Abstract
Proper burials and funerary rituals are a luxury in times of war. Bodies are disappeared, concealed in mass graves or destroyed with the purpose of hiding the truth about human rights abuses, as well as destroying the memory of an entire group of people. The relatives of those who died in massacres or in extrajudicial killings, and whose bodies were disposed in mass graves, are affected by the impossibility of conducting proper burials, which also affects the process of grieving.
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Notes
- 1.
‘In 1995, for example, Colombia’s Council of State held that the deceased must be buried individually subject to all the requirements of the law, and not in mass graves. Colombia, Council of State, Administrative Case No. 10941 (ibid., § 456)’ (ICRC 2017).
- 2.
Lina Rondón Daza is a psychologist and adviser to the general direction of the psychosocial attention team for the Victims’ Unit. 15 September 2016, Bogotá.
- 3.
An official exhumation of the rests of the victims of the massacre of Bojayá took place in May 2017.
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Oyola, S.M.R. (2021). Restoring the Human Dignity of Absent Bodies in Colombia. In: Otele, O., Gandolfo, L., Galai, Y. (eds) Post-Conflict Memorialization. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_10
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