With 80 years of age, blind and victim of the disappearance of her son 18 years ago, Rocío del Socorro Henao overcomes blindness and illuminates with the light of her soul the dark path to find the remains of Luis Carlos and give him a dignified grave. This Sunday ends the commemoration of the Week of the Disappeared Detainee.

By William Peña Gutiérrez

In the painful numbers of direct victims of people reported missing in Colombia (49,878), the name of Luis Carlos Ossa Henao, an artisan from the municipality of Puerto Boyacá, appears.

On May 20, 2002, and after a joyous celebration of Mother's Day in the store where he worked with his mother Rocío del Socorro Henao, Luis Carlos traveled to Bogotá to buy the assortment for the prosperous business. That date marked a journey of no return for him and his mother, Rocio Del Socorro, that day is a pain that overwhelms and consumes her for 18 years. “This has been a very hard blow. No one repairs a son; It was as if they had killed me”, says Rocío.

And it is that this 80-year-old woman lost her vision trying to find her son. She assures that the doctors have not diagnosed her with a disease or scientific cause that justifies the detachment of the retinas that caused the darkness for eyes that have shed tears of suffering and that demand to return to contemplate the image of Luis Carlos, the one that began to erase because of the violence when he was just 36 years old. “I started crying and crying; I fell asleep and when I woke up I couldn't see anymore”, recalls Rocío.

In 2014, and after having visited the morgues, hospitals, prisons and cemeteries of almost the entire country, information obtained in Manizales took Rocío del Socorro to the municipality of Calarcá, in the department of Quindío. She asked for his whereabouts in the church and was denied, she went to the cemetery and there was no way to check if the information was true. With no other possibility and with the experience of having investigated in so many other places, she did not give up and went to court. "The priest told me that he was not in that cemetery, the Prosecutor's Office also denied it; but with a guardianship I managed to get this process sent to the 90th prosecutor's office in Medellín”, she says.

Four years later, the exhumation of some corpses who suffered the same fate as Luis Carlos did not have the expected result for Rocío. However, for her there is certainty that in one of those graves and with the NN signal lie in that cemetery the remains of the young merchant who, according to what was investigated by the persevering mother, was killed in a sidewalk in the coffee municipality of October 2 of the same year that he disappeared.

Sure, of her inquiries and hoping to find the remains of her son, Rocío is waiting for a new exhumation to be ordered. More than a year has passed and her eyes, despite being turned off, continue crying out for the reason to live for the last 18 years: that they give her the remains of her beloved son, Luis Carlos. "I have been knocking on doors, I attend the victims' meetings in Bogotá, in Ibagué, in Armero Guayabal, and I talk and talk to see what they solve”, she says.

Displaced from Puerto Boyacá, she currently resides in Armero Guayabal, in Tolima, but remains confined in Bogotá, where she was surprised by the pandemic and also the economic reparation by the Victims Unit, for being part of the group of 131.312 indirect victims. That is, those people who have disappeared a relative in the first degree of consanguinity or civil and who are on the route of comprehensive reparation granted by the State.

End/WPG/EG