The family immediately rented a boat and began searching the river. A pilot working for the National Coffee Federation, he had disappeared with his brother in Tulua a week earlier while traveling north from Cali. The latest victim lying in the cemetery is among the few with a known history. Of the hundreds of corpses that have washed up on the river bank below Marsella, only 8% to 10% have been identified, usually by family members traveling to the hillside town. Fingers are often cut off for good measure. The butchery is meant to keep the body underwater long enough to make identification impossible. The killers had cut it open along the trunk in order to fill the gaping cavity with stones. The body recently awaiting burial at Marsella’s cemetery resembled hundreds of others found in the river. “I can’t say anything about what I’ve seen on the river because the killers will come after me.” “Whoever murdered these people and threw them in the river meant for them to disappear,” said one fisherman near Marsella. Now, fishermen on the river will look for a cadaver only if paid by the victim’s family. Two fishermen who recovered Fernandez’s body were later killed by the mafia. The military carried them out, sources say, adding that at least one army officer was given a farm in payment for his participation.īut the horror did not end there. The guerrillas had been extorting money from large landholders, including traffickers, who ordered the killings. Human rights sources both inside and outside the government now say that drug traffickers suspected Fernandez and the others of helping leftist guerrillas belonging to the National Liberation Army. Of the 25 people missing, 17 were found dead in the Cauca River, including the town’s priest, Father Tiberio Fernandez. “What the drug traffickers have done is to strengthen the extreme right wing in the valley,” said Alfredo Vargas, a Bogota human rights lawyer born in Tulua.Īn example of the scope of the violence came in April, 1990, when people began disappearing from the town of Trujillo, 50 miles north of Cali. Valle del Cauca suffers the highest rate of disappearances involving alleged participation by government security forces of any state in Colombia, according to a report released in September by the Colombian attorney general’s office. Human rights officials and residents say that drug barons, in alliance with other large landholders, control police and military officials through a combination of bribes and threats, and they add that the army and police are sometimes involved in the disappearances, murders and other violence in the region. Just as the Medellin cartel bought large stretches of land in central Colombia, the Cauca Valley traffickers have divided much of their region into small fiefdoms centered on towns such as Tulua. It turned out to be only a neighbor stopping by. “Hide your notebooks,” the woman told two visiting journalists. A knock at the door caused more than slight panic. “Those people have been in cemeteries for some time now.”Īs she spoke, she glanced nervously at her living room window each time someone passed outside. “There used to be people here who were very brave in speaking out against the mafia,” said a woman who lives in the town of Tulua. Residents of the valley’s towns speak fearfully of the cocaine mafia as a grim reaper that sweeps away opponents and enforces a deadly silence. “The majority of violence in the valley is committed by drug traffickers protecting their interests,” said Carlos Alberto Mejia, the regional attorney general for Valle del Cauca state. Now, drug trafficking is largely responsible. Once, political strife and land disputes led to bloodshed. The nature of the killing has also changed. The problem abated for years and then suddenly grew far worse in the late 1980s. Bodies began turning up in the river as early as the 1940s, when Colombia entered a decade of bloody civil war known as “La Violencia.” In and around Cali, there’s nothing random about it-if the mafia doesn’t like you, you just disappear.”ĭisappearing often means winding up in the Cauca River, which meanders through the valley. “In Medellin, a person can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He adds that while Medellin traffickers may blow up a bus of people to kill one perceived enemy, Cauca Valley traffickers are much more sophisticated, focused and, above all, quiet. “The valley is the most dangerous region in Colombia in terms of drug violence,” said a law enforcement official who has traveled frequently in the area.
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