The gruesome rumour of 20,000 bodies supposedly stored in El Dorado Airport has been laid to rest thanks to a special peace court ruling that there was no evidence of human remains hidden in Colombia’s international hub.
According to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP, by its Spanish initials) decision made public last week, the investigative court had failed to turn up any evidence of deceased humans or their remains stored “in places used as hangers, warehouses, recycling zones, or water waste treatment areas at the airport”.
The JEP’s extraordinary announcement followed three months of uncertainty sparked by a polemical press conference in December 2024, in which UN experts asserted that “thousands of unidentified bodies lie in poorly managed cemeteries or storage facilities, such as allegedly at a hangar at Bogotá airport where it was reported to the delegation that around 20,000 unidentified bodies would be stored”.
The comments came from a technical team from the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (UNCED) tasked with a two-week visit to “strengthen accountability and protections against enforced disappearances”.
The delegation travelled to Bogotá, Cali, Cúcuta, Medellín, Santa Marta and Villavicencio to meet government officials responsible for finding disappeared people, and in charge of establishing and implementing related public policies. They also met victims groups and civil society organisations, and planned to attend exhumations of human remains found during investigations.
Their initial findings, presented at a press conference in Bogotá on December 5, highlighted the magnitude of the decades-long horrors of forced disappearances in Colombia, and the fact it still happens today.
“Enforced disappearance remains a horrific reality across Colombia, with tens of thousands of victims unaccounted for and families left in despair despite decades of efforts to end this crime,” said the expert panel addressing Colombia and international media.
“Although enforced disappearances started in Colombia around the 1940s, they are not just a crime of the past. They continue to occur daily across the country in diverse circumstances.”
Insurmountable barriers
The delegation also pointed to an excess of bureaucracy in the network of Colombian institutions tasked with resolving cases.
“Families of disappeared people often face insurmountable barriers when seeking help due to the complex legal and institutional framework.”
For decades, for example, human rights organizations and families of people who disappeared amid Colombia’s internal conflict have pointed to La Escombrera, a trash dump in the western hills of Medellín, as the site of a mass grave with possibly hundreds of bodies buried beneath the rubbish.
According to official data from Colombia’s Colombia’s Unit for the Search of Disappeared Persons (UPBD), tasked with finding persons disappeared during the conflict until 2016, there are currently 124,724 disappeared, and 10,872 “sites of interest” identified as actual or possible burial sites where victims were buried.
For long term observers of the conflict, and the 40,000 Colombians currently seeking their missing family members, the airport allegation – which the UN delegation repeatedly stated came from “credible sources” – risked overshadowing other aspects of the technical visit.
The claim sparked an immediate backlash from a range of institutions from forensics services to airport management and an immediate search of 27 hangers the same night by a commission of the Attorney General’s office, with nothing to report.
Chorus of disbelief
But by then the airport allegations had taken off around the world, with one news agency reporting the “hidden tragedy of bodies discovered at Bogotá airport” and many others reporting Colombia’s denials of the UN claims.
Bogotá’s mayor Carlos Galan joined a chorus of disbelief calling on the UN delegation to “show Colombia evidence of their statement”, while legal experts pondered the implications of Colombia’s busiest airport, and one of the largest transportation hubs in Latin America, being declared a mass grave.
The UN at the time distanced itself from the controversy, telling news outlets by email that the UNCED delegation members were not formally part of the world body.
“Please note that the Committee on Enforced Disappearances is a monitoring body made up of independent human rights experts from around the world. They are not UN officials,” said the email.
The JEP announcement to end the case this week was welcomed by authorities relieved that the special conflict court would not be imposing any “medidas cautelares” – special protection measures – against the airport, such as cordoning off zones that could affect flights operations.
The JEP had discounted these measures because “the criteria of seriousness and urgency required for this type of process were not met”, it reported, following its own investigation of entities reporting to UNCED and its own inspection of El Dorado premises, including the Military Air Transport Command (CATAM) base which shares space with the Bogotá airport.
On the basis of this the JEP has now ordered the case to be archived, though the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances is still to deliver its full report, in theory due next month.
Whether this will shed light on the origin of the El Dorado rumours remains to be seen.