NewsLatin America36 years looking for his twin brother: "It's like living between the night and the fog"

36 years looking for his twin brother: “It’s like living between the night and the fog”

The man with a beard covered in gray hair waits at a station that is unknown to many. His voice is fragile, his legs firm. The sky is misty and it is cold. From this lonely place, Ivan Dario Mejia Toro, 63, tries to weave a story that is difficult to reconstruct. He is looking for the brother of his twin, Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro, who has disappeared since 1986. “It is like following a path that one does not know, based on clues,” he says. The map that guides him is drawn between dates, places and names that he has recorded in detail in a notebook.

“Disappeared student leader of Antioquia”, “The University of Antioquia reacts due to the disappearance of a student”, “Alive they took them, alive we demand them”, headlined the Colombian press more than 30 years ago about the disappearance of the ninth-semester student of Economic Sciences. His brother, Ivan Dario, preserves the newspaper clippings almost intact.

It also keeps images of Jose Gabriel, a mestizo man with a slim build, 1.77 meters tall, bearded and with straight, black hair at shoulder height. Family and friends then toured the streets and squares exposing his photograph in Bogota and Medellin. “What is the name of the missing person? With emotion squeezing inside”, said one of the messages that accompanied the tireless search mobilizations.

Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro was 26 years old when he was never heard from again. In addition to being a student leader, he was a member of the national leadership of the Camilo Torres political movement, the name of the Catholic priest and co-founder of the sociology faculty at the National University, who died as a member of the ELN guerrilla in 1966. Mejia Toro was also part of the of the regional verification and dialogue committee of Antioquia. At the time, peace talks were taking place between the government and the M-19, which were halted after the tragic seizure of the Palace of Justice in Bogota on November 6, 1985. The negotiations were resumed a few years later and helped create the Constitution of 1991 and a difficult democratic path for the former members of the former guerrilla, including the current president, Gustavo Petro.

As a high school student at a school of the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB), Jose Gabriel was linked to Almata, a group of young Catholics dedicated to social actions. The twins graduated from high school together. In the following year, the young man who would later disappear worked with peasants in a village in Antioquia, while Ivan Dario served in the military in Bogota.

Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro. Photo taken between 1983 and 1985Family Archive

Then they returned to their mother’s home to follow the life of university students: Jose Gabriel as an Economics student at the University of Antioquia and Ivan Dario, an Architecture student, at the UPB. The violence and threats linked to drug trafficking afflicted Colombian society, but at the same time they were “the wonderful years”, recalls the second. “We listened to salsa by Ruben Blades, we read Cortazar and we wrote poetry,” he evokes. “Let’s live laughter and laugh at life”, was a frequent phrase of his brother, remembered by friends as a charismatic man, a good reader and regular soccer player.

On February 5, 1986, Jose Gabriel traveled by bus to Bogota. He told his mother, Eugenia Toro, that he would be out of Medellin for three or four days. The only thing that came, after that time, was a call from a fellow member of the movement who reported to the family that the young man had not appeared. The last known communication was the one he had on the phone with a friend to let him know that he would not be able to reach an act of the candidacy of the doctor Hector Abad Gomez to the Mayor’s Office of Medellin. Abad Gomez, a well-known human rights defender, was murdered in 1987. His son, the writer Hector Abad Faciolince, captured his story in The oblivion that we will be.

An open wound

Ivan Dario Mejia Toro spent several years tirelessly searching for the trace of his twin brother; Cell phones did not exist, much less social networks. His family wove three hypotheses about those responsible: Jose Gabriel could have fallen into the hands of members of the Ricardo Franco front, a bloody FARC dissidence. The student disappeared along with Danely Salas, a young woman he met at university and who had dropped out of that group. The second is that they could have been victims of that guerrilla, who was also looking for the woman for having abandoned her ranks. The third is that state agencies would have been guilty.

This is because the spirit of the security statute was still in force, a norm that emerged in the late 1970s and conferred special powers on the security forces, such as arresting and criminally prosecuting civilians, in response to social protest and the rise of guerrillas. These powers of exception resulted in human rights violations such as searches without warrants, arbitrary detentions, torture, forced disappearance, and sexual violence, according to the Truth Commission report.

In the midst of the search, Ivan Dario tried to resume his life. He obtained the title of architect, got married and had two children. His soul was still attached to the twin’s. “It is not one more number or one more name, it is a life around which a world revolves”, he wrote in a letter addressed to the newspaper The Colombian to prevent Jose Gabriel from ending up doubly disappeared. The story of his brother was included in the research 50 years of violence and resistance at the University of Antioquia ‘We Make Memory’.

The mother of the disappeared Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro, Eugenia Toro, with another of her sons, Juan Fernando Mejia Toro, at the March of Silence held in Medellin in 1986.
The mother of the disappeared Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro, Eugenia Toro, with another of her sons, Juan Fernando Mejia Toro, at the March of Silence held in Medellin in 1986.

“If there is something that has kept open the wounds of the armed conflict or the dictatorship in all countries where massive human rights violations occurred, it has been the impact of forced disappearance,” reports the Truth Commission. The lack of information on the whereabouts of their loved ones has left their relatives “suspended in time”, it states in its final report.

The same Commission revealed that there is no certainty about the authorship of 54% of the disappearances. Of those with data, 52% are attributed to paramilitaries, 24% to the FARC, 9% to multiple actors, and 8% to state agents. Political or social ties were one of the reasons that most justified this crime. There were victims for exercising leadership in leftist parties, in unions or in the defense of Human Rights. Antioquia is the most affected department, with 28,000 victims.

The notebook that guides Ivan Dario represents a new light on the road. It bears the image of the Truth Commission, one of the components of the Comprehensive System for Peace, established after the 2016 peace accords. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) is part of this network of institutions, which investigates the main responsible for the armed conflict, and the Search Unit for Disappeared Persons, created in 2018 for a term of 20 years. “Before there was no one to talk to,” says Mejia Toro, after having spent years touring hospitals, military brigades and countless entities in search of her brother. “Disappear cannot be a verb with no return. There may be people who still have information, ”she assures.

The director of the Missing Persons Search Unit, Luz Marina Monzon, explains that forced disappearance is a permanent crime because the victim is disappeared every day. “It’s brutal because instead of terrorizing she has led to normalization,” she recently told EL PAIS. Since its creation, the unit has handed over the remains of 155 missing persons to their relatives, and has found eight people alive. There are still 90,088 people missing.

“The disappeared are also part of Colombia,” recalled the Truth Commission, which included among its recommendations that of guaranteeing the search as a priority that commits the State. To do this, it is necessary, for example, to compare the already existing remains of nearly 25,000 people. “This must be a fundamental pillar of the policies to be able to close the wounds”, affirms Ivan Dario. Both him and his 93-year-old mother had a DNA sample taken a month ago, which now appears in a bank of genetic profiles pending new evidence about Jose Gabriel.

More than 36 years have passed since the disappearance of his twin. Ivan Dario continues in what he describes as a season between night and fog, the way repression practices were also known in the Nazi regime. “It’s a space where you can’t discern anything, you can’t see anything,” he explains. “It is something that for many people seems to be taken from fiction, but it is real. We need to close the open circle of uncertainty so that this passenger, who is in the station of waiting, can board the train that will take him to the station of truth”, he concludes with the black and white photographs of his brother on the table of a cafeteria in Medellin.

Ivan Dario Mejia Toro marches in Bogota after the disappearance of his brother Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro.
Ivan Dario Mejia Toro marches in Bogota after the disappearance of his brother Jose Gabriel Mejia Toro.Family Archive

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Source: EL PAIS

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