CPTnet
December 31, 2003
COLOMBIA REFLECTION: The cruelest month

[Note: For reasons of security, the names of the writer and the missing man
referred to in the release have been withheld]

If T.S. Eliot had lived in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, he might have said
that December, not April, is the cruelest month. News of assassinations
arrive with every morning's paper. The team discovered three bodies in the
river within the space of a week and even more have been reported. One
community member disappeared and a farm worker was assassinated.

We saw the vultures circling on the river last week. Everyone was silent as
we drew our canoe up along side the bloated body. His pants were down below
his knees. He didn't have a shirt. There was a hole where his nipple should
be, another one in his stomach and, as an appropriate metaphor for the
frequency of unidentified corpses in Colombia, he lacked a face.

We gently pushed him to the side of the river and called the authorities.
We thought he might be a member of one of the rural fishing and farming
communities our team accompanies along the Opón River in the Middle
Magdalena region of Colombia. X had been missing for more than a week.

The family arrived first. After trying unsuccessfully to identify the badly
decomposed body, his sister, a stout middle aged woman, sat in our canoe
while we waited. A hundred black cormorants shrieked across the water and
the noon day sun pressed down on us relentlessly. As I sat across from her,
I saw in her eyes the worst pain a human being can know: seeing the lifeless
body of someone you love. I went to her and she collapsed in my arms while
sobs shook her and all I could say was "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

 And I thought how ironic, that a God who made sharing an essential part of
being human made us unable to share what we most need to: the emotional
burden of losing a loved one. No matter how much I wanted to, I could not
lift even part of the grief from her shoulders. The pain of seeing her
brother floating in the river was a burden she would have to carry all
alone. "This damned war," she said, "has taken my whole family."

And then the authorities arrived. The only way they could verify if it was
her brother was by looking for a piece of metal he had in his leg from a
childhood accident. They never found it. The body in the river was not her
brother. She is still looking for him.

They buried the unidentified man in a unmarked grave here in the city. He is
one among six others assassinated in or disappeared from the communities we
accompany along the river. The blood splattered on the screen inside the
shed where they killed the administrator of a large cattle farm on the river
matches the red Christmas decorations that adorn many of the homes of the
campesinos here. Tiny yellow and black butterflies flutter around the pools
of blood left on the ground where workers trying to dislodge a sunken barge
with stolen gasoline were assassinated. There are streaks of blood where
they dragged their bodies across the barge and dumped them in the river.

 Red is the color of the holiday season and December is the cruelest month.