Ten years have passed since the kidnapping of Reynaldo and Guillermo Cordón, José Losada and the drivers Edward Ipuz, Camilo Casas and Jesús López, held and disappeared by the Farc in 2003.
This Saturday, their relatives gathered to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their kidnappings in a religious ceremony. Despite having a possible location of their bodies, there are still no guarantees so that they can go looking for them, because in the area indicated by the same peace signatories, there is a presence of FARC dissidents.
“Uncle, good year or bad year?” That was the question that every midnight on December 31, Ángela asked her uncle, the merchant Reynaldo Cordón Herrera. And he, the prankster of her family, asked her to wish him a good year, as if convincing her that this would be the amulet of her success. But that custom of uncle and niece came to an end a few days after receiving the year 2003, on January 22, when the extinct Farc guerrilla kidnapped him in the middle of a trip from Neiva to the south of Meta, where he was distributing grains and groceries.
Two days earlier, in that same area, the formerly armed group had detained Reynaldo’s brother-in-law, also a merchant José Arbelay Losada, along with three of his drivers: Edward Ipuz, Camilo Casas and Jesús López.
The families were barely assimilating the impact of these events when, a month later, Guillermo Cordón Herrera, Reynaldo’s brother and Ángela’s father, traveled to that region to look for his loved ones and ended up being kidnapped.
In captivity, the Farc murdered the three merchants and the three Huila drivers, whose bodies are still missing, despite the existence of information about their possible location.
Families are still waiting for their bodies.
On Saturday, January 28, 2023, their families gathered at the San Vicente de Paul church, in Neiva, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their kidnapping and demand that the State expedite the search efforts.
“Our demand, after two decades of struggle in this search process, is that, through the peace talks that are being carried out with the so-called General Staff of the FARC, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace requests within One of the commitments is the opening of a humanitarian corridor so that the Unit for the Search for Persons Deemed Disappeared (UBPD) can prospect and exhume the remains,” says Ángela Cordón, who was 14 years old when her father was kidnapped, her uncle and his colleagues.
As Colombia+20 recounted, the request for this humanitarian corridor is based on the fact that two years ago the UBPD established the possible location of their bodies, in the Yarí plains, but due to the presence of Farc dissidents it has been impossible Make your search come true.
It is very important for us to recover their bodies and give them a Christian burial, to free ourselves from uncertainty, from such strong calm, to begin to grieve and heal wounds.
“Disappearance leaves many traces in a family: wondering how you can live with such a strong absence, how you can get ahead in the midst of so much pain. It is a footprint that marks your life in a before and after. It is very important for us to recover their bodies and give them a Christian burial, to free ourselves from uncertainty, from such strong calm, to start mourning and healing wounds”, says Ángela.
How were the kidnappings?
On January 22, 2003, Reynaldo Cordón traveled from Neiva, where he lived, to La Macarena, in the south of Meta, to deliver a shipment of rice, beans and other food for the municipality’s trade. He had been trading in that region for more than 10 years, until that day members of the Eastern Bloc of the extinct FARC guerrilla kidnapped him.
Just two days before, the guerrillas detained José Arbelay Losada Montenegro, who flew from Bogotá to La Macarena to meet Edward Ipuz, Camilo Casas and Jesús Alberto López, the drivers with whom he worked and who also remained in the hands of the Farc.
A month later, Guillermo Cordón Herrera was reportedly summoned by a guerrilla commander to receive information about his brother Reynaldo, his brother-in-law, and the three transporters, but, like them, he never returned.