By Geraldine Garcia |
Juan Frío (Colombia), (EFE) horror that the Government wants to rescue from oblivion so that it does not happen again.
In this town that is part of the municipality of Villa del Rosario, in the department of Norte de Santander, where its inhabitants assure that the land is blessed to harvest plantains and cassava, the tranquility was broken in 1999 with the arrival of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which turned Juan Frío into a center of operations against the guerrillas.
The massacre of 6 people, on September 24, 2000, was a mark of paramilitary violence and at that time their fertile lands were filled with corpses, mostly brought from Villa del Rosario, from Cúcuta -departmental capital- or from the nearby town of Los Patios.
“I remember when I worked in San Antonio (Venezuela) and I would pass by the Táchira river every morning to get there faster and I would find bodies on the banks, dismembered, burned, split in half, sometimes still alive, and you just had to throw them out. to one side and continue. Sometimes I would stop and tell them ‘rest in peace,’” Fidedigna Gómez tells EFE, who since 1999 has been looking for her missing father in the area.
terror regime
However, what marked Juan Frío forever were the “crematory ovens” in which the paramilitaries converted the brick buildings originally used by peasants in the process of heating sugarcane juice to produce panela.
It is estimated that the paramilitaries incinerated some 500 people in ovens to erase all evidence of the crimes committed by the Fronteras Front of the Catatumbo Bloc of the AUC, under the command of Jorge Iván Laverde, alias “El Iguano”, who years later accepted the Justice and Peace Law that in 2006 led to the demobilization of that group.
Some of those ovens are still visible in the middle of the brush and those who pass by and know the history cross themselves, while those who search for missing relatives weep at the thought that they may have been cremated there.
Everyone consoles themselves with the hope that one day a garden or a park will be built on the site in memory of those killed so they don’t have to mourn them from a dusty road.
For this reason, and to guarantee the victims’ full right to truth and justice, the Foreign Ministry will soon hold an “act of extrajudicial responsibility” in Juan Frío, complying with the recommendations of the Truth Commission report.
permanent pain
One of them is Rudt Cotamo Coronado, who cries hugging a photo of his brother Jorge Enrique, who disappeared 19 years ago by paramilitaries, while the eldest, Joel Henry, was murdered by the guerrillas when he wanted to leave their ranks.
“Jorge joined the Self-Defense Forces in 2000 with the sole intention of avenging the death of his older brother, Joel Henry, who had been recruited by the guerrillas at the age of 13 (…) and when he wanted to leave that group, he they murdered with a coup de grace” and they made them believe that he had died in a confrontation,” he told EFE.
The woman, who is a leader of the victims of Juan Frío, explains that then Jorge Enrique also joined the guerrillas to fight the paramilitaries who had supposedly killed Joel, “without knowing that his fate was going to be the same, but in this case, one more disappeared, like all those in Colombia.”
“Who tells me that I can’t ask for justice for him? My soul cries out for him, and here I am, looking for him, looking for an answer to why he disappeared. Why do I have to see my mother on her knees every night crying for not knowing where to find him? Why do I have to see the suffering of my nephews saying why they couldn’t grow up next to their mom and dad?” she says. Rudt in tears.
Fidedigna Gómez remembers that some 40 years ago, when she visited the sugar cane mills with her schoolmates, she walked fearlessly through those lands, and later she witnessed the damage caused by the guerrillas and state abandonment, “because speaking things as they are, it is also the government’s fault, because it did not know how to enter them and they let them grow.
Later, “those people” (the paramilitaries) seized the ovens of the sugar mills, where “they put car tires and wood and threw people out to make them disappear,” he says.
Gómez remembers that a few years ago in that same area one of his sons found “a half-burned piece of body; I just told him, ‘let’s go Chinese, lest they do the same to us’”, says the woman, who assures that “there are still many mass graves that have not been uncovered” and many others simply “the river took them away”.