JEP begins third day of exhumations in Dabeiba: it will deliver five bodies of disappeared

This Monday, November 9, began in the Las Mercedes cemetery, in Dabeiba, Antioquia, the third day of exhumations carried out by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which investigates cases of ‘false positives’ in the area.

This task will be carried out until November 14 and will be led by the magistrate of that jurisdiction, Alejandro Ramelli, and the forensic team of the JEP.

The JEP carries out this third day of exhumations after receiving several coincident versions of 17 members of the public force, in the investigations of that jurisdiction against extrajudicial executions.

This task is also carried out within the framework of precautionary measures that seek to protect victims of forced disappearance.

According to information from the JEP, a total of 54 bodies have been exhumed in the Dabeiba cemetery, s that could belong to people reported as missing in the context of the armed conflict in Colombia.

The first exhumations were made in December 2019, when 17 people were exhumed, and February 2020, when 37 more were recovered.

Of these 54 bodies, 6 have already been identified. The first was that of 23-year-old Edison Alexánder Lezcano Hurtado, who was unlawfully presented as a casualty in combat by Army units. Lezcano’s remains were handed over to his relatives in February of this year.

The other five bodies that have already been identified will be handed over to their families this Tuesday. Those bodies were recovered in the days of December of last year and February of this year.

According to a testimony published by the newspaper El Tiempo, there were four bodies: three men and one woman. Roberto, a resident of Dabeiba, was ordered to bury them. He and two other men approached the Las Mercedes cemetery in Dabeiba and dug a 4-square-meter grave.

The villager estimates, based on this information, that it was in mid-2004 when they did the same. Almost 16 years later, this testimony, published on December 22 by El Tiempo, led magistrates of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to locate that person and convince him, despite fear, to contribute to the search for the victims. of ‘false positives’ there.

“We were getting ready to take them there (to the cemetery), when an Army commander arrived with 15 soldiers and they told us to dress them,” Roberto told a journalist. After this, according to Roberto, they put green uniforms on them and took photos of the corpses and finally covered them with dirt until the JEP, 16 years later, carried out the exhumations.

During six months that the exhumation processes could be extended, no one will be able to bury remains on the ground in the Las Mercedes cemetery, in Dabeiba, Antioquia, by order of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which adopted precautionary measures to protect the bodies not identified and unclaimed that are in that cemetery.

In addition, that special jurisdiction clarified that the funeral of any person who died of natural causes, including the coronavirus, or violent death, can only be done in vaults and not on land, or in alternative cemeteries to Las Mercedes.

The precautionary measures began to be applied on August 5 by order of the Section of Absence of Recognition of the JEP and weigh on the local authorities, particularly the mayor’s office and the Church of the municipality of Dabeiba.

It also orders the Government of Antioquia “to comply with the constitutional and legal duties that assist it with the municipality to face in a real and concrete way the emergency caused by the pandemic”, in relation to the handling of the bodies of the deceased.

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