-17On January 16, 1990, the next of kin of the alleged disappeared who formed the search committee occupied the office of the mayor of Turbo. While they were there, ASFADDES arrived and provided them with assistance. Then a commission from the Attorney General’s Office in Bogotá arrived. Subsequently, they went to Carepa to talk to General Clavijo, who “assured them that the roadblock was there every day. [The witness] asked where the vehicles went that were full of people who were calling out for help, crying and shouting, and the General did not answer [her …] and did not offer to do anything to look for the disappeared.” When they returned to Pueblo Bello from the meeting in Turbo, they were told that the Army, specifically General Clavijo, “had organized a meeting in the village and gave fifty thousand pesos to the people, but [the witness] did not want [this].” Regarding her participation in the procedures to identify the corpses, the witness stated that they “found out that they were going to [take] the bodies to the Montería hospital. [She does] not want to remember this[.] The bodies were dismembered; there were corpses that only consisted of bodies from the waist down, others without a head. [She has] never been able to understand this. [Mrs. Villalba Sánchez] collected the shirts of the corpses and rinsed them in water to know if one of them belonged to [her] husband. [She] could not find it. No one helped them to search. [T]he bodies were [brought] in black bags [and] they had to break open the bags to see [what they contained. She thinks] that a complaint should be brought against the State for having dug up the bodies with a backhoe. [She thinks] that they should have gathered them up one by one, as any human being deserves. [T]hat was a tremendous error […]. If the authorities did not want to do it […] they should have called on the families who would have done it. Leovigilda Villalba Sánchez decided “to leave the village because [she] was afraid.” She left everything in Pueblo Bello: the house, the business and her clothes, because “there were many rumors that the paramilitary forces would visit [the village] again.” The witness stated that, before the facts, “life in Pueblo Bello was very agreeable, because everyone knew each other and the village was very united and very hardworking.” Her children “were very close to their father, [because] he spent time with his children; he used to go to the river and he played ‘parqués’ [ludo] with them.” After these events, her family disintegrated. Mrs. Villalba Sánchez sent her daughters to Turbo to live “in a rented room.” Her daughter, Delia, left school to take care of her sister, Leda, and could never continue her studies. Her sons began “to be increasingly resentful because of what happened to their father. They enrolled in the Army; it was as if they wanted to die. [Her son, Onasis,] remained [in the Army] and went blind.” The witness herself “almost went mad”[. She] was attended by a psychologist and then, in Montería, visited a psychiatrist. [Her] hair began to fall out; [she] felt very afraid; [she] felt that everyone was following [her] and [she] lost a great deal of weight. [She] wanted to die.” After the facts, a man called Pedro Escobar Mejía went to her store and told her that his sons who had allegedly disappeared, “Juan Luis and Leonel, were calling him and that he was going to go to them. After this don Pedro committed suicide. He needed a psychologist.” The witness wants justice to be done and to find the remains of those who disappeared; she wants the State to acknowledge what happened and undertake to return their loved ones to them.

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents