Nearly 62,000 Colombians disappeared: Ombudsman

[Judi Lynn]

Nearly 62,000 Colombians disappeared: Ombudsman
Tuesday, 30 August 2011 07:48
Travis Mannon

Nearly 62,000 people have been disappeared in Colombia, announced the country's ombudsman on Tuesday, the International Day of the Disappeared.

The Commission for the Search for Disappeared Persons, a division of the Ombudsman Office, reported that the number of disappeared people has risen to 61,604, an almost 30% increase from the 47,757 people reported in June 2010. According to the findings, that number consists of more than 47,000 men and nearly 14,500 women.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called attention to the tragic situation in Colombia in a press communique on the eve of the International Day of the Disappeared. According to the ICRC, "people on all sides of a conflict are affected. Civilians, military personnel, or members of armed groups may be killed in fighting or made to disappear as part of an effort to spread fear in a community."

Guilhem Ravier, the ICRC's expert on missing and disappeared persons in Colombia, believes that the will exists to help people bring closure to families, but the exhausting paperwork and sheer multitude of disappeared people exacerbates the problem.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/18654-nearly-62000-colombians-missing-ombudsman.html

[gbscar]

1. Of all those who have disappeared over 30 years, the state is thought responsible for about 16,000

State and paramilitaries responsible for 16,000 forced disappearances: UN

Monday, 23 May 2011 17:02
Tom Heyden

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that the Colombian state and paramilitaries are culpable for 16,000 forced disappearances in the country over the last three decades, Spanish news agency EFE reported Monday.

Christian Salazar, at a forced disappearance seminar in the Colombian capital of Bogota, stated that the current total figure stands at over 57,000 recorded disappearance cases, with 15,600 of these being forced disappearances.

He clarified that these figures are taken from NGOs and that the Prosecutor General's Office has seen "probably more than 26,500 cases of alleged forced disappearances."

These incidents of forced disappearance were mainly "committed by state agents and paramilitary forces who collaborated with them," while "there are more than 3,000 women and 3,000 people under 20 years old" included in the estimates.

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http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/16462-state-and-paramilitaries-most-responsible-for-forced-disappearances-un.html

Comment:

Needless to say, as the rest of the article and even the newest piece have indicated, both the total number of Colombians who have disappeared and those cases that can be directly or indirectly tracked back to the state, as opposed to those disappearances for unrelated causes or which have been directed by other parties in this conflict, are nothing but partial estimates.

Even if nobody ever disappeared again in Colombia from now on, the estimates will inevitably continue to grow just because more research is being done, more relatives of the victims are talking and the truth indicating the sheer magnitude of this brutality is slowly coming to light. That is, in fact, what explains most of the jump between this May article and the current August estimates. Unfortunately, people are still disappearing in Colombia, both forcefully or otherwise, to this day.

It's horrible to even think about these figures, but there is indeed a real possibility that there might well be 100,000 or more disappeared over all these decades of war and repression, with a significant -perhaps even the vast majority, though that doesn't make the remaining cases any less terrible or the other culprits any less guilty- chunk of that carnage being the sole responsibility of the Colombian right-wing.