How should we deal with the history of violence? Colombians place flowers on cardboard boxes to symbolize coffins in a square in Bogotá on February 20.
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More than a million people have died in Colombian guerrilla fighting. A peace commission wants to deal with the tragedy with international help. Can that succeed?
AWhen Cecilia Arenas thinks back to February 21, 2008, she tears up. That day in Soacha, Colombia, a man offered her brother a job. He left his hometown with eighteen young men and never returned. Six months later, her mother received a call saying her son had been killed in combat as a guerrilla.
Cecilia's brother never belonged to the guerrillas. He is one of the 6,402 “Falsos Positivos” (false positives) that the military shot to demonstrate success in the fight against the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia” (FARC). The dead were dressed in uniforms and given a weapon, then buried anonymously. When Cecilia was finally able to get the body returned to Bogotá, she first had to check whether it was really her brother: “We opened the plastic bag and a terrible smell came out. But I could still see his face,” she says in an interview.
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