At a bend in a Colombian river, a woman salvages human remains from decades of conflict

Salvaging corpses at a bend in the river

MARSELLA, Colombia — At this bend in the Cauca River, an eddy urges debris ashore. The rocky bank is scattered with sticks, reeds and plastic bottles, and vultures pick at the sodden, shiny white carcass of a small dog.

It is here that the bodies wash up.

While hardly Colombia’s only river repository for human remains, the Cauca may well be its most prolific. It carries the bodies of drug gang toughs, of peasants dismembered by death squads, of innocents killed for being kin to somebody’s rival.

Who the victims were or why they died never mattered much to Maria Ines Mejia. She simply fished them out — a few hundred or so — and tried to treat them with dignity. What began as a job no one else wanted evolved into a vocation.

“I pulled out legs, arms, torsos,” says Mejia, 50. “Or heads alone. You’d find everything there: Entire bodies. Little pieces. Big pieces. Some in sacks. Others in baskets. Tied up. Heads sheathed in plastic.”

Mejia’s story highlights a daunting challenge for Colombia at a historic juncture: locating and identifying victims of a three-decade conflict. With murders sharply down and fears of retribution subsiding, thousands have come forward to chronicle killings and disappearances and lead authorities to common graves. Colombia’s chief prosecutor’s office has compiled a list of 26,564 Colombians murdered since in the mid-1980s by 714 confessed killers from illegal armed groups.

That task is casting a spotlight on people like Mejia, the low-level civil servants who became guardians of the nameless dead.

“They are the unknown heroes,” says Maria Victoria Uribe, an anthropologist with Colombia’s National Commission of Reconciliation and Reparation.

It is always safer to push a body back into a river. That way, it may break apart, and the bones may settle to the river bed. But for 13 years, Mejia pulled the bodies out — until great personal risk made her stop.

Mejia, a farmer’s daughter, began her job in 1992, when she was named secretary for a rural district that included the riverbank. The job paid $250 a month.

“It was tough, in one respect, because they never equipped me. I bought the boots. I bought the gloves,” Mejia recounts at her 2.5-hectare (6-acre) coffee farm, in her simple tin-roofed home an hour’s drive from the river.

She never asked for money. But a grateful man once transferred $100 into her bank account, and a woman from Cali gave her a pair of overalls after she recovered a dead relation.

The eldest of four sisters, with a post-secondary education amounting to a few secretarial courses, Mejia had no training in forensics. Her written records on the corpses — preliminary autopsies of a sort — were initially riddled with errors.

“Sometimes I’d write down ‘orifice caused by firearm’ when the hole might just as well have been made by a raptor,” she says.

The more bodies Mejia pulled from the river — she remembers four in a single day — the more comfortable she became around the disfigured and decomposing. She loaded them into Jeep Willys for the ride up to the morgue in Marsella.

She says she felt they were hers, like family.

“To leave (a body) for the dogs and vultures to finish off, I just can’t do that,” she says.

More than once, Mejia and her husband Ancizar Lopez would be in a boat on the Cauca — he loves to fish — and she’d spot a limb, grab it barehanded and pull it to shore.

“Bodies begin to pop up after about 24 hours,” she says with a clinician’s matter-of-factness.

People would go slack-jawed when they saw Mejia speaking to a corpse. Typically, she’d be struggling to pry its mouth open to register details on dental features.

“I’d say, ‘Come on, my little friend, you can do it. For God’s sake, help me out.’”

Pulling soggy remains out of a river is not for the timid. They decompose rapidly — and reek mightily — in the warm temperatures here. The features are often blurred or unrecognizable. And after a few days in the water, the skin peels off.

“And so you can imagine trying to grab onto a water-logged body with the skin slipping off. It can come off in your hands,” says Michelle D. Hamilton, an expert in body decomposition who directs the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University.

Mejia, who wears her black hair close-cropped and favors small-hoop earrings, recalls walking home through town after spending hours with a decomposing body.

“Everyone I passed would look at me and do this,” she says, fanning under her nostrils with her fingers. “Puhff.”

Which doesn’t mean Mejia is made of stone.

When word got out she was pulling bodies from the Cauca, her phone began ringing at all hours. People from upriver would arrive at her door unannounced, looking for a loved one. Sometimes, Mejia would let families who couldn’t afford lodging sleep in her apartment and collect their dead the next day.

The job was exhausting.

“You cry,” she says, the businesslike tone draining from her voice. “You cry.”

“Some bodies make a person sadder than others. For example, it hurt me a lot when I would pull out a child.”

Did she ever have nightmares about the dead?

No, just dreams.

Would the dead speak in them?

“Only one ever spoke. I had a dream with one I’d retrieved who told me his name was Hector.”

That was his real name?

“I don’t know. I don’t know if they identified him or not.”

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Colombia’s main rivers have been used for body disposal for decades: the Cauca, the Magdalena, the Atrato and the Sinu.

“It’s a way of making the evidence disappear,” Uribe says. “What they do is empty the body. They take out the insides and fill it with rocks so the cadaver doesn’t float but sinks. So there’s no count of bodies deposited in the rivers.”

The bodies are mostly victims of Colombia’s far-right militias. Back in the early 1980s, drug lords and ranchers, tired of extortion and kidnapping by leftist rebels, began forming their own paramilitary hit squads.

In 2003, the government started a peace process with these militias. Since then, hundreds of demobilized militia fighters have confessed, and the relatives of their victims have filed complaints.

That information has allowed prosecutors to catalog tens of thousands of killings. The paramilitaries were responsible for the vast majority of the Colombians “disappeared” and presumed killed, according to Luis Gonzalez, director of the Justice and Peace unit of Colombia’s chief prosecutor’s office. The others are presumed killed by drug barons and the leftist rebels.

Investigators have recovered 2,778 bodies, largely from unmarked graves, and identified more than 830. Authorities have also collected some 5,000 DNA samples from relatives of the missing and plan to look for matches at cemeteries across the country, including Marsella’s.

But hundreds if not thousands of the missing may never be recovered. After four years, many of Colombia’s cemeteries routinely move unclaimed and unnamed bodies to charnel houses where multiple skeletons mingle, making identification all but impossible.

And then there is the river.

Drug lords for years warned people living along the Cauca not to remove bodies, says Uribe, but to instead “push them with sticks so they keep going downriver.” Most people did.

Mejia’s refusal to push bodies downstream kept Narces Palacio plenty busy. As gravedigger at Marsella’s municipal cemetery for two decades, Palacio interred most of the more than 400 unidentified sets of remains that medical examiners say were pulled from the Cauca.

“Very often, they arrived looking tortured,” says Palacio, eyes widening and head shaking. “I don’t know how you don’t go crazy witnessing such barbarity.”

They’d be bound, strangled. Guts and wombs would be gone, genitals mangled.

Both Palacio and Mejia were deeply disturbed by one corpse in particular. The boy, aged 8 or so, had a mallet attached to wire wrapped around his neck, wrists and waist. He wore a school uniform, white dress shirt and blue shorts.

“What could have that child done to be tossed in with that heavy mallet hanging around his neck? So well ordered, his little shoes, his socks, his shorts, belt, his shirt still tucked into his pants,” says Mejia, who has no children of her own.

Another victim, a young man in his 20s, had been prepared for what would befall him.

After she delivered him to the morgue, Mejia got a phone call from a woman with an odd request: Open the body’s mouth. Mejia did, and found the youth’s name and phone number etched on a dental implant.

Mejia was struck by how many of the dead had tattoos. “Tattoos of vampires, of skulls, of a redskin (a popular cigarette with an Indian logo), scorpions, a spider with its web, crucifixes.”

Bodies would pile up at the block-square cemetery, a national cultural landmark terraced into a hillside. Palacio, 66, remembered a bone-wearying 24 cadavers arriving in four days in the early 1990s. He ran out of space.

In those days, four or five out-of-town families were pulling up to the cemetery weekly looking for missing loved ones. Palacio was jamming corpses wrapped in plastic bags into one-meter-square crypts, as many as six to a crypt. He would charcoal on the white face of each crypt details on each body: N.N. (Spanish initials for ‘Ningun Nombre,’ No Name) date of burial, sex.

One day in 1997, Palacio arrived at the cemetery to find all the crypts covered with a fresh coat of white paint, the identifying markings erased. Town officials had decided the burial ground required “beautification.”

A few weeks later, in October, Mejia got a call about a corpse she knew they’d buried 14 months earlier.

Only where?

“What could we do but open up tomb after tomb? We were there Wednesday, Thursday and until Friday at midday, we found it.” They opened 70 crypts, and used steel wool brushes to scratch off paint so they could see the notations.

“It was a disaster,” Palacio says.

The lawns were a wreck. The stench was unbearable. Townspeople threatened to sue.

Thunder cracks reverberate over the hills at dusk. As a burst of tropical rain clatters on the tin roof, Mejia fetches the log book she meticulously kept that details the 95 bodies she retrieved from the Cauca from 1996 through 2000. She checks how many were ultimately identified — using fingerprints, chiefly — and delivered to relatives. She counts aloud, flipping the pages, before announcing: “Fifty-one.”

Mejia didn’t keep such a book the first few years. Instead, she filled out forms that she says are now strewn about the district office, some chewed by mice.

She gets nostalgic talking of victims’ relatives who kept in touch, sometimes months after she — the last link between them and their departed — helped reunite the living with the dead.

“One boy kept calling me for nearly a year,” she says.

Mejia pulls out photos she took of some of the remains. They are barely distinguishable by sex. Some are half-submerged, where she found them. Others are just limbs.

Such are Mejia’s keepsakes, taken with a camera she bought herself because the town of Marsella wouldn’t equip her. She has received no compensation and, despite 9 1/2 years of public service, she has no right to a government pension.

Mejia’s diligence in collecting and cataloging the dead placed Marsella — which touts itself as an ecotourism destination — among towns with Colombia’s highest homicide rates.

“The townspeople were really upset,” says Marsella’s current mayor, Carlos Andres Gomez. “It really gave the town a bad name.”

In a slightly exasperated tone, Mejia laments that so many in Marsella seemed to resent her for what her devotion to the river’s dead did to the town’s reputation.

“The murders were upstream. They weren’t our murders,” she says. “I’ve always been very clear about that. Marsella is a very peaceful, harmonious town.”

Mejia has not been down to the river in four years, until now. She draws deeply on a cigarette, then recounts what drove her to quit — twice.

When Mejia was sixteen, she gave birth to a girl who died strangled by the umbilical cord. In 2001, she was pregnant again, four months in with twins.

Her superiors asked her to accompany agricultural officials to investigate reports that a farmer had sprayed herbicide near a drinking water source. Mejia initially declined, but after some pleading agreed to go.

“There was poison all over the farm,” she says as tears well up in her big brown eyes and her voice cracks. “I lost the twins.”

Mejia gave up her job. But she still kept retrieving bodies from the river — until September 2005.

One day, Mejia found a note at the door of her small cottage near the Cauca ordering “Ines and family” to leave immediately.

“We’re not playing around,” it threatened. “Murder.”

They obeyed. Three weeks later, someone burned down the cottage.

Mejia wouldn’t say who she thought was behind the arson, but prosecutors believe local drug lords were likely to blame.

A baseball cap shielding her face from the midday sun, Mejia is pensive as she beholds the rushing Cauca river.

The Cauca still churns up the dead, though not as often these days.

The last two bodies delivered to Marsella’s morgue washed ashore on Nov. 10 and Nov. 16.

Associated Press Writer Libardo Cardona, based in Bogota, contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS the spelling of ‘Gonzalez’ in paragraph 43.)