Searching for Lost Lives.
Where killing is a means to many ends.
Óscar Alexander Morales Tejada was 26 years old when he was assassinated and disappeared by soldiers in Northern Colombia in 2008. His parents, Darío and Doris, have been searching for his remains ever since. Óscar Alexander is among the thousands of victims of extrajudicial executions, part of the ‘false positive’ scandal where law enforcement brutally executed civilians. For years, members of the military lured economically disadvantaged or mentally impaired civilians to remote areas with promises of employment, then killed them to inflate body counts for promotions and economic rewards. They presented them as guerrillas killed in battle, or buried them as unidentified bodies (UIB).
Figures released by Colombia's Search Unit for Missing Persons reveal that, over the past sixty years, almost 106,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Colombia – with more than 4,000 people disappeared in 2023 alone. Most of them are still missing today. Impunity is the essence of forced disappearance. There is neither a body nor a motive and, thus, no culprit. It is a silent, almost invisible crime, far from the bloody visual imagery of any armed conflict. Most of the disappeared have been thrown into anonymous mass graves, rivers, mangroves, sugar mills, and crematorium ovens.
Forced disappearance in Colombia, much more prevalent than in the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina, is used as a potent social control tactic. It is a hidden outcome of a complex low-intensity war over territorial control, illicit crops, and economic megaprojects, including hydrocarbons, dams, agribusiness, and tourism. The goal is to eradicate political opposition, and the crime itself, carried out by state agents, members of paramilitary and guerrilla groups, politicians, and civilians benefiting from the strategy.
The purpose of the project is twofold: to honor the thousands of disappearance victims and their families, and to raise national and international awareness about the tragedy of forced disappearance in Colombia. By exposing the magnitude, systematicity, and impact of this crime, Searching for Lost Lives challenges the 'memoricide' perpetuated by Colombian authorities, who, for decades, have downplayed the existence of the crime itself. It is a quest for truth, justice, and dignity for the disappeared and their families, who have spent decades not only trying to locate their loved ones but also to restore their good name. Even today, most Colombians believe that if a person has been a victim of disappearance, there must be a reason why.
Besides collecting visual fragments of the crime in the landscape turned into a mass grave, during the last years, I have photographed the altars that many families have erected in their homes as a way to deal with the ambiguous loss of their loved ones. I have covered marches and urban interventions promoted by relatives demanding justice, and documented part of the Plan Cementerio program, implemented by the authorities to exhume and identify thousands of Colombians buried in public cemeteries nationwide. For decades, victims of extrajudicial crimes were thrown, unregistered, into anonymous mass graves in Colombia’s cemeteries, evading discovery and accountability for those responsible. This is what happened to Óscar Alexander. His remains and those of another 61 people were recovered in the El Copey Alternative Cemetery between 2022 and 2023. Oscar's body wasn't identified until early 2024.
As Helmuth Santiago Angulo Castañeda, the son of a couple kidnapped and disappeared by the FARC in 2000, once told me, the hope of all the families of the disappeared is to find them alive. But when that is not an option, as in the case of his parents, “you at least try to pick up what is left.”
*In 2022, 'Searching for Lost Lives' won an Honorable Mention in the long-term project category at the World Press Photo. In 2024, it was finalist at The Aftermath Project.