People dubbed the truck “the last tear.” When they saw her appear on the dirt roads, they all ran to hide. The paramilitaries got out and ordered a beer at the local store. They would grab some boy or girl and parade him around town. still alive For all to see. Then, in a process explained by alias Juancho Dique, a paramilitary, and many others, the fortuitous victim was lowered to a shore. There his body was dismembered and his remains were thrown into the water. Gone forever. “To these sacred waters that we pollute,” the criminal now says with a spiritual tone in a recorded testimony for the Truth Commission. The place he now visits with a bunch of flowers in his hands, one of the “dumps” of corpses on the banks of the Canal del Dique, was where he earned his alias for disappearing souls in a truck ride.
If one placed 9,000 bodies one after the other, with an average length of 1.60 cm, one could draw a line of 14.4 kilometers. They are the corpses that are estimated to have been left by the war in Colombia in these waters that some say have the purple color of chicha. The row of dead would cover part of the 115 kilometers that the channel that empties into the Caribbean Sea, leaving through Cartagena, measures. The channel connects the bay of the tourist city with the Magdalena River and crosses twenty municipalities that, already accustomed to death, also suffer from pollution and the threat of flooding and overflows. The need for a mega-project on the canal has been talked about for decades, but now a new need is added: that of looking for those nameless dead.
The current project started in the Government of Iván Duque (2018-2022). Then the foundations were laid for works that will take 15 years with a budget of 2.3 billion pesos (about 500 million dollars). The only company that submitted to the bidding contest was the Spanish Sacyr. But Duque did not get to seal the project, which passed into the hands of the new Government of Gustavo Petro. Many problems have arisen around the canal that today have the process in the hands of the Constitutional Court due to the complaints of various communities affected (or benefited) by the works. The National Infrastructure Agency (ANI), in charge of the project, decided at the end of September to postpone the award indefinitely until the court decides. The ANI did not want to make statements to this newspaper.
But not only that, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the court that was born from the peace process between the Government and the FARC guerrillas in 2016, received the request of several victims’ associations to protect those places where people disappeared. during the conflict. The Canal del Dique, among them. The planned work includes the construction of locks and it will be necessary to dredge the waters. Two weeks ago, the JEP ordered the Ministry of Transportation to include a protocol that allows the search for bodies during the execution of the project. This is an unprecedented decision in Colombia, where a work can be stopped due to the discovery of an archaeological remains, but it continues if a body is found after its removal by a forensic expert. It is the first time that judges have ordered the preparation of a protocol for the search, identification and dignified delivery of the bodies of the disappeared.
JEP magistrate Alejandro Ramelli explains the decision this way: “It is not that we are against the project or stop it, but those who assume that responsibility and contract have to take into account that it impacts an area of forced disappearance and has to have some protocols that go beyond the casual discovery of a body”. This Thursday, the Ministry took the first step to comply with the measure and issued an order to create a table that sets the protocols that from now on will affect all works for the protection and search for victims of the conflict.
newsletter
The analysis of current affairs and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your mailbox
RECEIVE THE
The JEP conducted dozens of interviews with victims, witnesses of forced disappearance and former members of the self-defense groups that operated in the area of influence of the Canal del Dique. With this, they mapped those places where the greatest number of bodies could be found, although this is only a hypothesis because the water currents make it impossible to know with certainty where they may be. Not infrequently, the waters have returned some body near the bay of Cartagena. They were buried nameless in the cemetery that touched their path.
subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the informative keys of the country’s current affairs.
#entanglements #Canal #del #Dique #stuck #megawork #thousands #corpses