The anthropologist hits the tombstone with the chisel and sweats.
One, two, three gentle strokes until the woman interrupts him:
"Make it easy, boy, I've already said goodbye."
Noliase (doesn't matter) if they damage her.
María 'Nina' Barrera is sitting in a white plastic chair in front of the vault in the cemetery of Puerto Berrío, a seething town of 51,000 inhabitants in northeastern Colombia. anger resigned how they exhume the remains of a person who did not know but, at the same time, considers "his dead." For the last 10 years he has visited him every day, he has prayed to him, he has asked for miracles. And he, or she, does not know, has fulfilled. Now he must return it and he has come to say goodbye. For the second and last time.
Puerto Berrío is like the microcosm of disappearance in Colombia. Dead that emerged from the Magdalena River, murdered during the armed conflict, people who became rescuers of bodies, men who set up a funeral home due to the number of deaths; devotees and religious, sellers of flowers, saints, tombstones, ossuaries, a gardener who became the expert in speaking with the souls of those dead. For more than thirty years, in the late 1980s and then between 1998 and 2005, the river drove out the nameless dead and people renamed them, cared for them, and asked for miracles.
Nobody knows exactly how the tradition of adopting them began, but some inhabitants place it at the beginning of the year 2000. At that time, a second wave of violence was being experienced in the towns on the shores of Magdalena Medio and the paramilitary groups had changed their strategy: the The massacres were thunderous, now the dead had to be thrown into the river to make the evidence of the crime disappear.
The Magdalena River became a cemetery and the bodies that ran aground ended up with godparents in the cemetery.
One of the disappearance strategies used by armed groups in Colombia was to throw bodies into rivers.
Some people in this country say that the Magdalena River is a mass grave. Photo |
Andrés Cardona (Video | EPV)
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Now the people of the adopted children are experiencing a revolution and also a duel. They must “hand over” these remains to the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons, which, in a humanitarian mission granted by the peace process, exhumes the bodies of the NN throughout the country and tries to find their identity. The dimension of their work is immeasurable: finding between 80,000 and 120,000 missing persons left behind by the armed conflict. Much of them, it is known, are in the cemeteries of the country, buried as NN, or as in the case of Puerto Berrío, with other names, the names that their godparents gave them.
In a low voice, some inhabitants admit that there is resistance.
They fear that the people will cease to be "world famous" or that these souls will not perform miracles for them.
The favors that the NN do - they count on every corner of Puerto Berrío - range from a job, a house, the end of a drug addiction or the killing of a relative's murderers.
"You are not going to take my dead," they said at the beginning to the judicial officials who accompany the work of the search unit.
María Josefina Barrera, went to the cemetery one day when there were some children in the morgue and decided to bury him and at the same time ask for favors from the deceased's soul.
Today he says goodbye to his chosen one.Andrés Cardona
"Our motto here is that the best way for them to pay the miracle to that faithful deceased is by helping them find his family," explains Diana Gaitán, an official of the Search Unit, to Mrs. Nina.
The 64-year-old woman, retired and who is dedicated to doing paperwork, asked to be allowed to see her NN.
He believed that they were exhumed and packed with other bones and he did not want that end for his adoptee.
It is a Saturday in September and the breeze is not blowing.
"Dona Nina, we're going to get your adopted girl out."
Do you want to take the flowers and the saints? Carlos Ariza, a forensic anthropologist for the Unit, who coordinates one of the three groups that work in this cemetery, tells him.
Nina says no, to put them on another NN and starts talking about hers.
-I baptized him Friend.
I didn't want to name him like many people do, but for me he is like family.
At first he was tough and he didn't want to do miracles for me, but later he helped me fix the roof of my house.
A day before, the woman who seems to have a spring in her feet had gone to say goodbye.
With long jumps he entered the cemetery, crossed the nameless graves and reached that of his adopted.
He touched the glass that protects the tombstone three times with clenched fists and saluted him.
Then she whispered a prayer, touched the glass again like someone who knocks on a door to another world and saw that the tombstone that she sent him to make with the sign
210-01 Nit-Noe, NN One day you sent him but he left without regret or pain
, now had a label:
Forbidden to exhume.
JEP
"Ah, then they'll take it away," he said with resignation.
It was a possibility.
If his adopted had a violent death in the middle of the conflict, he was one of those that the Unit would rescue to make tests and then be compared by the Institute of Legal Medicine with those of relatives of the disappeared.
"Well, if it touches, it touches."
How wonderful that this boy found his familiar.
'NN chosen'
La Dolorosa is a Catholic cemetery that, seen from above, is shaped like a cross.
The sun hits it violently and in few places there is shade for respite.
It would be a village cemetery, like any other, if not because one of the most important blocks is that of the graves of the NN, that of the "solemn poor", as one of the forensic anthropologists says while ordering some bones in a white table.
According to the UBPD Missing Persons Search Unit, in Colombia there are approximately 120,000 disappeared in the context of the armed conflict. Andres Cardona
“NN chosen (sic); Male NN, do not touch, do not choose; NiloNavas, thank you for the favors received, you will always be my friend; Santiago Morales: Thank you Santiago for the favor
... Tombstone by tombstone, whether it is handwritten with paint or made in marble, each one reveals a story: that of a person who welcomed a disappeared person and that of a town that has seen a lot of death go by. Puerto Berrío is located in Magdalena Medio, 335 kilometers from Bogotá, and for years it witnessed the war between guerrillas and paramilitary groups. Most of the dead arrived dragged by the river but others fell in the combats with the Army and were taken as NN.
The traces of that war are clear in the bones that forensics exhume today. Their day is almost always the same and it is strenuous: they exhume - based on previous information, if it exists - they get into the pit, take photos, spread the bones on a white table, clean, detail and store each one in transparent bags. There are also surveyors who measure the size of the pit, the way it was found, photographers who portray garments, fissures, whatever can help the search. Every detail in the puzzle of its history is gold.
Only in two weeks they have recovered 13 remains that correspond to victims of violence: they have holes in the skull, round and obvious, signs of having been tied up.
Just the first step in a long identification process.
This Friday afternoon it was a man in his 30s, who was naked and wearing Texan boots that still retain their shape.
On Thursday, a minor of about 13 years.
And also, other bodies - of old people - that do not show signs of violence.
In that case, they take the same details and rebury them.
Most of the recovered bodies are found with signs of violence, projectile impacts or in this case, tied with a rope around the feet.
Andres Cardona
"And then they lose their jobs?"
—There's never lost work here, says Carol Paola Chavarro, another coroner on the team, without losing sight of the bones.
The group of 12 officials does this in five cemeteries in the country where a court order from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) indicated that they must search.
But in Puerto Berrío it has been different.
In order for them to work, the forensics needed a "spiritual permit."
The village cheerleader, who goes through the cemetery at midnight every 2 November to accompany the souls, “handed over” the children.
In a ceremony attended by several godparents of the NN, he gave them the endorsement to do their search.
"I made a prayer for them to make these souls find their relatives," says Hernán Montoya, the animator, in a store.
A gardener and plumber by trade, he is now a character in documentaries, movies and proud of his fame.
At first, with the exhumation of the NN, he feared for his work, but not now.
"There are many other dead to pray to," he says while pushing a soda and tells anecdotes about how he has escaped death thanks to "the blessed souls."
A collective duel
The disappeared are present here everywhere.
In the story of the photographer in this report, who is also looking for his mother in another cemetery in the south of the country, in Nina's, who lost a brother 36 years ago and decided not to look for him anymore because “why, if he already knows it? carried the river ”;
in that of so many who still avoid talking about their disappeared for fear that it will happen to them as well.
"The law of silence continues," a leader who asked not to be mentioned would later say.
Blanca Nury Bustamante is 60 years old and lived for many years in Puerto Berrío.Andrés Cardona
Nury Bustamante carries the weight of two missing children on his body: Jhon Jairo and Lizeth Sosa Bustamante.
She walks slowly, suffocated at every step and with a spinal pain that keeps her stiff.
She arrived from Medellín where she now lives to say goodbye to her NN, the one she adopted to fill the void of her children.
On any given day in 2007, visiting the cemetery, she said she would adopt one.
—I walked through this pavilion and began: tin marin de do pingué.
And fell on this tombstone.
Nury paints it light blue and remarks the name of his NN: Jhon Jairo SB, the same as his son.
She does it with love as if, in truth, her missing boy was there on April 29, 2005. A tear is confused with the sweat that runs down from her head.
What is lived in Puerto Berrío is a multiple duel.
This is what two officials of the Unit know who receive the adopters and relatives who want to give their statement.
They sit with them on a long church pew trying to get away from the sun and listen to them.
Like the forensics with the bones, they also try to reconstruct what happened there with the NN, to unite the story.
A photograph of Jhon Jairo Sosa Bustamante, the disappeared son of Mrs. Blanca Nury Bustamante, she decided to choose an NN from the cemetery and put her son's name on the tombstone, she took care of this NN since 2010, hoping that if Someone elsewhere would have found her son's body and would do the same as her: take care of the body of a stranger until he can find his family.
Andres Cardona
But in this cemetery tracing the history of the disappeared is even more difficult. To return the miracle, many godparents paid the parish to remove them from the NN pavilion and placed them in ossuaries, where the remains with mourners go after several years. There they have the names with which they were renamed. “The adoption dynamics atomized the children throughout the cemetery,” explains a source. The search then is broader.
Nina Barrera was about to take Amigo to an ossuary.
He did not manage to raise a million pesos (260 dollars) to do so, he is saying when forensics remove the remains from the grave and confirm that it is, in fact, a murdered person, a boy in his 30s.
From time to time she comes to the table to listen to the coroner who dictates technical concepts: "impact produced by high energy mechanism", but little asks.
Then he sits quietly and after a few minutes tells that his oldest son is on his birthday and must go.
“I'm already happy, I already saw the Friend.
I'm going to keep praying to him anyway, ”he says and thus closes a routine, a story of a decade.
Nina thanks the forensics and walks off with her long strides.
In front of the grave of NN Jhon Jairo SB, Mrs. Nury continues to repaint the name of the adoptee with a black brush.
It may also be the last time for her.
"I have taken care of this boy, hoping that someone is taking care of mine like that."
Who removes, one does not know, that mine was in this same grave.
Doll, can you imagine?
Nury closes his eyes and tries to smile.
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