By Irene Escudero
Bogotá (EFE).- Javier Rey Moreno would have turned 56 this month and his mother, Mrs. Berta, who has been looking for him for 24 years, has suddenly returned his hope, moved by the desire that, when taking DNA samples, they match something in the database of disappeared persons in Colombia and can give them some clue that will reactivate their search.
“How long will the results take?” asks this elderly lady impatiently, who while they explain to her and Mr. Pablo how the process works, gets up from the chair leaning on the cane and sits down again trying to silence a problem in her hip product of age.
After many questions about their son, which help the forensics of the Missing Persons Search Unit (UBPD) to fill in the gaps around the disappearance and physical characteristics of the person, Mrs. Berta and Mr. Pablo extract some samples of blood to send them to Legal Medicine, the institution that manages this vast database and make the final identification.
no one is ready
“Photographs, civil registries, baptismal certificates, medical records… everything they have will help us in the search,” the coroner tells them, but the mother replies embarrassed: “We only have one photo of him, I imagine they took him with all your papers.
“Nobody is prepared for the disappearance of a loved one, nobody has everything prepared. We don’t want them to feel anguished because they don’t have papers”, reassures the UBPD coroner, who tries, with these sample takings, to begin to fill the gaps in the gigantic DNA bank that can help identify the 104,602 missing persons out there. In colombia.
Javier was left-handed, he was about 160 or 170 centimeters tall and they took him away when he was 21 years old. These are key data to find coincidences on the basis of genetic profiles of the 6,997 bodies lying in Forensic Medicine laboratories without identification.
Or also in case there are coincidences with those that continue to be extracted from cemeteries, mass graves or ditches every day, in the deliberate action that took place in this country to make people disappear.
“He left and we don’t know about him (…) in any case, disappearing is terrible,” Doña Berta tells EFE point blank with a temper that hides part of the pain that she carries inside. “I assume since he died, that they killed him, but what we don’t know is where he was,” she says, and now at her age, she just wants them to “collaborate and deliver the bones,” that will be the great consolation her.
deferred search
Berta, Pablo and Javier lived in a village in the Sumapaz páramo, an area that the former FARC used as a corridor to Bogotá, for which the mother believes that the guerrillas took it, but she is aware that she will never finish it off. know. It is a topic that they still do not talk about out of fear.
Nor was there much talk in the town in Meta where they took Frederikberst. His sister Albenis Tibaquira, who has also gone to the UBPD to have samples taken for the genetic profile base, says that her brother was selling homemade ice cream with his motorcycle on the sidewalks of the area, as he used to do every day to earn a living. life, when he did not return. She has been looking for him for 22 years now and his father died with the regret of not knowing what happened to his son.
“Helicopters with dead people arrived in Villeta every day at that time,” this woman told EFE, nervously touching her hands, in front of her daughter, whom her brother was never able to meet. They were hard times of conflict and she was never allowed to see her bodies, to see if she recognized the face of her brother, any brand or the clothes she wore that day to go to work.
“At first it was difficult (to look for him) because it was full of guerrillas,” he says. They had to wait, like so many relatives, in a search in which time weighs heavily and makes it more difficult. Every time she heard the noise of a motorcycle passing by her house, she hoped that it was her brother coming home.
But neither Frederikberst nor Javier ever returned, and now their families hope that in the coming months someone will approach them to tell them that yes, that blood sample they have left seems to match some body or remains that Legal Medicine has safeguarded. That they will finally be able to bury their relatives and mourn them as they deserve.