“Even if it’s just a fingernail”: clothes, bones and DNA to identify missing people in Colombia

After searching for her son Apolinar for 24 years, Soledad Ruiz received the bones in a small coffin. A sweater and technology genetics were key to identifying it in a Colombia that searches for more than 100,000 missing people from the armed conflict.

With a haggard face from crying so much, the woman remembers that Apolinar Silgado was wearing that garment when he went to work on a farm in San Onofre, a Caribbean municipality in the department of Sucre (north), in August 1999.

In that region, the paramilitaries imposed their law, bloodthirsty far-right squads that murdered peasants on suspicion of collaborating with the guerrilla or as a control mechanism under a regime of fear.

Silgado, then 25 years old, never returned. His mother even thought that he could be among the victims of a paramilitary leader who threw the bodies into a river with alligators. But last year the search finally paid off.

Thanks to the pieces of that sweater that were preserved next to the buried body, the prosecution identified the farmer.

The search, exhumation and analysis of human remains intensified after the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla.

“I wanted him alive, I didn’t want him the way he came, but hey, that was his destiny. I rested”Soledad Ruiz tells AFP.

The authorities are working at full speed to decipher the identity of thousands of corpses that spent dozens of years underground. They grind bone remains and teeth to extract their DNA, analyze clothing and cross-reference information with relatives of victims in an attempt to map the disappearance.

“Translate” the dead

The Search Unit for Persons Reported Missing (UBPD), created after the historic disarmament of the rebels, delivered Silgado’s body to the family.

The entity assures that to date it has recovered 1,256 bodies and is still searching for more than 104,000. In other corners of Colombia, paramilitaries, guerrillas and state agents tried to hinder the search, explains Hadaluz Osorio, a forensic anthropologist at Legal Medicine, another entity in charge of identification.

“They murdered people and buried them clandestinely. There are even practices where the perpetrators exhume them (the victims) and divide them into different graves to make it even more difficult to identify them.”she says, surrounded by corpses of alleged victims of the armed conflict in a laboratory in Bogotá.

With latex gloves he analyzes a body that has a hole in the skull caused by a projectile. Another has bullet holes and cuts that could be from a machete. The latter also had wear and tear on one knee, a seemingly insignificant sign, but one that makes relatives whose loved one was complaining of pain excited.

Is about “translate what the dead are telling us”points out Osorio.

His colleague Grace Alexandra Terreros pulverizes bone and tooth fragments to extract DNA from the cells. She then compares it with samples from the Bank of Genetic Profiles of Disappeared Persons, an archive created in 2010 and which has at least 62,000 blood samples taken from relatives of possible victims.

Wait for a call

In the absence of photographs, Soledad Ruiz takes in her hands the spoken portrait of her son, the only memory she keeps. She puts her forehead against the picture frame, screams and cries. The father died longing to be reunited with Apolinar and José de los Santos Silgado, another son, who disappeared 15 days later.

Jimy Abello, a grandson, was forcibly taken from his home in 2001 and never seen again.

“I want them to come back whether alive or dead, because I already know that I have them here,” says the woman who has dedicated her life to working in the fields.

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace, also arising from the peace agreement and which judges the worst crimes of the conflict, urged to accelerate the identification of bodies to heal the wounds of the families.

Alba Silgado, Jimy’s mother, trusts that the experts will call her soon to give her good news.

“I have this phone and when there is a call I think (…) that they are going to tell me, ‘Mrs. Alba, come on, Jimy’s body and José de los Santos’ body are already there’”he maintains.

“Even if it is by the hair, even if it is by a nail, I have to recognize my brother and my son.”says Silgado, holding back his tears.