It was three years since Mrs. Rachel last visited her son.

The trip to the town of La Macarena is long and expensive. “I have to take a boat that pass on the river only once a week and save money for several days to be able to afford it,” says Mrs Rachel. Farmers from the surroundings farm travel only by the weekends, to sell agricultural products at the market, attend mass and buy supplies or tools.

La Macarena is in the Meta region in the western plains of Colombia and was the heart of the distention zone, an area of 42,000 square kilometers, slightly more than the size of Switzerland, that former president Pastrana demilitarized and gave to the FARC guerrillas (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) in 1998 during a peace process that lasted until 2002.

Peace never came.

Instead, the army arrived together with democratic security, president Uribe and the money of Plan Colombia. To make it simple, war exploded. La Macarena became the part of the country with the most intense fighting and the headquarter of FUDRA (rapid deployment force) of the Colombian army.

The only way to get from the provincial capital, Villavicencio to La Macarena is with an old DC-3 cargo plane, that after revolutionizing civil aviation in the ’30s and being key during the great war, have been retired and are used for transporting goods and passengers in the most remote areas of the planet. There is also an abandoned road that links the two towns, it is a dangerous road and is easy to find armed groups that still control much of the rural area of the Meta region.

Landing the memory of Bogotá with her modern buildings, business center and tourism is a distant memory.

At the airport, there is a big poster of a soldier painted for war, on his back few companions, rifles in hand and a phrase: “We are ordinary people doing an outstanding job.”

The weather is heavy, not only the sun seems to press us to the ground with the weight of its rays, but we breathe the typical air of the Colombian villages who live and have seen the war with their eyes. The only asphalt in town covers part of the airstrip, for the rest is the red of the ground to indicate the few streets.

It looks a bit like the movies of the conquest of the Wild West- a main sandy street with a hotel and a bar. Nothing else. Of course, there is not the fort of the cowboys, but instead there is the base of FUDRA dominating from the hill. Inside 20,000 soldiers, five mobile battalions and several Black Hawk helicopters and MI-17.

The inhabitants of the town are just 3500, six times less than the militaries.

Jesús Hernandez is known as Don Chucho, his hands are like those of Mrs. Rachel, the hard work deformed them during many years, some parts became harder, in others bones shaped to fit the tools. Anyway, Chucho is not a peasant, he is the gravedigger of the Macarena.

Doña Rachel remembers him, even if they met only once, three years ago, when he buried his son.

Is not easily forgotten Jesus, maybe because of the disinterest in talking about his work, or because, as he tells of the hundreds of people who did autopsy before burial, in the minds of listener, it creates an image of the dimensions of the huge NN graveyard of the Macarena.

Just a wire netting separates the cemetery from the base of FUDRA. The part closest to the military is different, it has not stone structures as the rest of the cemetery, nor flowers or pictures of the departed. From a distance it looks like a sea of small white crosses. “I think they are at around 700 guerrillas who I have buried here – Chucho account indicating in the direction of the white tablets – I started in 2002 when the army asked me to dig a pit and since then I haven’t stop.”

In the village is very difficult to find someone willing to speak about the cemetery or about those who are buried there. “It may be full of false positives – says a villager that prefers to remain anonymous – the military take in the bodies at night, they say they are guerrillas, but no one knows if is true.”

So many NN, which according Chuco can become nearly 2000, have drawn the attention of the Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, which investigates cases of false positives all around the country, but they didn’t yet visited officially the cemetery.

An employee of the town government of La Macarena states that is probably the town with more NN buried in the whole country.

The False Positives is the largest scandal in the history of the Colombian army. 2000, so far, cases of civilians killed, dressed in camouflage and presented by the military as enemies killed in combat. “Each body has its guerrilla clothing and weapons – continues Chucho – I do the autopsy and burial. If they have a nickname I write it on the cross, otherwise I leave only the number of the protocol of the prosecution case.”

When he hears the words: false positives, Chucho put on the defensive. “For me they are just NN. In many years I have learned to recognize the guerrillas, they smell of forest and have the color of the jungle. I am sure, the military bring me just guerrillas killed in combat.”

But Mrs. Raquel does not agree: “Here lies buried my son Jose Antonio, – account, putting a flower in a cross that says: “Act 21, 31st of March 2006 – he was 24 when the army killed him. He was a farmer; he knew nothing about guns, he never used one, never got to the guerrillas, was just a young worker.”

There was a landing of the military in the village of high Cachicamo, where I live, José Antonio disappeared, we looked everywhere and then we went to the prosecutor. They showed me pictures of the last guerrilla buried as NN and he was there. They had placed a gun, military clothing and cartridges. He was shot in the head back and had another shot in the ankle that broke his bone. It’s the worst, the worst that can happen to a mother.”

The movement in the cemetery must have caught the attention of the military of the base, as much that they decided to call Chucho to verify who we were. Soon after Colonel Yunda accompanied by other military came to meet us and to invite us to meet the general.

“Since I arrived – General Perez says – I have not heard complaints about the issue of false positives this is not our cemetery, we are just nearby. Fortunately in this area the war is very clean, force against force, there are deaths but only in regular combats. Our mission is to eliminate the FARC’s Eastern Bloc”.

La Macarena is the part of the country that is undergoing the consolidation plan. Once the army recover areas from the hands of armed groups, the government is trying to consolidate the presence of the Colombian State and all its institutions, to eradicate illicit crops, to create a legal economy and the army begins to fulfill civic duties, trying to win the confidence of the population, after having lost in the years of war.

The problem is that while the army controls the cities, if you move away from urban areas to enter the thick jungle right aside, there is still full of guerrillas. In such an area you can expect loads of killed in action, both sides, but to be sure the only thing is to wait for the special units of the prosecutor office to start digging the immense cemetery of John Doe in La Macarena.




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