25 l) Carmen Johanna Jaramillo Giraldo, stepdaughter of Sinaí Blanco Santamaría When she arrived in Mapiripán to live she came to love her stepfather very much; he began to pay for her schooling and he was “a very open-minded person.” Before the paramilitary came, the security situation was all right. She described the terror felt by the townspeople when the paramilitary arrived, and people heard that they came with a list. She met some of the paramilitary and saw many of them, including the “Mochacabezas”, who killed people. There were rumors about people who had been dismembered and thrown into the river in bits and pieces. “Since they arrived, it was like a ghost town[. E]very little while you heard that they took people away[. T]he paramilitary were heartless [and] they felt no pity for people’s grief.” There were many dead and missing in Mapiripán, including a whole family missing, with a baby that was a few months old. The day after the paramilitary took her stepfather away, she –who was 16 years old at the time- and her mother went looking for him and found his body at the police station. “When [she] approached […] [she] recognized that he was [her] father. [She sat] next to him and no longer understood anything, [she] almost went mad, they were going to cover him and [she] said[: D’ont] cover him, he is going to wake up. [She squatted] next to him and lifted his head onto [her] legs, and his throat had been slit. [Her] father’s face had been cut, he had been tied with black nylon[. She said: W]hy did they tie him up if he was not bad? [She stayed] with him crying for three hours until they took [her] away from there.” Aside from her stepfather’s body she saw other corpses and a woman dragging her spouse’s body with the head in her other hand to put them together. This made her feel angry and powerless because she could not do anything about it. Her mother called the mayor and the police inspector to remove the body but they said that they could not. “The paramilitary said that when they killed someone that person remained there. [Her] father was the only person they took away from the town [because] his family in San Martín sent a small plane to remove his body. [They] buried him in San Martín.” They left for Villavicencio, and there she could not sleep, but her boyfriend helped her overcome that “because otherwise [she] would have died.” Afterwards she and her mother went to Acacias, because they were told that they were looking for them to kill them. When she returned to Mapiripán a year later it was very difficult for her to go by the placed where her stepfather was killed. Then she went to Villavicencio to have her son and she has not returned to Mapiripán, out of fear. Sometimes she is so sad she cannot sleep. She wants to change her surname for that of her stepfather, but they have not allowed her to do so. Her life after the massacre changed very much and she had to quit school. She and her siblings received everything they needed from her stepfather. Her stepfather had offered to pay for her college education; therefore, she would have been a professional, and she wanted to study languages and travel. Instead, she and her mother have gone hungry and had to sell things on the street. Her mother sewed to make some money. Her mother almost died, because she did not eat well, and she also suffered a pre-heart attack.