In an act of reconciliation, reparation and truth, the Colombian Attorney General's Office symbolically returned the bodies of eight Christian leaders who were murdered and buried in a mass grave in a rural area of the municipality of Calamar in the department of Guaviare.

The event was held in the Legal Medicine auditorium in the city of Villavicencio, in the department of Meta, and was presided by the Guaviare sectional director, the case prosecutor and a specialised prosecutor, as well as psychology officials from the Technical Investigation Corps (CTI).

During the ceremony, they handed over documents and certificates of full identification of the bodies, and described the procedure for the location and recovery of the bodies.

The victims were identified as Jesús and Carlos Valero, Marivel Silva, Maryuri Hernández, Isaid Gómez, Óscar Hernández, Nixon Peñaloza Chacón and James Caicedo.

Religious and social leaders

The victims were “from peasant families who preached the gospel in community spaces rather than in large churches, but who were strong leaders within their own communities”, stated the Attorney General's Office.

The eight of them were members of the Evangelical Alliance of Colombia (DEAC) and the evangelical movement of the Foursquare Church (ICCG).

They were not only spiritual leaders, but also social leaders who developed community support projects.

Nixon Peñalosa, for example, was president of the Agua Bonita Community Action Board and DEAC treasurer. Isaíd Gómez and his wife Maribel Silva were both preachers, and James Caicedo was a former pastor of the ICCG and a spiritual leader in the area.

How did it happen?

The eight victims had arrived in Guaviare from Arauca, which sparked a “criminal paranoia” as the killers believed they were members of the National Liberation Army (ELN) attempting to enter the province.

Two of the victims were summoned by members of the Armando Ríos Front of the Central General Staff, led by alias Iván Mordisco. Three days later, the other six were also summoned on the pretext of verifying possible links with the ELN. They were interrogated and killed by the FARC dissidents.

The prosecutor said that the victims “were forced to dig their own graves before being executed on an accusation that, according to the ongoing investigation, was totally unfounded”.

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