UBPD recovered six bodies of missing UP members in Huila

The Unit for the Search for Persons Disappeared (UBPD) recovered in the municipal cemetery of Suaza, Huila, six bodies of alleged members of the Patriotic Union (UP), peasant leaders and members of the National Federation of Agricultural Trade Unions (Fensuagro), killed in the 1990s in this department, within the framework of the of the armed conflict in Colombia.

According to the UPBD, the massacre of these people occurred 29 years ago at the hands of an armed group in the village of El Vergel. The bodies of the victims remained in a common grave inside the cemetery, which was used to throw rubble, remains of flower arrangements and material from the cemetery.

Intervention actions by the UBPD in the Suaza Cemetery were carried out between 26 and 30 March. The recovered bone structures were handed over to the National Institute of Legal Medicine for full identification. This humanitarian action is part of the Regional Southern Search Plan of Huila, which “has an initial universe of 540 people missing due to events of the conflict, in 18 municipalities of that department,” says Unidad.

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According to the extrajudicial investigation carried out by the Search Unit, one of the recovered bodies could correspond to Luz Mercy Cruz, a 22-year-old agrarian union leader, who was a delegate of Fensuagro at the time of her murder in the department of Huila. She was a woman who promoted agrarian reform and peasant organization.

His son Andrés Cardona, was one of the people who accompanied the humanitarian actions and said that his mother “was a very young woman, she was 22 years old when she was forcibly disappeared. My family could not come looking for her, nor could she claim her body out of fear, since my father had been killed nine months earlier in similar conditions and she was killed for claiming the body and starting a legal process,” Cardona added.

It was in 1993 that the relatives of these people stopped receiving news and information about their loved ones. When both his parents were killed and Andrés became an orphan of the war, he was three years old. “I was very young when this happened. I don't have many memories of her, just some old photos and many papers that are part of this country's own paperwork. When a violent event happens, all they give you are papers. I am looking for a body and I only have files of many pages,” Cardona said.

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Today Andrés is a photographer and documentary filmmaker. It has focused on covering and recording acts of violence in the country. In the context of the armed conflict in Colombia, 20 members of his family group were killed, in addition to their parents.

The Search Unit assured that, “these actions seek to guarantee the rights to truth and reparation, to the relatives of the disappeared persons”.

The other 540 bodies that UBPD will seek due to events of the conflict in Huila will be in the municipalities of: Acevedo, Agrado, Altamira, Elias, Garzón, Guadalupe, Isnos, Argentina, Oporapa, Saladoblanco, San Agustin, Suaza, Tarqui, Timana, Rivera, Pitalito, Pital and Palestine.

“Within this initial universe, the lines of extrajudicial investigation related to recruitment, political activists, social leaders and disappearances that occurred during hostilities stand out,” concluded the entity born of the Peace Agreement.

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