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How to remember someone you have never met? This is the question that Gisela Restrepo asked herself. This Colombian visual artist and filmmaker, raised in France and currently living in Canada, presents her documentary ‘Under silence and the earth’ about her aunt, Marta Gisela, an M-19 guerrilla killed in an ambush in 1981 in the Chocó jungle and whose remains have not yet been found.
In Colombia, from 1958 to 2021, more than 80,000 disappeared have been registered. A figure that could reach up to 100,000 people, according to investigations by the Search Unit for Persons Given as Disappeared (UBPD). Among them, Marta Gisela, an M-19 guerrilla, killed in an ambush in 1981. Her niece Gisela Restrepo has made a documentary about the process of searching for her remains.
“I got very close to the reality of the forced disappearance by approaching other Colombian families and friends whose parents had been disappeared, I met human rights defenders who accompany the families, it was this accumulation that made me want to unearth their existence because the forced disappearance is to erase the existence of a person”, says the director whose aunt was her father’s sister and a friend of her mother, also members of the M-19 and who went into exile in France.
Marta Gisela was 19 years old when she was killed by the army along with nine other guerrillas, the same age as Gisela Restrepo when she moved from Paris to Canada. “I had a notebook where people wrote me messages because I was going to Canada and I didn’t know when I was going to come back. My father wrote me a letter about her militancy and also at the end of that letter he tells me that I have to wear my aunt’s name with pride because I was called Gisela in her honor, “explains Restrepo. That was a trigger, not only to search for her remains, but also to “know where she came from, what struggles, what dreams,” she explains.
It was the beginning of a whole process of many years of preparation and trips to Colombia to try to find his remains and also recover that part of his history that had remained in the country after his parents went into exile in France.
A very hard and also necessary process that will take her to Chocó, where the ELN is still active. Residents of the area had told him that there was a mass grave between Piedra Honda and San Marino, but the searches yielded no results. Some residents say that the bodies had been removed a month after they were killed in April 1981. For now, it has not been possible to go further.
During this search, the worst of the barriers has undoubtedly been the silence of the Army. “The hardest thing has been getting information from the armed forces. We have used all possible measures, from the Prosecutor’s Office to I personally have written to the brigades, but we have never been able to obtain information. We are asking to be able to access that information,” laments Gisela Restrepo.
“They are in the rivers, in the mountains, in cemeteries without names… it is no longer death that hurts, it is uncertainty, the need for a response,” he says in the documentary. For now, the uncertainty continues.
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