The construction of the Santo Eccehomo Cathedral, which spanned some 60 meters long and almost 30 meters wide, would have generated the exhumation without permission of 100 bodies of victims of the armed conflict that were in the city’s new cemetery.
The deputy scientific director of the Institute of Legal Medicine, Carlos Murillo, affirmed that many of these remains were identified and were arbitrarily transferred to four ossuaries.
“Yes, the central cemetery has perhaps the best cathedral in Latin America, but it caused a disaster with the corpses we had there,” Murillo said.
The apparent irregularities would have been evidenced by the report of some bone structures found in the rubble of a dump truck that had arrived in a parking lot from the cemetery.
The exhumations, with the presumed approval of the administration of the cemetery, were made without any permission from Legal Medicine or an order from the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation.
One reason why, according to the forensic entity, the laws that regulate the functions and duties of cemeteries were violated.
“I think that there must be a responsibility of the local administration of Valledupar and the administration of the cemetery so that they answer for what they did, because we are the ones who are looking for resources for something that should not have happened, but that also delays our work. ”, Murillo pointed out.
He also explained that due to the massive removal, the Internal Working Group for the Search, Identification and Surrender of Disappeared Persons, GRUBE, of the Attorney General’s Office, had to carry out 104 exhumations, generating an economic expense.
The official’s reproach arose in the framework of a report that the entity delivered to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, JEP, on the more than three thousand disappeared in the department of Cesar and that this media outlet recently also released. .
Due to the complaint, EL PILÓN contacted the episcopal delegate for the archdiocesan cemeteries of Valledupar, the priest Iber De la Cruz, but until the publication of this article he did not refer to the subject.
Construction of the Valledupar Cathedral began in November 2015 and opened its doors to the public in 2019. But in October 2016, when the Forensic Medicine complaint was made public for the first time, the work coordinators assured that everything was going normally.
Contrary to what was said now by the forensic institute, which assured that there were a total of 100 bodies that were exhumed.