By Julia Symmes Cobb
RIONEGRO, Colombia, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Roselly Gil watched as authorities carefully removed the blackened bones from the rotting wooden coffin, stored for decades in a cemetery in Rionegro, Colombia. They were, she hoped, the remains of her younger brother.
Now a willowy 59-year-old grandmother, Gil has been waiting more than two decades for information about what happened to her brother Jesus Arbey Gil, a Colombian soldier who disappeared in 2003.
She thought an answer was close
in 2024, when a government agency set up to search for people disappeared during Colombia's conflict told her they believed Jesus Arbey had been buried in the cemetery in Antioquia province.
Gil traveled by overnight bus from her home in Segovia to attend the exhumation of the remains, which were delicately eased out of a ground-level concrete niche labeled "NN 18 MAS" or "No Name Male #18".
But two and a half years later, Gil's wait endures. The remains have still not been positively identified.
"How long must one wait, wondering where he is or what happened to him, whether he was buried or not?" she said via video call in late August.
Her case is a stark illustration of the suffering of families across Colombia, and the formidable challenge facing the Search Unit for People Reported as Disappeared (UBPD) as it seeks to find and identify the remains of some 137,000 people who went missing during Colombia's six decades of internal conflict.
As well as sheer numbers, they are often dealing with remains that are significantly decomposed or partial, stored in conditions that can worsen their deterioration. Some remains are mislabeled and the quality of records varies widely between cemeteries, while DNA testing even in presumptive cases like that of Jesus Arbey takes time.
"The main challenges continue to be the high volume of requests, the technical complexity of the cases, and the ongoing need to strengthen operational staffing capacity in order to respond more quickly to identification needs," said the Institute of Legal Medicine (IML), Colombia's national forensic service, which is responsible for conducting DNA testing on bodies found by the UBPD.
MANY BURIED IN CEMETERIES
For over 60 years, Colombia's left-wing rebel groups have battled the government and right-wing paramilitaries turned crime gangs in a civil war fueled by the cocaine trade. A 2016 peace deal between the government and the leading guerrilla group, the FARC, brought some respite, but crime gangs remain hugely powerful and smaller rebel groups persist.
Many of the disappeared — including activists targeted by paramilitaries, civilians killed extrajudicially by the military, soldiers killed in combat and rebel hostages — were abandoned, or interred in clandestine graves deep in the jungle or high in the Andes. But thousands of others are likely in cemeteries across the country, where they were buried as unidentified people.
The UBPD, which is helped by ex-rebels and former soldiers as part of their adherence to the peace deal, seeks to confirm identifications with DNA, dental records and other evidence.
Samples from mothers, or siblings who share the same mother and therefore identical mitochondrial DNA, are the best candidates for comparison, though other relatives, including children of the disappeared, can also give samples. Where bodies were autopsied but unclaimed, there may be historic samples from the body itself with which to compare.
In October 2025, some 19 months after Gil attended the exhumation, the IML forensic service informed the UBPD that the sample taken from the remains did not have enough genetic material for comparison, the UBPD told Reuters. The remains were then re-exhumed and handed over in their entirety to the IML, the UBPD said.
The IML told Reuters in June it was waiting on samples from the UBPD to compare with samples from the long-ago autopsy of Jesus Arbey. It was unclear why the IML would need UBPD samples if it is in possession of the remains.
FAMILIES IN THE DARK
Jesus Arbey, the seventh of 11 children, was 24 when he vanished while on leave, never making it to a girlfriend’s house to visit, nor back to the barracks. Records show the family's estranged father identified a body as his son in 2003, but Gil says he never told his other children where her brother was buried.
Gil, who remembered Jesus Arbey as a jokester and said that she wishes she could cook him a Sunday lunch, was not distressed at Rionegro's hilltop cemetery when the remains removed by forensic staff were found to be missing their skull and hands.
She had been told by the UBPD that the person they think is Jesus Arbey was buried without them.
“I came prepared to see remains,” Gil told Reuters at the cemetery, her daughter Consuelo standing beside her, after forensic staff delicately cleaned the bones with toothbrushes and cloths. “That surely he wouldn’t have a head, and that’s how it was, he didn’t have a head, nor hands, but he did have feet.”
The femurs belonging to the body were cleanly cut in half, evidence that a prior DNA sample was taken when the body was autopsied.
Jesus Arbey is not the only sibling who is missing from Gil's life — she said other brothers were killed by guerrillas or paramilitaries, or died by suicide. Another, Rodolfo, is also missing.
"It’s so sad to have brothers and at the same time not to have them,” Gil said at the cemetery. “There are many families in the dark with nothing.”
AGENCY USES TV COMMERCIALS
The UBPD sought out Gil when it found a presumed location for Jesus Arbey's remains. In late 2024 it launched a nationwide 'Reverse Search' program, which uses TV commercials and other methods to seek the families of unclaimed remains.
Overall, the UBPD, created in 2017, has recovered nearly 5,100 remains through May of this year and identified 587 through DNA, dental records and other forensic processes. The unit said it was working closely with the IML to speed identifications, including via six joint teams staffed by anthropologists, doctors, dentists, forensic assistants and case workers.
"Despite efforts to close the gap between recovered bodies and identified bodies, given the scale of disappearances in Colombia, a comprehensive strengthening is needed of the institutions responsible for search, identification, and dignified handover efforts," the UBPD said.
It said more resources and people were needed to carry out DNA testing, fingerprinting and comparisons with historic autopsies.
Colombia is facing deep fiscal problems and the UBPD competes against many other entities for funding. The unit said in late 2025 it had received operational funding some 27% below its proposal for this year.
The number of cases being submitted to the IML's regional laboratories in Colombia's northwest, which includes Jesus Arbey's, has increased "exponentially" in recent years, the IML said in a written response to questions from Reuters.
It said it received 1,025 cases for just that regional lab between 2016 and 2022, jumping to 1,372 between 2023 and 2025. As of June, the region had a backlog of 490 cases needing forensic analysis, the IML said. Turnaround times at its genetic lab average 90 days.
In the meantime, Roselly Gil waits. Late at night, she often turns on the radio or uses her phone to distract herself.
"For a while I hoped he would come back to me, that I would find him alive, that I'd get a phone call or something," she said. "But in the end you sort of lose hope, and you're back to the same thing again, just wanting some kind of answer about what happened."
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Rionegro and Bogota, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
