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Pueblo Bello: 25 years after the massacre

3 February 2015
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On 14 January 1990, 60 paramilitaries came to Pueblo Bello and took away 43 men. In Pueblo Bello it is said that men were exchanged for cattle, because the guerrillas had stolen 23 cows from Fidel Castaño, and he paid them back with these farmers’ lives.
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On 14 January 1990, 60 paramilitaries came to Pueblo Bello and took away 43 men. In Pueblo Bello it is said that men were exchanged for cattle, because the guerrillas had stolen 23 cows from Fidel Castaño, and he paid them back with these farmers’ lives.

  • On 14 January 1990, 60 paramilitaries came to Pueblo Bello and took away 43 men. In Pueblo Bello it is said that men were exchanged for cattle, because the guerrillas had stolen 23 cows from Fidel Castaño, and he paid them back with these farmers’ lives.
  • In 2015, 25 years after the massacre, the families gathered in Pueblo Bello. Some of them told how they had not been back to the village for 20 years. The commemoration started with an ecumenical ceremony in memory of the victims.
  • Kati Milena Fuentas Macea lost her father, Wilson Uberto Fuentes Marimon, that night in 1990. She called on the State to implement the 2006 sentence of the Inter-American Court. She asked for a search for loved ones, reparations in terms of housing and healthcare, and a monument to their memory designed by the family members.
  • When the families left the church, they unfolded a banner showing photographs of the 43 men disappeared.
  • Jose Daniel Alvarez recalled the night that they took his father, when he was in the village visiting his mother. “We have been afraid, we have also been angry. This phrase stays in my mind, when the next day we went to the base at San Pedro de Uraba y and the commander said to me: they have exchanged people for cattle.”
  • After the ceremony, we walked to the wall of memory.
  • The wall of memory was filled with roses. There you can see the faces of the 43 disappeared.
  • Pedro Luis Escobar Duarte told us the tragic story that he lived through that night, when they took his two brothers who were 16 and 24 years old.
  • A group of young students from Pueblo Bello interpreted a play recalling what happened that night and in which they bet on a future where no person would have to live something like that again.
  • A woman from Pueblo Bello narrates the different massacres that took place nearby. Throughout history all the armed actors have wrought violence against the local population.
  • We say goodbye to Pueblo Bello, their people and their stories. After an emotional day in which what triumphed were the memories of all the victims whom, to this day, are disappeared.
  • And life goes on in Pueblo Bello, meanwhile the victims’ families wish that nobody in Colombia will have to go through the pain that they went through and still go through, as 37 of the disappeared have yet to be found.
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