Medellín — Forensic teams working at La Escombrera, a debris landfill on the outskirts of Medellín, have confirmed the site is a mass grave and recovered the remains of multiple people, bolstering long-standing claims by families who say relatives were disappeared during the city’s urban conflict.
Excavations that began in July 2024 under the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP), a tribunal set up in 2018 to investigate crimes from Colombia’s armed conflict, have produced the remains of six people over ensuing months, tribunal officials said. The discoveries have intensified scrutiny of years of violence in Comuna 13 and prompted renewed demands for investigations into alleged links between paramilitary groups and state security forces.
Forty women from a victims’ group take turns monitoring the soil that is being sifted for clothing, documents and bone fragments, said Luz Elena Galeano, a spokesperson for Women Walking for Truth and one of the family members at the site daily. Galeano has been searching for her husband, Luis Javier Laverde Salazar, who vanished in 2008; she said the excavated remains have shown signs of bindings and bodies placed in fetal positions.
"You could still see the ropes they were tied with and how they were all in a fetal position," Galeano, 61, said. "The discovery of human remains was very important in letting the country know that we are not crazy, that we are not liars."
Justice Gustavo Salazar, the SJP judge leading the inquiry, said the tribunal’s investigations point to paramilitary control of La Escombrera from at least mid-2002 and to a peak period of disappearances that aligns with that control. He said detainees were often taken to the site to be interrogated, tortured or killed and buried with the intent that their bodies would never be found. The tribunal has not filed charges in the Escombrera case to date.
Former paramilitaries who participated in Colombia’s 2003 demobilization and later judicial processes have admitted to killings and burying people at La Escombrera, and some were convicted, Salazar said. The SJP relied on those testimonies, investigations by the Attorney General’s Office and satellite imagery to define the excavation zone in early 2020, after a prior excavation attempt by the attorney general’s office in 2015 that did not fully substantiate families’ claims.
The landfill sits on a steep hillside in Comuna 13, a neighborhood that was a strategic corridor for the movement of drugs and weapons and the scene of intense fighting among guerrillas, paramilitaries and, later, state security forces. Colombian security forces conducted 34 military operations in Comuna 13 between 2001 and 2004 as part of efforts to take control of the area. One of those operations, Operación Orión in October 2002, involved police, soldiers and aerial support and has been a particular focus of accusations that civilians were harmed or disappeared during counterinsurgency operations.
Margarita Restrepo, 62, who lives within sight of La Escombrera, has spent 23 years searching for her daughter, Carol, who went missing on Oct. 25, 2002, during Operación Orión. Restrepo said she was told one of the recently recovered bodies may be that of a young woman between 16 and 18 years old with "perfect teeth," a detail she said matches her memory of her daughter. Forensic teams are conducting DNA analysis to identify the remains and return them to families when possible.
Authorities have reported finding graves as shallow as 50 centimeters with relatively well-preserved skeletal structures, which has aided identification efforts. The SJP’s forensic project is part of a broader push to clarify the fates of the tens of thousands of people who disappeared during Colombia’s decades of armed conflict. Families and human rights groups note that nearly 500 people have been reported missing in the Comuna 13 area since the 1970s, and that more than 120,000 people were reported missing nationwide between 1985 and 2016.
The discoveries at La Escombrera have reopened contentious debates in Colombia about responsibility for abuses during the security campaigns of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The conservative party Centro Democrático defended former President Álvaro Uribe’s security policies and has questioned the timing and motives of the SJP’s excavations, while President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president, described the findings as confirmation of the state and paramilitary violence he has long condemned.
Families who have kept vigil at La Escombrera say the excavations underscore a demand for truth and memory. Some relatives have pushed for a memorial on the site to honor the disappeared and to document what happened there in a way they say would be respectful and truthful. Families also criticize what they say has been a slow response by authorities: "Since 2001, we’ve been reporting that there may be more than 350 bodies, but we haven’t been heard," Galeano said as she looked toward other hills where she believes unexcavated graves remain.
The SJP has said it is investigating alleged links between members of security forces and paramilitary groups in the area but has not issued formal charges in the Escombrera matter. Investigators emphasize that forensic work and DNA testing can take time and that further excavations may uncover additional remains. Families and victims’ organizations continue to press for accelerated forensic examinations and full accountability as the tribunal pursues its inquiries.
For relatives such as Restrepo and Galeano, the work at La Escombrera is both a source of anguish and a fragile hope: the possibility of identifying loved ones and of a public recognition of what they say were crimes that for years went unacknowledged by authorities. The tribunal’s findings and the forensic evidence recovered so far have given those families renewed visibility as they push for answers about Colombia’s long record of disappearances.