San Jose Apartado: Peace Massacred - April 14, 2005
by Javier Giraldo; April 12, 2005
A telephone call I received last February 23 left me shaken and confused. Luis Eduardo Guerra, one of the first and most tenacious leaders of the San Jose de Apartado Peace Community, had disappeared. Another of the community's leaders told me that from what they had been able to find out, it was likely he had been murdered. Groups of people from the community had set off to look for him but held out little hope of finding him alive. More and more calls came in that day and the next until, early on February 25, I traveled to San Jose with Gloria Cuartas, former mayor of the town of Apartado. I went with a heavy heart. By then I knew the bodies of Luis Eduardo, his companion Bellanira and his 11-year-old son, Deiner Andres, had been found. Another of the region's leaders, Alfonso Tuberquia, who I knew and whose son Santiago I had baptized several weeks earlier, had also been murdered alongside his wife and children.
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