The pain that has followed him for two decades is concentrated in the silences of Carlos Carrillo, when he lost his 9-year-old son in the FARC attack on Club El Nogal in Bogotá.
He breathes and sobs on the other end of the phone as he recalls that February 7, 2003 when the bomb exploded that left 33 dead and nearly 200 injured on an unforgettable night in the capital.
He, who was one of the founding members of the Club, was one of the last survivors to be rescued "that fateful night", the word he finds more accurate to name the attack.
His name reached the list of deceased, while he, under the rubble and with broken legs, thought he had been abandoned.
“I was saying 'they left me alone, they forgot me', just when someone spoke to me and said 'you're not alone' and pulled me out of there,” he recalls.
They took him to the hospital and only the next day, when he was able to see his daughter alive, he asked him: "Juancho is dead, right?"
Carrillo narrates it and returns to silence for a few minutes.
Juan Sebastián died of suffocation and his daughter Ana María survived, but she was left with lifelong injuries.
"As my heart cries, it also heals"
That same night, the life and family of Milton Ricardo Martínez, the Club's security guard, also broke.
He had started his shift at 6 p.m. and he only had a few days left before going on vacation, recalls his wife Jacqueline Grande, who found out what had happened through the media.
That day he had lunch with her normally and picked up the middle 3-year-old girl from her kindergarten.
She then went to work.
Martínez was badly injured in the explosion and managed to spend three months in a hospital.
"He had several surgeries and when he was recovering mobility and was in the last one, a bacterium entered his blood and he died," says the woman.
He left behind three children, ages 7, 3, and 1.
Since then, says Grande, it has been 20 years of fighting for justice.
The case of El Nogal has been one of the most investigated because it occurred in the heart of the Colombian capital.
From the beginning he knew that they were the FARC, although at first they denied it.
Later, details were revealed: among the deceased was Oswaldo Arellán, who entered a car with 200 kilos of explosives, as well as his brother, the squash instructor, Jhon Fredy Arellán.
His deaths led to the arrest of his relatives from Hermínsul and Fernando Arellán, who structured the terrorist attack under the order of Darío Velásquez alias 'El Paisa', former head of the Teófilo Forero Mobile column.
The brothers Hermínsul and Fernando were sentenced.
They were serving sentences of 40 years in prison, but in 2017, after the peace agreement between the Government, they submitted to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to access legal benefits in exchange for providing information that clarifies the attack.
Now, the files and reports of the victims are added to Case 010 Non-amnestiable crimes committed by the extinct FARC-EP in the framework of the Colombian conflict.
Judge Julieta Lemaitre, one of those handling this macro case, explained that it is one of the prioritized events.
She says that they analyze and systematize the reports received, including that of Bertha Fríes, one of the victims of the attack.
Two of the three criminal patterns of the FARC identified by the JEP have to do with attacks like the one suffered in El Nogal: urban warfare and the use of illegal means of war against the civilian population.
“The FARC cells functioned differently from the fronts.
In the case of Nogal, the acknowledgment of responsibility and the files indicate that Teófilo Forero participated, which is not exactly an urban structure, but rather worked in the cities and in the rural areas,” said Lemaitre.
Although the material authors are known, there is still a lot of data in the air.
In the days preceding the attack, it was learned in the media that the FARC intended to attack 35 clubs in the north of the city, for which reason there are complaints against the State for not having sufficiently protected the place.
"There are files and a demand for justice from the victims with questions that remain pending," adds the magistrate.
For some of them, who have approached the JEP, it remains to be known if there were infiltrators in El Nogal and if, as the extinct FARC has said, paramilitaries met with government officials there.
The Report of the Truth Commission collected these versions, but clarified that it had no proof of it.
“This version has been picked up by some survivors.
One of them told the Truth Commission that "all the players were there, that was like the battlefield, FARC-EP, AUC and the State, all the players were there, they were playing and we were serving almost as balls there for everyone», he refers to an interview with one of the victims.
Publicly, the former head of the AUC, Salvatore Mancuso, said that he never met in El Nogal with state officials.
The Truth Commission clarifies that "even if this were true, it does not justify an indiscriminate terrorist action of this magnitude and, in fact, it is offensive to the victims, who reject this version."
For many of them, like Carlos Carrillo or Jacqueline Grande, the attack 20 years ago opened a huge wound that does not heal.
"It symbolically represented an attack on the collective sense of security in the country's capital, and not only of the elites who met there," the Truth Commission concluded.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the latest information on the country.