Another anniversary of the plebiscite has passed. Conversations about the aftermath of the ‘No’ vote winning in the peace referendum and the current state of the agreement’s implementation permeate Colombian society, academic circles and activist spaces both in and outside the country. They have been about peace and reconciliation, what the future holds in the forthcoming presidential elections in 2022, and if Colombians can hope to work collectively towards a more just and inclusive society. This year, the conversations were more pressing, perhaps even more poignant as five years have passed since the plebiscite, and progress in the agreement’s implementation is, to be generous, meagre.

As I sit in various of these spaces, sharing and listening to different experiences, viewpoints, and suggestions – all committed to peace – I wonder about what I see as less visible effects of the ‘No’ vote and the consequent feeble implementation of what was agreed. My thoughts go to those who have an enforced disappeared relative or who have lost loved ones to this long-lasting conflict and are still looking for their bodies. Particularly, I think about the difficulties and challenges that forensic teams of the Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparations and Non-Recurrence are currently facing. I am referring to the work of the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons (UBPD) and the Technical Forensic team of the Unit of Accusation and Investigation (UIA) of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). These forensic experts have the task of finding the forcibly disappeared persons and other victims of the armed conflict whose bodies are still missing.

In the years following the referendum, the country has been in an almost constant state of turmoil with multitudinous demonstrations marked by profound violence towards civil society, without even mentioning the impact of the pandemic and mandatory lockdown. Although political will frames the implementation of the peace agreement, the shameful state of the process is not only due to a lack of this important element. The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has also caused an enormous strain on some of the main points of the agreement, including the search, location, exhumation, and restitution of the remains of victims of the armed conflict.

The need to constantly legitimise their work to the government and some sectors of the political and social elites, together with the impossibility of continuing their searches and conducting exhumation activities due to the lockdown, has affected the expected results of the forensic teams of the UBPD and the JEP. This, in turn, has affected victims whose concerns and rights are, once again, being overlooked. However, this is not by the forensic teams. No, the work of the forensic experts of the UBPD and the UIA- JEP has not only been thorough and caring but also shown just how committed the individuals involved are to peace and reconciliation despite the challenges and obstacles to their work and integrity. Instead, the harm to victims comes from the difficulties and constant attacks faced by the JEP and the UBPD that undermine the legitimacy of these teams and hinder the possibilities of reparation owed to the relatives of enforced disappeared persons and other victims of the conflict. The bullying nature of the scrutiny endured by the JEP and its forensic team has involved the questioning of their work and implied that the endless hours they have spent locating and exhuming victims’ remains is all a charade. The pernicious words of Salud Hernández on the exhumations conducted in the Las Mercedes cemetery in Dabeiba are but one example of the kind of aggressions that the team has endured, in this case on their investigations around false positives. And so it follows that the core of the questioning is really about the crimes under investigation and the legitimacy of relatives claiming justice and the remains of their loved ones.

As for the UBPD, one of the challenges the forensic team has faced is entering places where remains of forcibly disappeared persons are thought to be. That is particularly the case when these sites are on private land. Given that the Unit depends on the willingness of those owning the property to grant access, the attacks on the agreement and its implementation may hinder people’s participation and, in particular, that of landowners. As such, the task of locating and exhuming remains is slower than expected. Location and exhumation activities have required additional logistics that have resulted in massive amounts of time preparing before actually doing an exhumation. Time, however, is something that victims do not have and do not wish to have as they have been waiting, sometimes for decades, to find their loved ones.

Thus, after five years, it all comes back to the same point: populations that not only have endured the endless violence but struggled towards and demanded peace, continue to be silenced and ignored. Despite their numbers and undeniable realities, those who have been forcibly disappeared or who died in the context of the armed conflict, remain neglected, their bodies missing. The deafening silence of their absence is conveniently ignored, or what is worse, acknowledged but made irrelevant. It might be time to remember that what won in 2016 was not the ‘No’. The indisputable winner was apathy. Only a mere 38% of voters actually voted. The referendum’s aftermath maps onto the aftermath of the years of violence: those who suffer the most are ready for peace, yet they somehow become a sort of an afterthought, and their stories, experiences, and lives continue to be in the line of fire while missed in grandiloquent conversations and discourses.

As I enter a winter of reflection, I am convinced that if we are to care about peace and reconciliation, we must care about the dead and about those whose bodies that are still disappeared. Searching for and locating these individuals should not only be a concern for their relatives and the organisations supporting them. We, as a society, must embrace and protect the search of the forcibly disappeared persons and other victims of the armed conflict (living or dead). Their continued absence affects us all and, if we continue to ignore them, we prevent ourselves from being able to reconcile.