Afro-Colombian women submit request to search for their loved ones to the UBPD

This Thursday, April 21, the Coordination of Afro-Colombian Women Displaced in Resistance 'La Comadre' presented to the Unit for the Search for Persons Disappeared (UBPD) a collective application report for the search for their loved ones in the context of the armed conflict in Colombia.

The organization, which is part of the National Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians (Afrodes), which carries out advocacy actions to design and implement public policies and programs that guarantee the ethnic and gender focus, delivered the document that is the result of a permanent dialogue between the groups and the officials of the entity that has been part of the Integral System for Peace since 2019.

“Today is an important day as the hope of finding our disappeared beings is revived. We value the efforts of the UBPD because it is in this space where we women resume the hope of finding our relatives,” said the national coordinator of 'La Comadre' and leader of Afrodes, Luz Marina Becerra, who delivered this report that seeks to contribute to the truth about the whereabouts of the disappeared.

The report, entitled: 'Collective Application for Searching La Comadre', which was carried out with the support of the International Organization for Migration and the United States Development Agencies, documents 130 requests to search for Afro-Colombians reported missing and includes the description, analysis and patterns of disappearances and affections from a gender and ethnic perspective.

The presentation of the report was attended by the director of the Search Unit, Luz Marina Monzón, and representatives of the Integral System for Peace, the Peace and Reconciliation Memory Center and members of international organizations, an event in which the work 'Somewhere Khalil' was also presented, an artistic exhibition in which represents the pain of disappearance and the determined commitment of black women to search for their loved ones.

“I am very proud of all of you and I am honored to represent this entity that should be that hope. UBPD would not have been able to move forward without the commitment of you and other organizations in this process of mutual and lifelong learning. Thank you for this trust in the entity that we assume as an institution of the State in the responsibility of responding to knowing what happened to your loved ones. Their contribution does not end with the delivery of this Report”, stressed the director of the UBPD.

Finally, the entity, born at the urging of the Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian State and the demobilized FARC guerrillas, reported that it will maintain a permanent dialogue with the collective 'La Comadre' around the construction of methodologies for the search for persons from the Afro missing communities in different areas of the national territory, in which ancestral and psycho spiritual knowledge are incorporated into a commitment to human rights.

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