Colombia's Secret War Against Civilians

Latino USA

My Cultura, Futuro and iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Years ago, Gloria Martinez’s son went out to look for a job and never came back. Gloria would spend months searching for him, and she wasn’t alone—many others, mostly young men from rural and poor urban areas, also mysteriously disappeared. In 2008, the “false-positives” scandal broke—and revealed that the Colombian military had been systematically killing innocent civilians as part of a body-count policy they adopted in the conflict against the FARC, a leftist guerilla group. But over a decade after the scandal was exposed, relatives of the victims continue to seek justice.

This episode originally aired in December 2019.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey Latino USA Lister, here's a show from Nuestros Archivos.
0:19.8	This past September, I want to go visit Gloria Martinez in her home in Bogotá, Colombia.
0:25.7	Gloria meets me with a smile and a warm hug.
0:30.7	She's in the small rustic kitchen, frying up some eggs.
0:34.0	It's her birthday today.
0:40.7	She jokes that she's turning 15.
0:43.0	She tells me she has mixed feelings about celebrating her birthday.
0:52.5	Birthdays are really the only thing she celebrates anymore.
0:55.5	She says sometimes she doesn't like to celebrate because everything changed for her when
0:59.6	something unthinkable happened to her family nearly 12 years ago.
1:06.7	The story of what happened starts on an early February morning in 2008.
1:12.1	Gloria was just getting home after working her third shift at the soap factory and her
1:17.0	son Daniel was waiting for her.
1:23.5	He told his mom he wanted to have breakfast with her.
1:26.5	He was up early that morning because he was going to turn in his resume.
1:33.5	Gloria told him, you keep insisting with that?
1:36.9	Daniel was 19, her only son, and eager to help out in the house.
1:41.2	He didn't want Gloria to have to work anymore.
1:44.1	But despite the family not having much, Gloria tried to tell her son.
1:47.6	He didn't have to get a job.
1:52.8	She told him not to worry.
1:54.4	There was enough in the house.
	...

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