Facing the uncertainty of missing loved ones for years, families in Venezuela endure further distress inflicted by an indifferent state. Relatives seeking answers often encounter sarcasm from authorities when requesting investigations into disappearances: “Oh, ma’am, your daughter is of age. She probably ran off with her boyfriend.” However, most of the time, they don’t even receive the effort of mockery; only indifference.
“We filed the report, and nothing,” “they never called us,” “they never helped us”: these common phrases belong to mothers of Venezuelans who disappeared along the border, who help each other in searching for their loved ones, thereby filling in for the absent support from the Venezuelan state. Although it may be bureaucratic and slow, the only official authority that listens to them and often provides answers is the Colombian one.
Internal violence in Colombia between guerrilla groups and paramilitaries in the late 90s spilled over the border into Venezuelan territory. The dynamics of transit became dangerous in the struggle for control of the areas, leading to a steady stream of news about Colombians and Venezuelans being killed or disappearing on either side of “the line.” Over the years, this became part of the landscape, especially with the proliferation of paths controlled by armed groups to fill the gaps left by both states.
Colombians undoubtedly bear the brunt of the victim toll. Updated figures from the Colombian Network of Missing Persons and Cadavers Information System (Sirdec) count 178,429 Colombians missing due to the internal conflict—not limited to border issues—up until May of this year.
However, the count of Venezuelans missing at the border is also quite high. According to the same Sirdec data, between 1993 and 2024, 3,338 Venezuelans were reported missing in Colombian territory, of which 660 (432 men and 228 women) vanished in the border departments of La Guajira, Cesar, Norte de Santander, Boyacá, Arauca, and Vichada; there were no records from the also-bordering department of Guainía, alongside Venezuela’s Amazonas state. To date, out of these 660 cases, 140 individuals have been found alive, while another 17 were identified as deceased.
In the yearly progression, 2018 stands out as a significant year, having peaked in migration driven by the complex humanitarian crisis that Venezuela was already facing. A desperate migration on foot, which, as people escaped, confronted the absence of the Venezuelan state’s protection of borders, control of which is now shared by irregular armed groups.
Since 2018, in the Colombian department of Norte de Santander alone, more than 50 people have been reported missing each year, with Cúcuta as the city with the most recorded cases, roughly 384 in total.
Politics Ignites and Also Extinguishes
A year after Gustavo Petro’s assumption of the Colombian presidency, the tragedy of cross-border disappearances became more visible than ever. The statements made at that time by demobilized paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso about mass graves in both Venezuela and Colombia presented a golden opportunity to address the issue. In July 2023, the Binational Technical Committee for the Search, Recovery, and Forensic Handling of Bodies of Missing Persons in the Venezuelan-Colombian Border Zones was created.
The mechanism had two objectives: to process, with the help of the Red Cross, the search and identification of bodies in locations identified as burial sites, and to develop an Operational Manual to regulate the procedures for “searching, recovering, and conducting forensic examinations of the bodies of missing persons” along the binational border. This manual was to be reviewed by the foreign ministries of both countries, led at that time by Yván Gil from Venezuela and Álvaro Leyva from Colombia.
“I remember that over there [referring to Venezuela] they were very willing to do something,” says Helena Urán, one of the advisors on this matter for the Colombian government. Due to the long-standing internal armed conflict, Colombia has institutional mechanisms prepared to address the consequences, such as counting and searching for missing persons, which fall under the jurisdiction of Forensic Medicine, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD).
In the committee, on the Venezuelan side, General Major Gerardo Izquierdo Torres (sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in 2018), then the director-general of the Border Office, and Render Peña, the deputy minister for Latin America from the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, were in charge. The Colombian ambassador to Venezuela at that time, Milton Rengifo, served as a liaison between both governments.
Urán recounts that for several months there were advancements and regular meetings between representatives from both governments, but that communication eventually cooled. The reasons for this are unclear. She notes that in the following year, 2024, with a decrease in contacts and the intense election process for the Venezuelan presidency, the committee’s work stopped, although a draft diplomatic agreement to address the issue of the missing persons had been prepared. She claims it was even managed to involve the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and the Ministry of Justice of Colombia. “We were left super frustrated,” she laments.
Indifference Like a Headstone
“Male corpse measuring 1.60 cm, in a state [sic] of 90% carbonization on the body’s surface,” reads a handwritten note dated July 18, 2005. The deceased’s name is “unidentified,” and the body was brought from San Antonio del Táchira, a city near the border, to the Municipal Cemetery of San Cristóbal, the capital of the state.
Like this, there are dozens of cases that reached the main cemetery in the capital of Táchira between 2000 and 2005, one of the points where the bodies of cross-border disappearances have ended up. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups, occasionally with some clothing or in pieces, some bodies have been identified while others have not, but none with any identification leads ever got claimed, ending up like the others—anonymous until now—buried in a mass grave in the cemetery.
“That mass grave is called the restero. It’s a chapel where all those little bones were collected,” says Alba Villamizar, secretary of the San Cristóbal Municipal Cemetery. Two years ago, in 2023, a group of Colombian officials reviewed the documentation on bodies arriving from the end of the 90s up to 2005. However, Villamizar recalls, nothing was taken away, neither documents nor remains.
“There are thousands of little bones in that chapel; imagine moving all of that. It’s an impressive job. Because everything was just like that, a small chapel, everything was thrown in there until a point when it was completely sealed. No more bags of bones were coming in. It was too much. And that municipal restero was sealed,” remembers Villamizar.
A forensic effort of that magnitude will only take place when there is similar political will. However, on the Venezuelan side, there is no entity, office, or official institution dedicated to processing these cases. Families usually file complaints with the Scientific, Penal, and Criminal Investigations Body (Cicpc), which has a unit specialized in missing person investigations. Nevertheless, there are no public data reflecting the number of cases received by this entity, and even less about those resolved.
The prosecutor’s office of the Chavista regime does not have a specialized division to handle the issue of disappearances at the border, nor does the People’s Defender, which receives complaints from relatives but shows no data. The last report published by the Defender from 2021 mentions “disappearances” only five times, solely referring to cases of people who died due to rising rivers; in one instance, it refers to a possible human trafficking case. An email was sent requesting information to the Defender’s office in San Antonio del Táchira, with no response received.
The lack of information from the Venezuelan side became even more prominent starting in 2017, when the mass migration of Venezuelans through the Colombian border surged the numbers of cross-border disappearances. Wilfredo Cañizares, the director of the Colombian non-governmental organization Fundación Progresar, highlights that out of the 650 documented cases of missing persons between 2016 and 2024, 120 correspond to Venezuelan citizens.
The discrepancy in numbers when compared to the counts made by Colombian institutions occurs because the Fundación Progresar tracks records in correlation with the actions of violent groups, excluding cases of individuals who may have voluntarily cut ties with their families.
“Those 120 cases are documented concerning an illegal armed group detaining them, or that the last time they were seen was crossing a guerrilla-controlled trail or one controlled by a paramilitary or criminal gang,” specifies Cañizares.
“The migration crisis has placed the number of disappearances in a scandalous dimension (…) Even today, the Colombian government lacks a definite count of how many Venezuelans disappeared and in what cross-border contexts, even less so the Venezuelan government,” he asserts, although he notes that with the arrival of Petro’s administration and the reopening of the border, there has been a drastic decrease in forced cross-border disappearances.
Sonia Rodríguez Torrente, coordinator for the department of Norte de Santander at the Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD), an official Colombian institution, points out that among the obstacles for achieving any cooperation on searching and identifying cross-border missing persons lies the differing views of both states when addressing cases. “In Colombia, we do it from extrajudiciality,” meaning searches are conducted without the participation or order of courts, while in Venezuela, she states, it is the opposite: “The search in Venezuela is framed within a judicial and penal exercise, which puts the logic of relations in different positions.”
Villamizar, the cemetery secretary, affirms the same. “To do something, an organism must be moved,” she states, referring directly to the Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office or the courts. “It must be ordered by a tribunal because otherwise, it’s considered desecration, it’s a tomb.”
In Colombia, Rodríguez Torrente explains that the UBPD has a total of 94 plans for searching missing persons, of which 11 correspond to border areas with Venezuela: one for the medium and high Guajira, another for southern La Guajira, another in northern Cesar department and one more in the center; as well as one in Sarare, Tame, Sabanas de Arauca, and the department of Vichada. Three more relate to search plans covering the 40 municipalities in Norte de Santander.
We Search for Them
In Venezuela, however, the search for the missing is solely undertaken by their families.
The disappearance of Wilmer Jair Cáceres Salamanca, a member of the National Bolivarian Police (PNB), occurred on January 25, 2016, in San Antonio del Táchira. His mother, Blanca Salamanca, began searching for him after noticing he didn’t arrive at work in San Cristóbal, the state capital.
Upon entering the PoliTáchira headquarters to file a report, she encountered another woman also reporting her missing son while giving a composite sketch of a young man who had been out with him. That composite sketch, Mrs. Blanca remembers, was of Wilmer. “At that moment, we both met and united in the search for our sons. She told me that my boy had gone on that Monday, the 25th, to look for her son, Kevin Rodríguez, a 22-year-old officer from PoliTáchira, at his house in barrio Miranda, from where they left without giving any explanation.” The mother of Kevin Rodríguez is named Belén Botello.
The story of Mrs. Blanca and Belén exemplifies how the search for missing persons works in Venezuela in the Colombian-Venezuelan border: a struggle led by families with support from the Colombian side.
Supporting each other, through their own inquiries they found that their sons had been last seen in San Antonio del Táchira, leading them to believe they may have crossed the border. “We began to seek links to file a report with the relevant authorities in Colombia,” Mrs. Salamanca stated.
Eight months later, on September 26, 2016, Salamanca and Botello formally filed a complaint of forced disappearance with the Colombian prosecutor’s office. They were assigned an investigator for the case. “It was two years and three months of going to Colombia, with a closed border. Most of the time, we had to cross the trails. Once, we were caught in a shootout on our way back, and we threw ourselves on the ground. It was horrible and dangerous.”
Visits to Cúcuta, the capital of Norte de Santander, were split between the prosecutor’s office and Forensic Medicine. “We made several friends who lent us a hand and put in all the effort until we managed to clarify the case. In the end, all the searching was concentrated in Colombia; we never went back to the Cicpc. We feel a certain anger towards them. They never helped us, and we haven’t even gone back to close the case.”
The assistance from the Colombian side bore results in the most unexpected way, with the arrest of a criminal in Cúcuta who revealed the location of five mass graves in the La Playita trail, where the remains of Wilmer Cáceres Salamanca and Kevin Rodríguez were finally found. After a year and a half of waiting to confirm their identities through DNA testing, they received the remains in September 2019 and organized a dignified burial at the municipal cemetery of San Antonio, closing a painful chapter for their families.
Like the mothers of Wilmer and Kevin, in Venezuela, there is the group Esperanza de Madre, created by Lisbeth Zurita, the mother of Emisael Contreras, who disappeared in 2019 while returning home in Bolívar state, southeastern Venezuela, after working in mines in the Guainía department. In addition to the NGO Fundaredes, which has brought visibility to cases of disappearances in border states—documenting 133 people in their latest 2023 report, most of whom are Venezuelans from Bolívar and Táchira states—Esperanza de Madre is the only group attempting to support families of Venezuelans missing at the border, currently accounting for 74 individuals.
“When I traveled to Colombia to search for my son, returning [to Venezuela] empty-handed made me create the Esperanza de Madre group on Facebook, because I thought: I must do something; I can’t just stand by, I can’t wait for the authorities to search for my son. That’s when I started interacting with other moms who are also going through the same thing, looking for their children, and I began to realize this nightmare (…) I still find it hard to believe how many are missing,” explains Zurita.
Although Emisael Contreras has not yet been found, some mothers from the group have located their sons—some alive (she doesn’t specify how many) and 17 deceased.
In Colombia, mothers have also emerged as fundamental search engines, having been more organized due to the longer history of the phenomenon there. Groups like Las Tejedoras de Moiras, Las Tejedoras de Juan Frío, and Las Guardianas de la Memoria are some that, like Fundación Progresar, support the UBPD and also Venezuelan families with cross-border missing persons. Meanwhile, they increasingly document more cases of Colombian citizens missing in Venezuela.
Yolanda Montes, a social leader who documented up to 240 cases of forced disappearances in the Arauca region bordering Venezuela’s Apure state, describes the complexity of searching on the Venezuelan side.
“In our group, there are Colombian mothers who’ve been told that their children ended up in Venezuela, and from there we don’t know more. That’s more complex because going to search for them is practically impossible. We have seen reports about three locations where Colombians were buried: Los Bancos, Las Charcas, and Tumeremo in the Miner’s Arc [of the Orinoco River, within Venezuelan territory], and that in the cold storage of the San Cristóbal morgue, there were five Colombian bodies. However, acknowledging that process there is very complicated. We have also been informed about mass graves or areas of forensic interest in cemeteries that could reveal many truths, but there is no political will from either country to search for these individuals.”
But beyond gathering their cases and supporting them with institutional contacts, the search for missing persons at the binational border is also experiencing a moment of paralysis in Colombia, not precisely due to a lack of effort from institutions.
The lack of political will noted by Montes is also mentioned by Judge Gustavo Adolfo Salazar from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) in Colombia, who also warns that Mancuso’s declarations regarding the existence of mass graves are insufficient to initiate a search; these are general statements without specific coordinates for their location, which must be validated by lower-ranking paramilitaries to find more specific sites.
He recalls that the process of locating has not yet concluded and warns of its slowdown. “At this moment there is nothing because we are absolutely stalled at the border. There is no possibility for a commission to be activated in the short to medium term,” he asserts, arguing that the conditions of security necessary to protect informants and witnesses are insufficient. He prefers to dismiss the possibility of obtaining support from the Executive Power authorities in Colombia: “With Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo and the new one, Laura Sarabia, this subject has not been revisited.”
