Breliacnis, a Venezuelan woman, finds the memory of her mother slipping away like water between her fingers. She hasn’t seen her since childhood. A collection of bones and a gravestone bearing the name she had long stopped writing—Brenda María Marín Lara—marks the conclusion of this disappearance story in Colombian territory.
On March 10th, Breliacnis and the man who raised her mother, Benigno Teherán Monsalve, attended the “dignified delivery” of Brenda’s remains facilitated by Colombia’s Unit for the Search of Persons Given as Disappeared (UBPD) in the town of Arauca.
“I simply thank them; they took their time and found her.” Breliacnis’s story, which at least had some closure, is not common among the hundreds of Venezuelan and Colombian families who live with the disappearance of their loved ones along the border. On the 2,219-kilometer border between Colombia and Venezuela, forced disappearances persist, a crime systematically committed by various actors: paramilitaries, guerrillas, criminal gangs, traffickers, and even regular armed forces.
Colombian ex-paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso stated in 2023 before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) that there are still unmarked graves along the border with at least 200 bodies buried. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the main paramilitary group, had disarmed at the end of 2006. Some of its commanders served time in prison, including Mancuso himself in the United States, where they began to make public statements that finally provided clues about the backstory of violence during the darkest years of the internal war.
Mancuso was extradited to the United States in 2008 and returned to his homeland in February 2024, where he was designated a Peace Manager by the government of President Gustavo Petro Urrego. He committed to collaborating with the JEP to clarify crimes that remain shrouded in silence, such as forced disappearance at the border with Venezuela.
Reporters from Armando.info in Venezuela and Vorágine in Colombia visited several hotspots on both sides of the porous, dangerous border, confirming that the disappearance of citizens, both Venezuelan and Colombian, along at least the segment of the boundary stretching from La Guajira to the Arauca River, is a longstanding phenomenon that little has been done to stop or even mitigate for the past 25 years.
To complete the series titled “Lost on the Line,” of which this report is a part, the journalists interviewed dozens of conflict survivors, grave diggers, social researchers, community leaders, women searching for their loved ones, regional journalists, official sources, and perpetrators. They also reviewed official data from agencies in Colombia that document the disappearances of Venezuelan and Colombian citizens. The interaction with these sources generated data and leads to construct a map of possible locations where bodies from both countries may have been abandoned or buried.
The gathered evidence demonstrates how these victims have undergone three sequential disappearances: first, when criminal groups murdered them and hid their bodies; second, when binational authorities ceased or failed to initiate searches; and finally, when the enforced silence in local communities erases the word, transforming the disappeared into mere absence and oblivion.
This investigation, which compiles multiple testimonies regarding various cases from the first quarter of the 21st century, confirms that cross-border disappearances have turned from an occasional phenomenon into a criminal practice throughout the binational border.
César was made to dig his own grave
César Tulio Cijanes Mendoza was a man born in Colombia in 1949 who emigrated to Venezuela and acquired citizenship at a young age. His daughter, Vivian, recounts today that he went to work at a company that later fired him. With his severance pay, he purchased land near Machiques, the capital of the municipality of the same name in the Zulia state, northwest Venezuela. From then on, he focused on agricultural activities: planting avocados and plantains and purchasing cattle.
“As time went on, displacement issues arose due to clashes [in Colombia],” says Vivian Cijanes. She explains that the conflict in Colombian Catatumbo crossed the border into neighboring Zulia, where her father owned the farm. “In 2000, they took him from the farm… and I received the news in the town [Machiques] where I was. The first thing they told me was that a bunch of people were detained and that Señor César had been killed.”
Vivian then asked the people in Machiques if they knew who had taken her dad. “I went to my father’s house, which was three hours from Machiques, and found some boards forcibly torn apart… and I started to inquire with the neighbors if they knew what group had been around.” They could only tell her that the group identified itself as “anti-guerrilla.”
Wilfredo Cañizares, director of the Progresar Foundation, an NGO based in Cúcuta, Norte de Santander, which has documented cross-border disappearances, states that “in 1999 the paramilitaries arrived in the territory [of the binational Catatumbo River, which flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela] and made their presence known with the La Gabarra massacre [municipality of Tibú, named after a tributary river of Catatumbo, in Colombian territory], where several were killed and thrown into the river. Since then, it has been a river of blood.” The local population has consistently claimed that the death toll was higher, with many victims disappearing without record.
Vivian Cijanes thought her father’s case was a kidnapping and waited for a ransom demand. But it was only twenty years later that she received information indicating that clues about her father’s fate were found in the Colombian Catatumbo. “I was told they located the child who was taken with him, then around 12 or 14 years old. He confirms the accounts that [César Cijanes] was tied up, that he was the last to give a cigarette [to César Cijanes] to smoke. And that [her father, César] was made to dig his grave. They shot him there and buried him right there… I had been threatened not to go back, to stop searching,” she recalls.
The UBPD in Colombia is handling Víctor Cijanes’s case, but no conclusive results have emerged. Vivian hopes for a “dignified delivery” to occur one day, although she admits she has low expectations because she was informed that the DNA of the remains found, which could belong to her missing father, has deteriorated, complicating identification. She never dared to file a complaint with Venezuelan authorities and only approached Panorama newspaper in Maracaibo, Zulia’s capital, to share her testimony. Today, she lives in a town in Colombia and is one among 2.8 million people forced to migrate from Venezuela to the neighboring country.
From 1993 to 2024, there have been 3,338 recorded Venezuelan disappearances throughout Colombia, based on historical data from the Information System for the Network of Disappeared and Dead Bodies (Sirdec). Of that number, 660 vanished in departments bordering Venezuela, such as La Guajira, Cesar, Norte de Santander, Boyacá, Arauca, and Vichada. No records exist for the department of Guainía.
Reinaldo was thrown into the Catatumbo River
“Death has held a vendetta against me,” repeats Socorro Durán while clutching a photograph of her son Reinaldo. At 81 years of age, she hasn’t been able to fulfill her promise of giving Reinaldo a proper burial—or what remains of him.
Reinaldo Méndez Durán was taken by paramilitaries 24 years ago from the Pedregales area, in the municipality of El Zulia, in the Norte de Santander department, northeastern Colombia, bordering Venezuela. A few days later, she learned he was thrown into the Catatumbo River in Colombia. “There is no body. No grave. No justice, but I continue to await answers,” she says, head down.
The wound created by war in 2001 has only grown in her. The Colombian army killed her second son, Florentino, who was buried as unidentified in Ocaña, Norte de Santander. It took ten years for Socorro to receive an envelope with the corresponding death certificate. “When I opened the envelope, I felt the ground beneath my feet open,” she recalls.
In 2006, violence took her husband and a grandson as well. Tireless and filled with pain and uncertainty, she does not give up seeking Reinaldo, the only one of her deceased loved ones without a grave. In the meantime, she has also been threatened with death. “I know that his body may have ended up in Lake Maracaibo [in Venezuela], but I don’t care; I will go there to search for him,” Socorro asserts, clenching her right fist.
This woman’s story is one among hundreds that make up a horrific, chronic, and invisible crime between Colombia and Venezuela: cross-border forced disappearance. It has been 25 years since the first paramilitary incursion.
Elvis is believed to be on the banks of the Torbes River
On April 6, 2002, 17-year-old Elvis Luis Vargas left his home in the Rosal del Norte neighborhood of Cúcuta, the capital of Norte de Santander, headed for his uncle’s workshop in the border town of Juan Frío, southeast of the Venezuelan town of San Antonio del Táchira. He never returned. His mother, Gladys Vargas, searched hospitals with family and friends. Her teenage son was wearing mechanics coveralls that day.
Days later, Gladys’s brothers gathered to find a way to tell her what had reportedly happened to his son: paramilitaries had taken him to Venezuela, killed him, and buried him there. “I feel he’s over there at the cemetery in San Cristóbal [capital of Táchira state, alongside the Torbes River]. My heart tells me so,” she affirms through teary eyes.
In her quest for answers about Elvis’s fate, Gladys Vargas confronted former paramilitary commanders. During the Truth Commission process in Colombia, she managed to speak with Jorge Iván Laverde Zapata, El Iguano, a feared ex-paramilitary leader. “Your son and other boys were killed in Venezuela; they need to be searched for over there,” Gladys recalls him saying.
Many bodies were thrown into rivers or the Venezuelan side to “erase evidence,” Laverde Zapata affirmed in an interview for this report: “If there is no corpse, there is no crime.” According to his testimony, this was the “solution” paramilitary forces adopted in the area to follow orders from a superior, explicitly aiming to decrease murder rates in Colombia and, thus, cooperating with the military’s concerns. “It’s no secret that some military officials, I’m not saying all because there were people who never wanted to work with us… [But] it was inconvenient for them to have many bodies appearing,” Laverde Zapata stated.
Laverde Zapata commanded the Border Front of the Catatumbo Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which operated in Norte de Santander. He stated that paramilitaries provided lists of disappeared persons at the border to Justice and Peace, of the Prosecutor’s Office. He also enumerated four ways paramilitaries disposed of their victims: throwing them in mass graves on the Colombian side, as may have happened with César Cijanes Mendoza, Vivian’s father; tossing them into rivers, as Socorro Durán relates being done with her son Reinaldo Méndez; incinerating them, as research confirms regarding the crematoriums discovered in Juan Frío, Norte de Santander; and executing them in Venezuelan territory, so that authorities on that side would handle the bodies and no records would exist in Colombia, as may have happened with Elvis, Gladys Vargas’s son.
Even after issuing their declaration on the Act of Faith for Peace in October 2004, paramilitaries began a series of demobilizations lasting until April 2006. The withdrawal of these irregular troops opened the door for other criminal groups in Norte de Santander, such as Las Águilas Negras and Los Rastrojos, which continued the practice of killing people along the border and concealing bodies in Venezuela, as reported by family members searching for the disappeared in the Catatumbo.
Ex-paramilitary Laverde Zapata mentions a sector known as La Isla, in Puerto Santander, where groups that arrived after the paramilitaries killed people and left their bodies behind. He describes it as a place where “the river splits in two; one side flows to Venezuela, the other to Colombia.”
Manuel buried “only bones”
Manuel Manjarrés is 56 years old and has worked as a grave digger at the Municipal Cemetery of San Cristóbal, capital of Táchira state, in the southwestern Andes of Venezuela since he was 16. Although he doesn’t know Elvis, he has much to share about the corpses that arrived from the border with Colombia.
Manjarrés explains for this report that “bodies came from Ureña, San Antonio, and various places where they were found, but the PTJ [initials for the Judicial Technical Police, the scientific investigation body that worked under the Attorney General’s Office in Venezuela until 2001, now CICPC] said they were killed in one place and left in another. Almost all were shot and left by the Táchira River on the border. Sometimes they would arrive as just bones, how could we know how they died? Those bones would sit for a month waiting for the doctor to examine them. One tooth or bone would be taken to at least tell if it was a man or woman.”
“Some arrived dismembered, looking like a puzzle,” Manjarrés continues to reminisce. “The doctor would leave the remains there, and it fell to us to assemble the body and bury it. Back then, we were seeing five to six bodies a week. In 2007, we received a batch of six, and they were young youths. They were buried in a mass grave; then one father appeared, but he couldn’t identify his son anymore. He asked me to build a cross to place there, but he never returned.”
Wilfredo Cañizares from the Colombian Progresar Foundation puts into context the chilling account from Manjarrés: “[In 2002] we began having the first cases of Venezuelans who were illegally detained by paramilitaries, some of whom were killed on Colombian soil, and whose bodies were thrown or abandoned in Venezuelan territory. In other cases, they were taken alive to Venezuela and murdered there. In some rare cases, this action was coordinated with the Bolivarian National Guard [GNB], regarding whoever was on the territory. They would conduct the collection and the bodies were buried in the closest cemeteries to where the homicide occurred.”
Paola Andrea never arrived with the gift
Paola Andrea Quiñonez Roa was 17, with green eyes and blonde hair that her mother washed with chamomile. She was her “princess,” her “mona.” On September 16, 2011, Friendship Day in Colombia, Paola called her mother to say she was coming to visit with a gift. María Braulia Roa prepared her daughter’s favorite meal and went to pick her up at 11:30 in the morning at the court in the San Martín neighborhood of Cúcuta, but hours passed and her only child never arrived.
The last time Paola was seen was crossing the pedestrian bridge in Villa del Rosario, heading towards San Antonio del Táchira. That night, her mother received a call: she was told that her daughter had been decapitated and thrown in a bag in El Piñal, the capital of the Fernández Feo municipality in Táchira state, Venezuela.
Still in disbelief, with a shattered heart, María Braulia Roa set out to search for her “princess,” not caring that she didn’t have papers to cross into Venezuelan territory. Once there, she asked the local authorities for help but, after searching various locations in the town, found nothing. It was “as if the earth had swallowed her up.”
She searched in cemeteries, morgues, and streets with no one giving her any information. A few days later, someone claimed to have seen Paola crying, beaten, and apparently showing signs of abuse in a place in the San Antonio del Táchira area called Mi Pequeña Barinas, but when this person returned to offer support, she was gone. María Braulia has spent 14 years in this torment.
Ivan was caught while crossing the bridge
Colombian guerrillas are also responsible for cross-border forced disappearances. Arauca, a territory currently in the grip of the Popular Liberation Army (ELN), which was also controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is a Colombian province riddled with nameless dead. In the border area with Apure state in Venezuela, guerrilla camps abound with dozens of children recruited against their will, according to humanitarian organizations that requested to remain anonymous due to their presence in the conflict-ridden territory.
The Arauca River, the natural border between the Colombian department of Arauca and the Venezuelan state of Apure, served as a burial ground for dozens of people during the most turbulent years of violence. This fact is confirmed by Arauca’s Defender of the People, Grace Serrato Salazar. “Our data analyst within the entity, Father Deison Mariño, told us that the river served as the cemetery for Arauca, as one could see bodies floating and often in an advanced state of decomposition. How would you know where they were killed—if it was in Venezuela or in Colombia?”
This river is now a dangerous passage. Evidence of this was seen when boaters refused to transport one of the journalists from this report to learn first-hand the stories of Venezuelans who witnessed how Colombian violence slipped into their lands. Crossing is prohibited. Furthermore, for Venezuelan colleagues, moving through towns where these events occurred is almost unthinkable due to fear of the repressive control exerted by the regime that governs the country.
In fact, in Arauca there are reports of Colombians being detained by Venezuelan migration authorities once they crossed the river, and their families still have no information on their fate.
Dolly García Briceño, who lives in Cúcuta, says that her 34-year-old son, Iván Colmenares García, was arrested on November 1, 2024, in El Amparo, Apure, while crossing the international bridge from Arauca. Iván is a lawyer and worked for the NGO Corpodrinco, which assists and counsels Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. However, this past May, the organization had to shut down its program in Arauca due to budget cuts in U.S. cooperation programs, such as USAID. “I was told he was being held in El Helicoide [a former shopping center turned into a detention site for intelligence agencies of the chavista regime in Caracas], but there was no clarity regarding the reason,” his mother says. A few days ago, she confirmed to VORÁGINE that, after five months without knowing his whereabouts, she received information saying Iván is actually being held in El Rodeo 1, a horrific prison east of the Venezuelan capital. Still, they haven’t given her any reasons for his detention.
Iván is one of 18 Colombians in the same situation. Their families have approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Colombia for assistance in searching for them but have achieved little.
Raúl was taken by the guerrillas
On the other side of the river, a disappearance occurred 19 years ago that was believed to be perpetrated by the FARC guerrilla. Raúl Esneider Morales Quiroga was taken by armed men in a truck in El Amparo, in the Páez municipality of Apure state, Venezuela, right after he crossed the river. This happened in 2006, according to his sister, Clara Leydi Morales, who has since searched for any information about her missing relative.
“My dad and I went to a FARC guerrilla camp [in Venezuelan territory] to speak with those people multiple times. Six months later, they notified us that he was taken [Raúl]. They didn’t tell us any more. My father then went to the military of our country and went to a military control post in La Charca, the El Nula sector, Apure state, and recounted what happened, hoping for a response. Nothing came of it,” she recounts.
Clara Leydi’s parents are Colombian citizens born in Boyacá—an area in Colombia’s central highlands—who sought a better future in Venezuela. “All seven siblings were born here in Venezuela. My dad died without ever seeing his son [Raúl] again, and my 77-year-old mother has been sick and depressed since then.” Raúl, the missing one, owned a welding services cooperative and left behind two children.
“Throughout this border, the armed conflict ebbs and flows. The armed men are over there and here. We’ve had paramilitaries, the feared Vencedores de Arauca Bloc. This violent dynamic escalated in 2005, 2006, and 2010, when the FARC clashed with the ELN for territorial control. There was an exodus of people from Colombia into Venezuela. The groups realized this and began to extort and abduct people along the border. Many individuals disappeared while making that journey,” the local defender, Serrato Salazar, states.
Brenda’s remains finally appeared
As mentioned at the beginning of this report, Breliacnis Lara recently completed a search that stole 13 years of her life. On March 10, 2025, she received her mother’s remains, Brenda María Marín Lara, who was 38 when she disappeared.
“She always moved between Colombia and Venezuela, crossing the border in Arauca frequently. I was young when she left. She told us she was going to work, and my brother and I were sent to live with our grandfather. Later, we moved to the east, to Monagas. From a young age, we began receiving threats. I was about 14. We didn’t understand what was happening. When we were older, we were told our mother had gone to join the Colombian guerrilla and was around Pueblo Nuevo, further down from Tame, in Arauca. Over time, we migrated to Colombia. Living in Venezuela with such poverty was impossible. So, [in Colombia], I resumed my search for my mother,” Breliacnis recounts.
The information that several guerrillas had died in a battle in Arauca, including her mother, and that the bodies had been buried anonymously reached Breliacnis. “I went to Bogotá and started contacts with the Unit for the Search of Persons Given as Disappeared (UBPD). One day I received a call because she had been identified and they were going to deliver her remains to us.”
On March 10, Breliacnis and other family members attended the “dignified delivery,” as UBPD calls these ceremonies. Elba Sánchez Rosas, coordinator of the unit in Arauca, stated that the identification of the remains was done after intervention in the main cemetery. “It’s been a complex task, but it’s the process to follow. The search must start there, at the cemeteries where unidentified bodies have been transferred over decades. I wish both country governments would agree on a humanitarian search strategy in Venezuelan cemeteries as well, where it’s likely Colombians are buried without names.”
“Wherever there was an empty space, we buried bodies”
A man who was a grave digger in Apure crossed the border bridge over the Arauca River connecting that Venezuelan state to Arauca, Colombia, on May 14, 2025. He did so to share with reporters the story he experienced. “We had to bury people in the cemetery. Wherever there was an empty space, we buried bodies without asking why they were abandoned. If they did what they do here in this country [Colombia], surely many families would have answers,” he said.
The grave digger requested not to have his name published. He is older and continues to take risks and rebel against the confinement imposed by guerrillas at some border points in both countries. “They move back and forth. There’s a camp over there [pointing towards Venezuela]. They control internet usage, which is why we couldn’t speak through there. They even dictate security schedules. They’re in control. It’s worse now.”
The grave digger highlights the fear entrenched in the territory and also addresses a heated topic that no one wants to tackle: the fact that the ELN guerrilla group operates equally in both nations.
Kleiver Andrey vanished just recently
Kleiver Andrey Ramírez Acuña crossed the Arauca River from Colombia to visit his Venezuelan girlfriend. Hours later, his girlfriend called his grandmother to say he did not arrive. Since March 6, 2025, no one has heard from the 17-year-old, who just graduated high school in 2024.
Kiara Acuña, Kleiver’s mother, reports from the humble home of her son’s grandmother in the Libertador neighborhood of Arauca that the last messages her son sent his girlfriend were cryptic. “He seemed to be in danger. It was like he was saying goodbye to her. She sent me the screenshot. I spoke with the friend Kleiver was with last. It’s a kid nicknamed El Gordo, who told me he left Andrey at the canoe station to cross into Venezuela, but I feel he knows more,” she recounts.
The woman publicized her son’s disappearance on social media, “and I started receiving messages from an unknown number on my phone. They told me that if I kept posting, I wouldn’t find even my son’s body. They told me to delete everything, or else they would tighten the pressure,” Kiara extends her phone to reveal the threatening messages she keeps securely.
A couple of days after what happened with Kleiver, another young man from Arauca disappeared. There are several stories of forced absences in the neighborhood that mothers prefer not to report to authorities due to fear. All of them are young, and all intended to cross the river. Rumors circulating among the beleaguered neighborhood suggest that the youngsters are being recruited by the guerrillas, whom they refer to as “the armed actor,” without using a specific name to avoid retaliation.
Kiara traveled to Saravena, a municipality in the Arauca department. From there, “I sent messages to the guerrilla stating that if they had my boy, they should return him. The day I went, they had taken two young men.” She crossed the Arauca River multiple times to reach El Amparo. “I ventured as far as Guasdualito, about 30 minutes from El Amparo, until someone approached me and cautioned me not to risk so much.”
Fear rules
“In this capital, we have a report, since 2022, of around 120 missing people, about whom we still know nothing. It’s a high number,” the local defender, Grace Serrato, mentions. The figures speak volumes regarding the horror.
In Arauca, fear surges like blood from a wound. Arriving in the city and navigating it feels like a time travel back to when as many as five people were murdered a day. People on the street greet outsiders cautiously and advise journalists to speak softly in hotels, as it’s uncertain who occupies the adjacent rooms. Distrust runs deep.
Colombian agencies—UBPD, JEP, and the Victims Unit—have insisted on a binational plan between Colombia and Venezuela to search border cemeteries and access forensic records. Yet the lack of political will has halted any possibility of joint efforts. Meanwhile, mothers continue their search. Because even without a body, without answers, and without justice, there is something that no armed group has been able to erase: hope.
