to come home for lunch at noon but he never arrived," she says. "I almost went crazy that day. I wanted to die. I didn't know where to run."
For a long time, she looked everywhere for Luis. She prayed that he was still alive somewhere and would one day walk back through the door. "Days passed, years passed," she says. "My son has never returned." Now she only prays his body will be found. "I ask God to give me the wisdom to find him and to bury him," she says. "But so far, my son is lost. He was swallowed by the earth."
'A grain of sand in the peace of this country'
Back at the dig site, the forensics team is reading riddles in the soil. After two days of digging they've completely removed the concrete box and excavated piles of the earth from underneath. But they've found no sign of human remains, not even a hint that the soil has ever been disturbed before.
The shovels fall silent as they debate what to do. Miguel is soon forced to accept the crushing truth — there's no body here. The search is called off. "Sometimes it hurts," he says, as the team packs up the site. "Every time we go out, the idea is to find a body but sometimes things don't work out. This shows all the difficulties of finding a missing person."
But Miguel's team isn't ready to head home just yet. There's still another job for them in Tierralta. Grube's mandate goes beyond just finding missing bodies, they're also tasked with conducting the forensics work required to formally identify remains and register a death.
The team reassembles under the white stucco arch of Tierralta's town cemetery. In the chaotic war years, bodies were often dumped in cemeteries without being properly interred. Some were left by the killers. Others were stashed by family members who feared holding a funeral could make them the next target. Scattered among the crumbling mausoleums, piles of bones lie out in the open.
Today's case is more complicated still. The bones Grube has come to recover were brought here only recently, but the murder happened decades ago. According to the victim's brother, he was up in the hills beyond the River Sinu in June 2002 when he was seized by paramilitaries and tied to a post outside a church. "My brother was afraid," he says. "He knew all those who were taken by the paramilitaries at the time were disappeared. So he broke free … he started to run. He was hit three times with bullets."
The killers warned the family not to hold a funeral. They buried the body in a makeshift grave on the side of the road where the bones remained until a few years ago, when the family finally felt safe enough to dig them up and bring them here.
The victim's brother and father show the forensics team where they stashed the plastic bag containing his remains. It's carefully removed and placed on a white sheet. One by one the bones are laid out, and the outline of a person slowly emerges. It's a solemn procedure. Only the brother's sobs break the silence.
It can be tough for the Grube team too. "Physically, we get used to it," says topologist Jairo Torres. "But the emotional part, knowing that was a human being who unfortunately ended up in this state. You think about your family … especially the children, your sons."
With all the bones recovered, they'll be sent to one of Grube's labs to be formally identified through DNA testing. The family can then get a death certificate and hold the funeral they have long been denied. It's a small victory for Miguel too. "It gives a little peace of mind because the family will later be able to give him a Christian burial," he says. "They will be able to go to a place where they can visit him."
Still, there are challenges in reuniting so many families with so many missing people across a country as vast as Colombia. It's a cruel irony that many of the bodies Grube has recovered have never been claimed. Grube maintains a DNA register of families looking for loved ones, which it cross-checks against unidentified remains found during field work. But thousands of boxes of unclaimed bones are piling up in body banks in various cities, the largest being in Bogotá.
It's hoped new technology will help identify some of the unclaimed. Using a state-of-the-art digital scanner, Grube morphologists can map a victim's facial bones to create a detailed 3D model. When combined with information from the victim's DNA, the result is a realistic depiction of what they looked like before death. The images are published in a magazine, along with photos of any items of clothing or personal possessions found with the body, in the hope someone will recognise them.
It's a massive task but former journalist Marta Ruiz says is essential. "People will never give up looking for their missing persons and I believe we are going to find them," she says. "I believe we have started to build the institutions for that to happen."
Even in the face of setbacks, topographer Jairo says every body found is "a grain of sand in the peace of this country". It's "a little bit to reparation," he says. "That makes us feel good that we are contributing to a beautiful work."
Watch The Body Hunters tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
