AFP | 2023-10-04

VILLA DEL ROSARIO, Colombia -- Armed with shovels and brushes, a team of forensic anthropologists fan out to excavate an old kiln in eastern Colombia once used in cane sugar production, but which the experts suspect may have also been used to incinerate human bodies.

They are searching for any remains of the hundreds of victims believed to have been killed by paramilitary groups who once operated in the region.

Victims' organizations estimate that more than 500 bodies may have been cremated in this type of oven in the early 2000s, as armed groups attempted to erase all evidence of the killings.

The Missing Persons Unit (UBPD) estimates that more than 100,000 victims -- the vast majority of them civilians -- were forcibly disappeared during the conflict that ravaged Colombia for six decades, more than all the other 20th-century regional dictatorships -- Argentina, Brazil and Chile -- combined.

The conflict, which began in the 1960s, pitted left-wing guerrillas fighting against the government and against right-wing paramilitary groups from the 1980s onwards, against a complex backdrop of violence related to drug trafficking.

During the period, paramilitary groups sowed terror through massacres and the persecution of any politicians, farmers and community leaders who did not share their ideas.

In 2006, some 30,000 members of the groups were disarmed and the majority of their leaders put behind bars. Motivated by sentencing deals, some now say they are ready to contribute to the search for the missing.

'Not only the dead'

From his prison in the United States where he is serving a 15-year sentence for drug trafficking, Salvatore Mancuso, a former paramilitary leader, reported the location of a mass grave earlier this year.

In June, UBPD investigators found "multiple" human remains there.

The brick ovens located in the municipality of Villa del Rosario, on the border with Venezuela in eastern Colombia, were originally used to produce cane sugar.

But according to confessions of paramilitary commanders before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) -- the court which judges the worst crimes of the conflict -- the far-right death squads used the furnaces to cremate guerrillas and the farmers who sympathized with them.

This type of oven could have been used to cremate bodies, said Marlon Sanchez, head of the UBPD, an entity created after the 2016 peace agreement.

"This is not the only oven where bodies could have been cremated", the anthropologist told AFP.

The people "were previously tortured and subjected to absolutely humiliating degradations," said Javier Osuna, author of the book "You Will Tell Me About the Fire: The Ovens of Infamy," which recounts the grim history of the conflict.

From testimonies that have been collected, "we can deduce that it was not only the dead who entered these ovens," said Osuna, leaving unsaid the horror that people might have been burned alive too.

The search offers new hope for victims' families, some of whom come out to watch the investigators do their work.

"The temperature conditions may not have been high enough to completely destroy the bones," so it is not impossible to find clues, Osuna said.

So far, however, the search has not yielded any results.