Limbo
Over the past sixty years, 137,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Colombia. Today, more than 15,000 forensic search sites are scattered across the country—places where missing persons may lie buried in anonymity*. The disappeared and their loved ones have been condemned to inhabit a gray zone, a limbo between life and death.
According to Anne Huffschmid, the disappeared belong to a ghostly category, occupying a non-place: a limbo. They are neither alive nor dead. Disappearance also extends into the spatial realm: the disappeared are nowhere and everywhere at once. Their remains, scattered across Colombia’s vast geography, inhabit the limbo of our inability to imagine them. Forced disappearance deprives families of mourning, that most elemental of human acts. Relatives, caught in unresolved and suspended grief, often say they do not even have a bone to say goodbye to. Each day, they are consumed by the ambiguous loss of their loved ones and the agonising question of whether they are alive or dead, whether they are hungry or cold. The father of one disappeared person described it this way: “For 1,107 nights, I have thought of 1,107 different ways my son might have died”. This uncertainty is not collateral damage; it is the crime itself.
The fate of the disappeared lies in the hands of those who determined what became of them— State agents, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and other actors seeking control. In Colombia, forced disappearance has been more widespread and, tragically, more persistent than under the dictatorships of Chile or Argentina. It is the hidden outcome of a protracted, low-intensity war linked to counterinsurgency policies, territorial control, illicit economies, and megaprojects in the hydrocarbon, tourism, and agribusiness sectors. Sustained by impunity, forced disappearance leaves no bodies, no evidence, and no one to hold accountable. It is an invisible and silent crime. The perfect crime.
For years, I have travelled across Colombia, through towns and territories turned into mass graves and clandestine burial sites. I have photographed families who are still waiting for answers after decades of searching. I have joined protest marches and commemorations, annual reminders that Alice, Gerardo, Roberto Antonio, and so many others never came home. I have also documented forensic work and the Plan Cementerio, a state programme through which Colombian authorities exhume and identify thousands of people buried anonymously in cemeteries. Many of these sites hold the remains of victims of extrajudicial executions who were thrown into unmarked mass graves, with no record of their burial, in an effort to conceal them forever and ensure that those responsible could never be brought to justice.
By revealing the scale, systematic nature, and profound impact of forced disappearance, Limbo confronts the memoricide perpetrated by Colombian authorities, who for decades have sought to minimize or erase its existence. This approach echoes Georges Didi-Huberman’s reflection in Images in Spite of All: “[...] we must contemplate them, take them on, and try to comprehend them. Images in spite of all: in spite of our own inability to look at them as they deserve; in spite of our own world, full, almost choked, with imaginary commodities”. Through images, the unimaginable becomes comprehensible, absence is given a face, and we are able to recognise what had remained invisible. Images so that what happened is not reduced to something that never existed. The project honours the disappeared and the families who have spent decades searching for their loved ones and fighting to restore their good name. Even today, many Colombians continue to believe that if someone has been disappeared, “there must have been a reason”—an assumption that only deepens the injustice.
Limbo captures the frustration of trying to assemble an impossible puzzle. It is a visual tribute to absence and a sustained act of bearing witness.
*According to data from October 2026 provided by the Search Unit for Persons Reported Missing (UBPD).
**In 2022, the project won an Honorable Mention in the long-term project category at the World Press Photo. In 2024, it was finalist at The Aftermath Project, won the Women Photograph Grant and the Italian Council 13. In 2026, Limbo received an Honorable Mention from the International Women's Media Foundation's 2026 Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award.