UBPD has recovered 29 bodies that would correspond to missing persons in Puerto Berrío, Antioquia

The Unit for the Search for Persons Disappeared (UBPD) reported on Thursday that in the parish cemetery La Dolorosa in the municipality of Puerto Berrío, Antioquia, it managed to recover 29 unidentified bodies that would correspond to persons disappeared in the context of the internal armed conflict.

The entity of the Integral System for Peace, born at the request of the Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian State and the demobilized FARC guerrilla, indicated that these forensic findings were carried out between March 27 and April 3 within the framework of the Magdalena Medio-Puertos Search Plan, amid the intervention of 11 points of interest in the cemetery of this town in central Colombia.

“During the fifth phase of the intervention of the cemetery, protected by precautionary measures of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), five pavilions were approached which since the 1980s and to date have been the place of disposal of bodies in unidentified conditions, and the columbaria of ossuaries San Jude and San José, where the unidentified bodies' adopted 'by some inhabitants of the region remain, in gratitude for the favors and miracles received,” said UBPD.

In the vaults that were operated on by the entity, which has recovered a total of 145 unidentified bodies in the La Dolorosa cemetery, bodies were found that, for the most part, had unusual positions, traumatic injuries and elements suggesting that their deaths occurred in contexts of violence, which were handed over to the National Institute of Legal Medicine for identification.

In addition, the UBPD carried out the extrajudicial investigation, which included the collection and analysis of information; and conversations with victims who are looking for their missing loved ones, as well as with social organizations and citizens who have adopted bodies, in order to contribute to the construction of genograms to advance in future humanitarian actions of reference sampling to assist in the identification process.

“The approach to the cemetery was carried out on the basis of information gathered by the Investigation and Prosecution Unit of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, as well as information collected by UBPD from various sources, including books and records of the cemetery and interviews conducted with various sources, through which 395 sites were identified inside the cemetery where unidentified bodies were allegedly found, many of them found precisely in the Magdalena River,” said the Search Unit.

In that municipality of Colombia on the banks of the Magdalena River, the adoption of corpses has been carried out, a practice that has allowed the preservation of unidentified bodies that have been disposed of in the La Dolorosa cemetery. However, on some occasions some have been renamed and moved within the same cemetery, which has led to the preservation of unidentified bodies that have been disposed of in the cemetery of La Dolorosa. generated difficulties in locating and recovering bodies.

The Magdalena Medio-Puertos Regional Search Plan has included the participation of social organizations, relatives of disappeared persons, the community of this region, which has been one of the most affected by the armed conflict, and local institutions, in which progress has been made in their turn in actions to characterize the cemetery of Puerto Triunfo and the launching of the institutional technical round table of human rights organizations, in compliance with the pact.

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