Jaime Peña of Barrancabermeja in northern Colombia has spent the last ten years trying to find out what happened to his son and the 24 others who were taken by paramilitaries on the night of 16 May 1998.
‘My son was taken on the 16th of May 1998. His name is Jaime Yesid Peña Rodriguez, he was sixteen, and he was still at school.
‘The man pointed the gun at him and pushed him. That’s the last image I have of my son.’
We were watching TV. I remember it was a comedy. Yesid put his T-shirt on. He told me he was going to sit outside with his friends.
I heard a dog bark. I’ve never been able to explain why that struck me so much, but I looked out. I saw my son being taken off by a hooded man. I shouted: 'Hey Yesid, what’s going on?'
He tried to answer, but the man pointed the gun at him and pushed him. That’s the last image I have of my son.
I saw a truck with 10 or 12 men in. They were heavily armed. Someone shouted: 'They’ve beheaded someone.' My heart started pounding. I was thinking and worrying, almost begging that it not be him.
An unarmed man was lying in a huge pool of blood. His head had been cut off.
It wasn’t my son.
Fear took hold of me, my whole body started trembling, but I overcame the fear and worry and started to run in the direction of the truck I had seen earlier.
I heard shots, someone shouted: 'Get on the ground friends of the guerrilla, sons of bitches, tonight you’re all going to die because the war has started, face down all of you.'
That’s when I heard the voice of a neighbour - I’m not even sure who it was - saying to me: 'Come, don’t go on, if you go they’ll kill you.'
At the police station, they were indifferent. They didn’t do anything to help us. At one point they seemed to be laughing at us.
People were running, shouting, mothers crying and calling for their children, and children wailing, asking for their parents.
When I got home with my wife, we collapsed. We held each other and like two children we cried and cried.
When it started to rain, I got up and went to the window where I’d seen my son for the last time and I asked myself 'where can he be?'
The emptiness answered that he was dead in the middle of a road with the rain falling down on him.’