By Jane Guskin

In Colombia there is an expression: la paz del cementerio – the peace of the graveyard.

This is the kind of peace that powerful forces enjoy when everyone who resists them is dead and buried.

Colombia’s government and its military and paramilitary forces have spent decades working diligently for this kind of peace. The country is so intent on achieving it that its even dispensed with the graveyard. According to Senator Gloria Inés Ramírez, more than half a million people have been forcibly disappeared in Colombia in the past 33 years. The government’s own “Justice and Peace Unit” has reports of 210,000 forced disappearances, based on complaints lodged by family members between 2006 and mid-2009. That suggests the 500,000 figure may be low; Yanett Bautista of the Nydia Erika Bautista Human Rights Foundation — named for one of the disappeared — estimates that family members have filed complaints in only 10% of the disappearance cases. Of the cases investigated so far, fewer than 2,500 bodies have been located, mostly in mass graves.

CONTINUE LEYENDO (Continue reading) It’s Holiday Shopping Time, while the Peace of the Graveyard Marches on