[00:00:01] Steven Dudley: Hi. This is Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime. Just one thing before we get started. We’ve changed the names of all the people involved in this story to protect their identities.

Okay. Here’s the story. It’s Saturday morning. Our investigators Henry Shuldiner y Juliana Manjarrés are sitting in a hotel conference room in Buenaventura Colombia’s Pacific Coast.

[00:00:29] Elena: Bien, gracias a Dios, el Señor me lo bendiga.

[00:00:32] Steven Dudley: Across the table from them is a woman in her 60s. Afro-Colombian. Braids. She’s short but sturdy. We’re going to call her Elena.

[00:00:40] Elena: Estaba durísimo.

[00:00:43] Henry: Estaba duro.

[00:00:43] Elena: Y cuando llueve…

[00:00:47] Steven Dudley: She doesn’t raise her voice – she doesn’t have to. In Buenaventura, people listen. She’s been in the middle of this country’s civil war for decades.

[00:00:55] Henry: Tenemos un mapa porque estamos muy mal ubicados.

[00:00:58] Henry: We came to talk to Elena about how Buenaventura changed in that time period. From a city where kids played in the rain into a war zone where kids disappeared. 

Elena knows every little corner of the area, so I told her I was a little lost and put a map I was carrying in front of her.

[00:01:15] Elena: Yo te ubico por aquí. Esta es la isla. ¿Te vienes por aquí? Por aquí. Por aquí. Dónde está.

[00:01:21] Henry: Buenaventura snakes from the mainland to an island in front of a large bay, where the city’s port is. There’s a bridge that connects the two. Most people live on the mainland, but the fight over the strategic corridor and launchpad for drugs stretches across both of these areas and beyond.

[00:01:41] Elena: En esta parte se empieza en la isla y se termina.

[00:01:45] Henry: Sí.

[00:01:46] Elena: Hacia arriba.

[00:01:47] Henry: In Buenaventura, the lines on a map don’t just mark neighborhoods. They mark territory. Held by guerillas. By paramilitaries. By Street Gangs.

[00:01:59] Steven Dudley: Elena has lived through every wave of that violence in the worst way. Over the years, three of Elena’s children have gone missing, or “disappeared”< as they like to say. Three. And she’s not stopped looking for any of them. Welcome to InSight Crime’s Podcast where we take you behind the headlines to the frontlines of organized crime in the Americas. I’m your host, Steven Dudley, InSight Crime’s co-director.

[00:02:39] Henry: And I’m Henry Shuldiner. In this episode, I’m going to tell you the story of a mother in Buenaventura looking for her three sons in the middle of a brutal war over a strategic cocaine corridor.

[00:02:39] Henry: Three searches. And three very different outcomes. Elena wasn’t born in Buenaventura. But she’ll tell you she’s from there.

[00:03:08] Elena: Soy una hija de Buenaventura.

[00:03:10] Henry: I’m a daughter of Buenaventura, she likes to say. From the beginning, her life has been shaped by war. She arrived as a small girl from the heart of the coffee growing region in central Colombia, after armed groups killed her parents. She doesn’t remember much or doesn’t want to talk about it, about either the armed groups or her parents. What she remembers is what came after. A happy childhood. Hide-and-seek in the streets. And the rain.

[00:03:39] Elena: Una alegría era un aguacero en Buenaventura.

[00:03:43] Henry: It would come down in buckets she told us. But for Elena it was a joy. One of her favorite things to do was frolic in the puddles accumulating outside. The rain also fostered food, in abundance, which Elena said people readily shared.

[00:03:58] Elena: Los pescadores traían plátano, banano, papa, china, coco…

[00:04:06] Henry: The boats would pull up next to the houses, she told us. Plantains. Bananas. Yuca. Coconuts. The neighbors shared everything – this for so-and-so, this for so-and-so. That was Buenaventura, she said. 

Elena eventually trained as a nursing assistant and became a mother at a young age. She had seven children – five boys, two girls. 

But things were tough. She split with her partner. Some of the kids went to live with him, some with her. By then, around the mid-1990s, things were also changing in the city.

[00:04:40] Elena: Entonces yo diría que alrededor del 95, 96 empezaron aquí las masacres.

[00:04:47] Henry: Bodies started popping up in the river – tied to logs, floating north with the current. They were victims of massacres, the first of their kind in the area. 

But they were emblematic of things to come. The fight was between right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas. Buenaventura is Colombia’s only Pacific port. It’s also right next to the country’s biggest coca growing region and the FARC – then-Colombia’s largest insurgency – was getting deeper into cocaine trafficking. 

They wanted the port. So, they came for it. 

The battle soon came to the city. Elena remembers the first time the FARC launched a full-scale attack on Buenaventura. It was 1997.

[00:05:35] Elena: La noche fueron disparos, fueron ráfagas. Fue una noche verdaderamente de terror.

[00:05:43] Henry: Gunshots and machine-gun fire all night, she said. Two young men from her block were shot. She drove them to the hospital. But they died. 

For a while this pattern continued. Fighting. Injuries. And Elena tending to them all. After all, that’s what she trained for. Until they came for her.

[00:06:05] Elena: Me amenazaron con revólver en mano. en la cabeza, me pusieron el revólver.

[00:06:11] Henry: She didn’t give many details but said that someone put a gun to her head and told her to stop helping people.

[00:06:17] Elena: Me ha tocado ver caer muchos, muchos, muchos, muchos, muchos.

[00:06:24] Henry: A lot of people. A lot, a lot, a lot. And that, she says, is when fear really took hold in the port.

[00:06:30] Elena: Y entonces empezó realmente la zozobra.

[00:06:40] Henry: People left, especially young people, who didn’t see a future, and who didn’t want to get caught in the fray. Others disappeared. One of those young people was one of Elena’s sons. We’re going to call him Luis. 

Luis was about ten years old when a man came around saying he was taking some kids to a bike race. Luis went and he didn’t come back. Helena had no idea what happened. She searched everywhere. And when she didn’t find him, she went to the local radio station which gave airtime for people to send messages to their missing relatives and loved ones. 

Still, in her heart, she knew he might have been kidnapped or worse. But she kept looking.

[00:07:29] Elena: Me contaban los compañeritos que era que el señor era ecuatoriano y que andaba robándose a los niños para que robaran para él.

[00:07:36] Henry: Other kids in the neighborhood told her the man was Ecuadorian, and that he was stealing children to make them steal for him. Her heart sank. Luis was gone. Elena lost her second son just a few years later. Esteban, as we are calling him, was her youngest. The apple of her eye. The tallest of her boys, dark-skinned like her, with tightly curled hair.

[00:08:07] Elena: Si todos mis hijos son guapos, pero él, sobresalía.

[00:08:12] Henry: All my kids are handsome, she told us, but he stood out.

[00:08:14] Elena: Ese jugaba fútbol y eso mantenía con una tula para arriba y para abajo.

[00:08:19] Henry: Esteban was also restless, energetic. He wanted to be a soccer player–and wore shorts and a jersey all the time. He lived with his dad, his stepmother, his grandmother and a few siblings. But Elena saw him a lot.

[00:08:33] Elena: Entonces ya no vivía ahí en la casa. Pero yo, frecuentemente iba.

[00:08:40] Henry: When Esteban was a teenager, he’d spend his days with friends in the woods or on a muddy field the boys carved out for themselves to kick the ball around. But something was off.

[00:08:50] Elena: La abuelita de él me comentó que no, que estaba muy rebelde.

[00:08:56] Elena: His grandmother told Elena that Esteban had become rebellious. And that the stepmother was blaming Esteban for everything. But Elena could see he was sad and distant.

[00:09:04] Elena: Porque él una noche llegó con un arma hechiza y ella decía que era corta y pega una arma de verdad, pero era de madera.

[00:09:16] Henry: Esteban showed up with a gun, or it looked like one but was really just a replica that was carved from wood. Still, his grandmother was worried, and she told Elena to be careful. By then the war had settled into a brutal tit-for-tat between the guerillas and the paramilitaries. Massacres had become commonplace in the area as the two battled for control of this lucrative drug staging area. Huge numbers of people had to flee. And young men like Esteban were being recruited regularly. Sometimes it was voluntary. Sometimes they were forced to join. It was around then that Elena went to the house and Esteban, his grandmother on his father’s side sat her down.

[00:09:57] Elena: Ya tiene varios días que él no duerme aquí en la casa.

[00:10:03] Henry: Esteban hadn’t slept in the house for days, the grandmother told her. They’d already started looking. Family. Friends. But no one had seen him. 

A few days later came a tip — someone had spotted him in another neighborhood.

[00:10:16] Elena: Me comentó que él había estado allá. Que él tenía un amigo que era un indio que era un peruano. Pero era indio. Y desaparecieron los dos.

[00:10:29] Henry: He’d been hanging out with an Indigenous man from Peru, the neighbor said. And one day the two of them just didn’t come back. 

But Elena had other questions. Did he run away? Did he join the guerrillas or the paramilitaries? Was he forced to join? What she did know was that she now had missing sons. So once again, she tried to follow every lead. She traveled to the neighborhood where Esteban was last seen and then walked the streets asking anyone who’d listen – have you seen a boy like this? 

But nothing. At the time, most people assumed Esteban had just run off. Same as Luis. And then in 2002 – a minor miracle happened.

[00:11:11] Elena: Pero un buen día apareció.

[00:11:15] Henry: Luis came back. 

Just like that. As inexplicably as he’d left. 

The full story remains unknown. But here’s what Elena could piece together. Luis was taken to Ecuador, where he eventually snuck away then ran for his life.

[00:11:30] Elena: Él dice que él se montó en una mula y cuando fue a ver, se fue. Estaba en el Ecuador.

[00:11:37] Henry: Eventually, he found a mule that got him across the border from Ecuador to Columbia where he made his way to Cali. One day, someone in the family heard a local radio station broadcasting messages of families who had lost their children or partners. They heard a voice calling for Luis. We can’t keep you, they told him, your family is looking for you. They gave him money, food and put him on the road back to Buenaventura. It was 2017. Years passed since Esteban disappeared. Elena lived in a kind of suspended animation. Searching. Waiting for him. And around here, Colombia was changing.

[00:12:29] Newswire: After more than five decades of bloodshed, there may be a chance for peace in Colombia again. The Colombian government and the Marxist guerrillas known as FARC, are due to sign a revised peace deal Thursday to end the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people and forced millions more Colombians from their homes.

[00:12:48] Henry: Although in 2016 the Colombian government signed a peace deal with the FARC that ended more than five decades of war with the country’s biggest guerrilla organization, for Elena, the agreement brought hope, but not answers.

[00:13:01] Elena: Salimos muchas. Recuerdo que salimos alrededor de unas 111 personas.

[00:13:10] Henry: So, in 2017, about a hundred of them women who had lost children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends started meeting at a Catholic Church. It wasn’t really activism. It was like a support group. They were going to need each other.

[00:13:26] Newswire: La ola de violencia que vive el puerto tiene una razón. La disputa del territorio por parte de estas tres bandas delincuenciales. Todo por el control del narcotráfico.

[00:13:43] Henry: But the war wasn’t over. What came after the peace deal with the FARC was different. Smaller. Less ideological. More Criminal. And remarkably, more brutal. In addition to the remnants of the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, there were local gangs. Two of them ended up at war for control of Buenaventura. Fighting it out. Block by bloody block. And soon it reached Elena’s family. Again. This one, we were going to call him Josué. Now, he wasn’t actually Elena’s biological son. He was her nephew. But he and Esteban had grown up together in the same house raised like brothers.

[00:14:24] Elena: Era como un hijo para mí.

[00:14:25] Henry: Josué is like a son to me, she told us. Josué worked with his hands. He was a motorcycle mechanic. People said he could diagnose any engine just by looking at it. 

It was a Sunday in May 2021 when someone called him for a repair. He grabbed his tools and walked out of the door. He never came back. By Monday people in the neighborhood were saying Josué had been killed. It could have been one of the gangs or other armed groups in the area. Or it could’ve been a random crime. When war surrounds you, no one asks too many questions. At one point for example, someone had told her they had seen a young man from the area carrying his tools hiding them under his shirt. Sneaking into Josué’s room to grab his clothes. Who was he? Didn’t anyone stop him? Elaina still doesn’t know. 

She probably never will. Still, she looked. And this time with a sense of urgency, because Josué’s mom, Carmen, was dying. She felt like she had to get an answer about what happened to her son. She pushed organizations, she pushed authorities.

[00:15:39] Elena: Hay veces yo me iba todo el día a caminar con ella, a buscarlo.

[00:15:45] Henry: Carmen helped as well. Sometimes the two of them spent the whole day walking around looking. Months passed. Nothing. More months. And still nothing. And then, in December 2021. Something. A forensic team from the government had been searching all day in the estuaries that surrounded the city. The waterways are used for trafficking and dumping bodies. The team was finishing a sweep through them when the tide went out and they were beached. While they waited for the tide to return. Somebody looked towards the brush. There resting in the mud…

[00:16:29] Elena: Estaba el cráneo allí.

[00:16:41] Henry: …was a skull. Identifying the body was a painful process. It took years. Throughout, Elena had one concern.

[00:16:49] Elena: Yo no quiero que fallezca sin saber de su hijo.

[00:16:53] Henry: I don’t want Carmen to die without knowing what happened to her son, she told herself. Carmen died on August 14th, 2024. Thirteen days later, authorities declared the skull they had found was Josué’s. It had been three years since they had found it. It was so hard. Helena says she was the only one. Who looked when they showed them what remained of Josué.

[00:17:21] Elena: No le pudo dar el último adiós a su hijo. Uff… Dios bendito…uff…el dolor es inmenso.

[00:17:37] Henry: The pain is immense. Three Children. Three Searches. 

Luis left, and Luis came back. Josué was killed. Elena buried him. And Esteban?

[00:17:46] Elena: Y así estoy yo hoy. Esperando. Esperando que mi hijo aparezca.

[00:17:53] Henry: Elena is still waiting.

[00:17:57] Elena: Aunque sea un huesito. Aunque sea un huesito de la mano, del pie, de alguna parte del cuerpo que aparezca y le digan a uno: es mi hijo.

[00:18:09] Henry: Even a small bone she says, from his and his foot anywhere. So someone could finally tell her: this, this is your son.

[00:18:36] Steven Dudley: This show is a production of InSight Crime. Before we go a quick look at next week.

[00:18:41] Rapper: La droga que sale de aquí porque sale.

[00:18:44] Steven Dudley: We met him in Ecuador. He’s a rapper. On stage, he’s got the microphone. Off-stage, something else entirely. It’s a story about music and crime, and the line between them. You won’t want to miss this one.

Now, about the episode you just heard. It was reported and written by Henry Shuldiner and Juliana Manjarrés. Edited by Liza Schmidt, Tomás Uprimny, Elisa Roldán and me, Steven Dudley. Elisa Roldán is our project manager and art director. Graphics by Isabella Soto. Sound design by Valentina Fonseca, and our own cumbia music was Juan Felipe Pulido. Thanks to our whole team at InSight Crime.

Special thanks to Elena — for opening her door, and her story, to us.

And if you’re still with us right now — thank you. Getting a story like this on tape takes time. Months of reporting. Flights. Hours sitting in living rooms. And to be blunt — doing it right costs money.

InSight Crime is completely independent. No owner, no boss telling us what to cover or what to kill. That’s how we like it. And what keeps us going is listeners like you.

So, if you can chip in — from 15$ to whatever makes sense for you — head to insightcrime.org/donate. That’s how stories like Elena’s get told.

And if donating isn’t an option right now, just send this episode to a friend. That helps more than you’d think.

See you next week. From Ecuador. Chau. Chau.