Searching for Lost Lives.
Where killing is a means to many ends.
Óscar Alexander Morales Tejada was 26 years old when he was assassinated and disappeared by soldiers in Northern Colombia in 2008. His parents, Darío and Doris, have been searching for his remains ever since. Óscar Alexander is among the thousands of victims of extrajudicial executions, part of the ‘false positive’ scandal where law enforcement brutally executed civilians. For years, members of the military lured economically disadvantaged or mentally impaired civilians to remote areas with promises of employment, then killed them to inflate body counts for promotions and economic rewards. They presented them as guerrillas killed in battle, or buried them as NN.
Figures released by Colombia's Search Unit for Missing Persons reveal that, over the past sixty years, almost 106,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Colombia. Most of them are still missing today. Impunity is the essence of forced disappearance. There is neither a body nor a motive and, thus, no culprit. It is a silent, almost invisible crime, far from the bloody visual imagery of any armed conflict. Most of the disappeared have been thrown into anonymous mass graves, rivers, mangroves, sugar mills, and crematorium ovens.
Forced disappearance in Colombia, much more prevalent than in the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina, is used as a potent social control tactic. It is a hidden outcome of a complex low-intensity war over territorial control, illicit crops, and economic megaprojects, including hydrocarbons, dams, agribusiness, and tourism. The goal is to eradicate political opposition, and the crime itself, carried out by state agents, members of paramilitary and guerrilla groups, politicians, and civilians benefiting from the strategy. Despite the theoretical era of post-conflict inaugurated in 2016 with the signing of a milestone Peace Agreement between the government and the leftist FARC guerrilla, the disappearance of individuals and the selective assassinations of social leaders and demobilized guerrillas continue to occur on a daily basis. According to authorities, more than 4,000 people were disappeared in 2023 alone.
By exposing the magnitude, systematicity, and impact of this crime, Searching for Lost Lives challenges the 'memoricide' perpetuated by Colombian authorities, who, for decades, have downplayed the existence of the crime itself. It is a quest for truth, justice, and dignity for the disappeared and their families, who have spent decades not only trying to locate their loved ones but also to restore their good name. Even today, most Colombians believe that if a person has been a victim of disappearance, there must be a reason why.
Besides collecting visual fragments of the crime in the landscape turned into a mass grave, during the last ten years, I have photographed the altars that many families have erected in their homes as a way to deal with the ambiguous loss of their loved ones. I have covered marches by relatives demanding justice, and documented part of the Plan Cementerio program, implemented by the authorities to exhume and identify thousands of Colombians buried in public cemeteries nationwide. For decades, victims of extrajudicial crimes were thrown, unregistered, into mass graves in Colombia’s cemeteries, evading discovery and accountability for those responsible. This is what allegedly happened to Oscar Alexander who is presumed to have been illegally buried in the El Copey Alternative Cemetery in the Cesar region. Despite efforts and investigations, authorities have thus far been unable to locate and recover his body.
As Helmuth Santiago Angulo Castañeda, the son of a couple kidnapped and disappeared by the FARC in 2000, once told me, the hope of all the families of the disappeared is to find them alive. But when that is not an option, as in the case of his parents, “you at least try to pick up what is left.”
In 2022, 'Searching for Lost Lives' won an Honorable Mention in the long-term project category at the World Press Photo. In 2024, it was finalist at The Aftermath Project.