Colombian military escort the forensic team in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta.
In its Winter 2009 issue, the Virginia Quarterly Review publishes my report on the exhumation of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia. Complex, gruesome and under-reported, the injustices of Colombia's vast paramilitary power remain unresolved. Here's what happens when the trappings of order are cynically deployed in a lawless land.
Maira Alejandra Martínez Suarez is sweeping away another layer of dirt when the bullets come flying overhead. She’s twenty-six years old, and with her French braid tucked under a brand-new baseball cap, she looks more like a rec-league softball pitcher than a forensic anthropologist under fire. She grabs her shovel, paintbrush, and dustpan and, standing in an open grave, peeks over the ledge of moist earth. She scans for incoming fire across the clearing dotted with body-sized rectangular pits. Her Colombian army bodyguards, belly-down, shoot out into the surrounding brush. A ranch corral is too far for escape. She crouches, comes eye to eye with a silver tooth in a half-buried skull and starts to pray, lying in a grave she’s digging.Subscription required to read the full story. Better yet, support VQR with a newsstand purchase.
