Talking About Colombia

Yaison Alexander Ducuara Díaz was one year and ten months old when he witnessed men from the AUC, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, murder his parents, Jacinto and Zenaida Ducuara, in rural Colombia. His parents’ corpses were thrown into the river. Ten years later, his grand-father, insistent that his littlest one was alive, found young Yaison in Bogotá with another name, another family, and another life. The paramilitaries had handed over little Yaison to a Christian church who, in turn, delegated a family in the congregation to raise him. The boy had become one more family member to them.

Under Colombia’s National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation, which was created under the Justice and Peace Law, members of illegal armed groups, who voluntarily demobilize, freely testify about their wrong-doings. So it was that, recently, human rights activists found out that the children of victims of paramilitaries, children who were at first reported as disappeared, have, in fact, survived and are being raised by other families. Some children are even raised by the family members of the same people who murdered their families. DNA tests are, sadly, proving the veracity of such heinous acts, and the cases are surfacing throughout Colombia, in Bogotá, Antioquia, Putumayo, Bolivar, and the Plains of los Llanos.

One woman in the countryside said, “I had a little shop where the ‘paras’ used to come and eat. One day, in 2001, they showed up with two children. The girl was two years old. They told me they were children of some campesinos who had done wrong and so they were killed.”

In the town of Hormiga, in Putumayo province, another woman came forward to the authorities last February and confessed she raised a child she was handed over, no questions answered, in 2001. She is rare; families tend to become attached to the child and the child will likely never know his real identity. Unless, like in Argentina and Chile, grand-mommies and grand-daddies campaign hard enough to find their grand-kids; and posters throughout Colombia begin asking, “Do you doubt your identity?” “Do you physically resemble your parents?” So far, with the help of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, 95 Argentines have recovered their identities and have sued the lying milicos genocidas who used to read them bedtime stories and soothe their pains.