Colombia’s Prosecutor General Mario Iguarán revealed Monday his office
is investigating 22,000 cases of people who disappeared during
Colombia’s ongoing violent conflict.
“We are talking about 22,000 people who disappeared in Colombia. We have found 1,040 of them and identified a few hundred of them. One has to conclude that we had a genocide here,” Iguarán told Cali newspaper El País.
The Prosecutor General stressed that the genocide still is going on, using the disappearance and murder of at least Awá indigenous people by the FARC as example.
“What the FARC did was a massacre and looking at these facts one has to conclude that it still isn’t over. What is important and what we must do is bring these crimes to justice and deliver results, not leave them in impunity,” Igusrán added.
The Prosecutor General said his office increased efforts to locate the victims of forced disappearance with the help of relatives and demobilized members of the AUC, the far-right paramilitary organization responsible for many of the disappearances.