The Bones of Mendihuaca, in Winter VQR

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.

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Close to the Bone: Searching for Justice in Colombia

In the Sierra Nevada, 2007

I've got a brief on the forgotten victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia in this month's Walrus, Canadian magazine of the year winner.

SIERRA NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA — I’m trudging down the lower slopes above the city of Santa Marta with a black plastic bag of human bones dangling like a scarf bundle from the handle of my shovel. An assistant to the forensic anthropologist I’ve been shadowing for the past eight days — a big, ribald gravedigger — stops on a ridge overlooking the misty clouds that have rolled in off the Caribbean, and laughs. “Do you want me to carry Doña Tulia?” he asks. That’s what we have taken to calling the woman we exhumed two days ago, a likely victim of paramilitary violence. “Tulia’s no trouble,” I say, more spooked by my nonchalance than by the bones.

Read the rest here. Or buy the Walrus -- great publication.