“They want to cover one thing with another, but our very skin is marked by what we lived through in Comuna 13.”
Q&A with activist and poet Luz Elena Salas on Medellín's Comuna 13 and the 'Escobarisation' of the neighbourhood - and on writing as resistance against denialism and indifference
Today, something from my adopted home city: Medellín. This week, the neighbourhood of Comuna 13 has hit the headlines due to the ‘Escobarisation’ of its tourism - it’s a part of the city which has been subject to so much marketing, propaganda, and parachute journalism that it has become difficult to see the place or its history with any clarity.
So here are some words from someone who has lived it in her own skin - from bullet holes in her front door and the murder of her son to the activism and displacement that followed.
Luz Elena Salas has spent decades campaigning for those who were forcibly disappeared from Comuna 13 - including her own son, who was killed by paramilitary groups. She has watched history happen, and seen how memory is made, destroyed, and re-invented. Luz has rendered her experiences of place, time, and history in poetry - in two collections, Luz en medio de las sombras (2023) and Palabras de Luz (2020).
Luz and I had a coffee here in Medellín, and she shared some of her story with me - I’ve translated a few of her poems here, too.
Comuna 13 felt the presence of armed groups as early as the 1980s, occupied by various militia and guerrilla groups, escalating in the 1990s when the urban strategies of the FARC and the ELN consolidated.
These groups were in constant conflict with paramilitary groups which controlled parts of the city: the neighbourhood was (and still is) strategically key as a trafficking corridor between Medellín and the coast, via Urabá.
In 2002, Comuna 13 was subjected to Colombia’s largest ever urban military incursion: Operation Orion.
It was just one of a number of state attacks on the entire community - carried out in participation with the city’s biggest paramilitary groups, to whom the area was then handed over, including the Bloque Cacique Nutibara, led by alias Don Berna.
The period directly following Orion saw the highest number of forced disappearances during the civil conflict, and Comuna 13 has remained a neighbourhood heavily disputed by armed groups, causing grim numbers of violent deaths as well as attacks on community leaders - most of which crimes were committed in total impunity.
This ‘retaking of the neighbourhood’ from guerrilla groups was the launch of then-President Álvaro Uribe’s ‘Democratic Security’ policy and set the tone for much of what was to follow during his mandate. For more on the consequences of that policy, check out my feature on the ‘False Positives’ murders, written for DG Magazine earlier this year.
Years later - even as tourists started to flock to Comuna 13 to hear the stories of urban transformation amid cable cars, electric stairs, and brightly-coloured graffiti - the women of the Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad collective were still seeking their dead and missing loved ones - ignored by the state and continually threatened and displaced for their activism.
If you’re interested in Comuna 13 and Operation Orion, the Corporación Jurídica Libertad has published an excellent report, ‘Comuna 13: Memorias de un territorio en resistencia’, and writer Pablo Montoya published a complex and fascinating novel last year, too - ‘La Sombra de Orión’.
So, Luz, when did you start writing?
Initially, I was resistant to writing about my experiences: your mother dies and you’re left an orphan, your husband dies and you’re left a widow – but what do I call myself after the disappearance of my son? When I couldn’t even say goodbye him, what name could I give that? I didn’t have the words.
But I was invited to a writing workshop in 2017 at the Museo Casa de la Memoria, and they told me to give it a go, so I did. And so it came out of me – ‘Te Espero’ – my first poem, written from my son’s point of view about how he might feel watching me search for him.
I am waiting for you
I am waiting for you, beautiful Mother. I want to tell you that I, here in my deathly shadow, also feel alone, sad, and bereaved, when you wake me from my deep sleep with your pained weeping. I feel the impotence of not being able to dry your tears. I miss your love, your affection, and even your reprimands. / When you again wake me with your inconsolable heart, I ask myself once more why they didn’t let me say goodbye to you, or look into your eyes for the last time. / Eyes in which I could see a love as vast and deep as the grief you feel for my departure, though I think it is better this way: laid in a coffin, I would also have suffered to see your heart broken into a thousand pieces and to see your body doubled in pain. I want to remember you solid, strong, and smiling. / Mother, when I see you so sad and alone, I escape myself for a moment, like a shooting star, and I enter your dreams to console you. Do you remember when we would watch the stars together on moonlit nights? / I want to tell you, Mother, that I am walking by your side, though you don’t see me, I console and relieve you through my presence in your memories. / When you cry at night, in the solitude of your room, I come through the window like a gentle breeze, and wipe your tears. But you don’t see me. Why don’t you see me? / I am waiting for you at the start of the path, so that you don’t get lost, so that you are happy again. / In my deepest sleep, I see you walking and you take my hand. You walk with me through beautiful meadows, as green as your eyes. / The flowers have the colour of your lips and the trees are the colour of your skin. The song of the birds mixes with your voice and the flowers release your scent, Mother. The grass is soft, and doesn’t hurt your feet as you walk on it. The wind is gentle and sweet like the the lullaby of your voice. / Keep walking, strong and sure, Mother. At the end of the path I’ll be waiting for you, to take your hands in mine and never let you go again.
(‘Te Espero’ by Luz Elena Salas, translated by Emily Hart)
I liked writing a lot. I kept going. I wrote during the moments when I wanted to kill myself. I couldn’t cope with all the pain. It was one thing on top of another – my son disappeared, and then a year later, my grandson - his only son - was killed, beaten to death by his own stepfather - still a toddler.
Then came love – the love of my neighbourhood, of Comuna 13. It all started to flow from there.
One poem was inspired by a single word someone said to me; alucinaciones – hallucinations. People have accused me of making things up, even experiences I literally carry the scars of - scars which prove I have lived through them.
People who haven’t lived through the sort of things I have lived through find it hard to believe they could happen. People living here now don’t know and can’t imagine everything we lived through.
In Comuna 13, we lived through things that even I ask myself how we survived.
Comuna 13 has become a tourism hotspot, now a destination for dance and music, artesanal beer, and the story of the post-conflict transformation via Medellín’s much-mythologised metro etc…
But how does it feel having lived through so much there, and still not having had justice for what you suffered at the hands of the state just for being a resident of that barrio, then a heavily-stigmatised neighbourhood due to the presence of left-wing guerrilla groups?
It drives me mad to see stuff about Pablo Escobar there – his chapter was the 1980s. It has nothing to do with us.
The violence we lived was in 2002, why don’t they recognise that violence as it really was? … Caused by (then-President) Álvaro Vélez Uribe, Marta Lucía Ramírez, and Luis Pérez.
They want to cover one thing up with another. Sure, they’ve fixed the houses and built some stairs, but it doesn’t deny the truth: that our very skin is marked by what we lived through there.
It’s incomprehensible to me. How can they do it? Selling stuff off the back of what we lived, which doesn’t even relate to our history?
So let’s talk about that history: the military operations of 2002 - particularly Operation Orion, you lived through it all in Comuna 13.
From February of 2002, we would hear shootouts from nightfall to 5am.
I had the roof broken from bullets and the front door even had a hole in it. They’d cut off our power or we’d even shut off the lights ourselves, so it seemed like there was nobody home.
During Operation Orion, they bombed us via land, air - from everywhere. And the day after, the operations continued - and they were taking away young people.
When I saw that, I wanted to leave with my own three sons, I said ‘pack what you can fit in a bag,’ and we ran - but the army were on every road, the police too. Somehow we managed to get out. It was like God had made us invisible.
But after Operation Orion, it didn’t end: the police and army left us an inheritance: the paramilitary – hanging around everywhere. They’re the ones who took my son – Damián David, though we always called him Pacho, the second of my three sons.
On the 15th January 2007, Pacho and I ate together. He was quiet, a homebody - he smoked a lot. He was always so thoughtful, attentive, so kind to me. Afterwards, I thought he gone to smoke a cigarette or play pool, but he didn’t come back. So I began to look for him.
Looking for you
Dedicated to all the victims who remain in the tireless search for their disappeared
I see your face on every person.
I hear your voice calling in the cooing of the waves.
I see you in every sunset.
I see you in every sunrise.
I search for you every night in my dreams,
But you have gone without a goodbye.
It hurts so much to hear nothing from you,
Though your voice arrives to me in my dreams and I would choose not to wake,
And to keep dreaming of you,
Now that it’s the only way to be with you.
I keep looking for you on that path which leads nowhere.
I look for you in the impenetrable rock and ask if you are hidden inside, but it does not respond to me.
I ask the beggar on the street, who only glances indifferently at the photo of you hung around my neck.
I ask the wind and it whispers that it has not seen you.
Since the day you were taken, I ask the insistent sun, who looks at me sadly, but says nothing.
I ask the moon, who tells me she was so afraid that she hid herself behind a cloud, because she was not brave enough to face the events unravelling, that she wanted to run and tell me, but was sure I wouldn’t believe her, and didn’t have the right words to say to me.
I ask the ground, who tells me he doesn’t know anything, that he’s already forgotten whether you passed by here. But he knows I’ll never forget you, that I’ll keep searching, and that he’ll be a refuge for my tired feet when it’s all over.
(‘Buscándote’, Luz Elena Salas, translated by Emily Hart)
Pacho had told me that the paramilitaries were going to kill him, that they wanted him to work for them, and that he refused.
My husband was an addict for many years, and I couldn’t handle that situation any more, so I’d left him by the time they took Pacho. I had to search alone. And this was before I had women’s group, before we had each other’s support - it was another seven years before I gained that network.
Even while I was looking for him, I dreamt of him. He’d say to me, “Mum, don’t cry for me – I’m alive.”
Ten months later, I was told that they had found him, buried in the Universal Cemetery as ‘NN’ - no name. They matched his remains to my DNA. He had been buried in a plastic bag - imagine, my son buried like a dog.
In a way, though, it was a relief to have certainty - to finally know, but what I can’t process is that I’ll never have that last goodbye, to see his body and grieve the loss - all those rituals which you do when someone dies, to assimilate and accept the death.
I haven’t looked into exactly what happened to Pacho – there’s not much to be gained by that. He’s dead and nobody can bring him back to us.
I still dream of Pacho now, he appears in my kitchen. But now when he speaks to me, he reminds me that he is dead.
I Can't Forget You
I wander, indifferent, through the world
Carrying a great pain here in my chest,
And until I die,
Only your memory shall dwell in my mind.
Leave me here, cruel gravedigger!
How can you tell a mother that her son,
Her beloved son, has been buried
In a plastic bag.
Not even among animals is there such cruelty.
Oh! cruel gravedigger,
You live among the dead, but still
you are human.
Now, as though it is nothing, you tell me
That it is only by mathematical calculation
We can find my son’s grave,
Oh, cruel gravedigger!
And then you say that we have to walk
Through the mud
And take care not to fall into another tomb.
It's a cold and rainy day,
Mystifying.
Sweet son of mine, the bells won't toll for you
And I cannot go with you to your eternal home.
Because evils exists here on earth
In those who walk among the living.
My sweet son, you were always my companion,
What sadness,
You left a great sorrow alive in me
And until I die
I'll never be happy.
What deep grief you gave me
And what a profound emptiness I feel here in my soul.
How great is my brokenness,
That I am left here alone in this cemetery.
There was no helping hand,
I'm as lonely as you are,
How I wish there was a remedy to ease my pain,
How I wish,
Oh, cruel gravedigger,
To fall asleep forever in this dark graveyard.
My soul cries out,
Oh, cruel gravedigger!
Let this be my lair
Till death surprises me,
So that I may join you, my sweet son.
(No puedo olvidarte, Luz Elena Salas, translated by Emily Hart)
The women’s collective, Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad, has been hugely important in the struggle for justice for Comuna 13 and the disappeared of that neighbourhood.
The group managed to oblige the government to start a new search for remains in La Escombrera, a rubble pile overlooking the neighbourhood, where you believe there are bodies of numerous disappeared young men.
They also, just this week, managed to get approval for a new conflict reparations plan, including a physical HQ for the collective and ongoing human rights training.
So what’s next for you in the fight for historical justice?
The group, we cry together, we can break down together as well as support one another and bring calm. We have the sensitivity to accompany one another, understand one another. I felt awkward when I first joined, but hearing how we had all lost sons, husbands, loved ones - there’s a little comfort there.
It has been hard, but they have heard us, and we have finally forced them to search La Escombrera – in 2015 and again now. And it’s legally binding: whether they like it or not, they have to carry out this search.
La Escombrera, overlooking Medellín, photo courtesy of the JEP
So it has been worth it to be so insistent. The determination of women has made history.
But some people call us crazy old ladies who just want money – as if the lives of our children can be valued in money… I’ve heard people saying they should spend the money they’re spending on the excavation on roads or a project for women instead, but for the mothers of those missing, even a small bone – a fingernail – of their loved one is worth more than all the gold in the world.
Some of these women still don’t know whether or not their children are dead. You only really believe it when you have proof, otherwise you keep hope: you call, you knock on doors, you wander around the neighbourhood and go to hospitals.
Photo courtesy of the JEP
I had a dream after the last excavation, that all of the dead - all dead things - make a noise, and that if we learn to search, we will find.
I have a sensibility to dreams, I think if the dead want to communicate, they can - so that they can rest.
We women have powerful intuition. I dreamt my ex-husband was having an affair – I dreamt of the girl. He called me crazy – but exactly as I dreamt her, there she was.
They can call me crazy or demented – but I have a lot of faith. I think they’ll find something up there in La Escombrera, to vindicate us – to prove that we aren’t crazy.
And we’re still going, some making art, writing or singing. It has allowed us to discover things about ourselves which we otherwise might not have known – powers we didn’t know we had.
How can Colombia heal from so much violence and loss?
It’s complicated, because you can only heal if they stop committing crimes against you. Some of these wounds do not heal.
Where is the justice? It’s difficult to have hope when so much has happened - and when so much keeps on happening. Justice doesn’t exist – the guy who killed my grandson is already out of prison – and people leave prisons more criminal than they went in: the corruption and drug use is enormous.
I don’t believe in justice really - at least not in life or here on Earth. The people who have hurt us live much better than us, and we’ve lost everything - many of us displaced, now elderly and lacking in basic resources, even to eat breakfast.
But if we are looking for peace and non-repetition, maybe that’s the way forward. I do not want these things to happen to other mothers, to other women.
You’ve campaigned and spoken out and been displaced multiple times - it is no longer safe for you to live in Comuna 13 - so where do you get the strength?
Of course, sometimes I’m really afraid – but how can you stay quiet when these things happen? For the dignity of young people, who had dreams and plans - my son wanted to be a doctor. I’ve been displaced numerous times – the last time was last year, in November, the armed groups accused me of being a police informant.
There’s an indignation which comes with age. It outrages you, the cowardice of heavily armed men. You lose your fear in those moments. But sometimes, for your own safety and that of your children, you have to say quiet. When I was sexually assaulted, they threatened me, saying ‘think about your son.’ So I stayed quiet about it.
But staying quiet about so much that has happened to me has made me sick. I’m a healthy person, but I ended up ill – in open heart surgery. My heart is broken – literally broken. Of course it had to be my heart - broken from so much suffering.
The medics thought it was a small rip, but they opened me up and it was huge. They told me they couldn’t understand how I was still alive.
About twenty women from the women’s group are dead now, more than a few are fighting cancer. I myself haven’t been in the group for a lot of this year for health reasons.
But I’m still writing, and this is what moves me to keep on: those who are still waiting, all the obstacles we are still facing, the denialism even in the face of the witness statements – even in the face of confessions of perpetrators.
Writing is a form of healing for me – to express myself here in these poems which have been the only way I could get these things out.
The writing fights against indifference too. There are still people who look for logic, or reasons these things happened – even looking to blame us, not understanding how random and precarious life can be in contexts like the one we lived through up there in Comuna 13.
Photo courtesy of the JEP
Life
I don't know when you'll be done
With me, Life.
Your pursuit exhausts me,
It weakens me,
But you will not defeat me.
Throughout my existence,
I have been fighting
Many battles
Because you always want to be
At war with me.
I don't deny that at times I feel like
I am running out of strength
And I even find it hard to breathe.
But do not fear, Life,
I will not escape.
I will have new strength
To face you,
I won't give you the pleasure of seeing me
Destroyed;
I will have wings like an eagle's
To fly high.
And if, in that flight, my wings break,
I'll stay in the highest canopy
until they heal and are restored.
Life, though the tempest wants to drown me,
I will stay afloat,
I'll cling to the branches and trunks I find in my path;
I know, Life, that you want to take advantage of
My fragility in order to destroy me.
But have you ever wondered what will happen when I,
though I am now bent over,
rise up, throw back my shoulders,
and look you in the face?
I swear to you,
At least for a while,
You will have to let me rest.
(Vida, Luz Elena Salas, translated by Emily Hart)
You can buy Luz’ poetry books directly from her - write to me here (via Substack) or comment below and I’ll connect you!
In 2021, I was part of a team which created a museum exhibition about the mythology around Medellín’s metro and the sense of transformation which it has come to embody: I wrote a related article for the Bogotá Post - ‘Medellín’s miracle transformation: a half-told story’ - read it here
Extremely moving story, this, Emily and Luz Elena. Thank you.