Colombia unearths landfill looking for scores of disappeared
Colombia unearths landfill looking for scores of disappeared
Published: Monday, July 27, 2015 at 3:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, July 27, 2015 at 12:04 a.m.
MEDELLIN, Colombia (AP) — The last contact Margarita Restrepo had with her daughter was a hurried phone call on Oct. 25, 2002. The school day was over and 17-year-old Carol Vanesa was going to meet friends at a metro stop near the sprawling Comuna 13 hillside slum.
Restrepo and her children had fled the violent Medellin neighborhood a few days earlier, right before it was taken over by thousands of Colombian soldiers trying to ferret out leftist rebels. She begged the girl not to risk returning there, but the teen went anyway. Neither she nor her two friends have been seen again and, to this day, nobody knows who is responsible for their disappearance.
Thirteen years later, Restrepo and dozens of others who have missing loved ones are closer than ever to closure. On Monday, a team of forensic experts will begin removing 31,000 cubic yards (24,000 cubic meters) of rubble from La Escombrera, a debris landfill on Medellin's outskirts where the remains of as many as 300 people are believed to have been dumped during one of the darkest chapters of Colombia's long-running civil conflict.
Human rights activists say it could be the biggest mass grave ever in Colombia and the dig represents a glimmer of hope that justice will be realized. But the search will be complicated. Despite more than a decade-long clamor by victims' families that the landfill be closed and excavated, giant trucks have continued to dump construction waste daily.
More:
http://www.goupstate.com/article/20150727/API/307279966
