Disappearances

Colombia’s decades of conflict have caused more “disappeared” than South America’s military dictatorships put together, and the anguish still goes on, as the “living dead” leave hundreds of thousands of survivors in the grip of mental anguish, psychologists say.

“The disappearance of someone is like torture, night and day,” says Judith Cassallas, her voice breaking.

Almost 11 years ago, her daughter — three months pregnant — and her husband went to spend a weekend in a tourist village near Cali. They never came back.

All trace of Mary Johana Cassallas, 21, and Jose Duque, 25, were lost in the violence of a more than five-decade war. They have become another statistic among 83,000 Colombians, according to the Latin American country’s National Center for Historical Memory. It’s a problem the country’s new president will inherit after Sunday’s election.

The number of disappeared at the hands of the parties to the conflict — leftist guerrillas, right wing paramilitaries and the security forces — is almost thrice those of the dictatorship of Argentina, Brazil and Chile put together. According to the latest figures, those amount to a combined 32,300 people. Mary Johana is one of those people who “left her home one day and of whom we know nothing more since,” says anthropologist Myriam Jimeno.

“In the case of the missing ... the most serious problem is the unfinished mourning. It’s a wound that does not heal,” said Jimeno, emeritus professor at Bogota’s National University.

Specialised psychologists have been deployed in Cali and Puerto Asis, in the southwestern department of Putumayo, another of the conflict’s flashpoints. To date, around 100 patients have had therapy that, through speech, dance and art, aims to make absence bearable.