The government and the FARC rebel group vow to speed up the work of locating the remains of the victims

BOGOTA, Oct 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The last time Dario Sierra knew his 84-year-old father was alive was during a phone call with a rebel from Colombia's FARC guerrilla group demanding he pay a $135,000 ransom for his father's release.

Thirteen years on, the old man is still missing.

"All I know is that 14 guerrillas kidnapped my father, tortured him, and then killed him when I couldn't pay the ransom within two weeks," said 69-year-old Sierra.

"I've searched for his body in all the corners and mountains of Colombia. The truth remains buried. People say I'm the old man looking for another old man. It's been 13 years of pain."

According to the official victims' register, 45,000 Colombians have disappeared, victims of a five decade war between government troops, right-wing paramilitary groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other guerrilla groups.

For decades the relatives of the disappeared have campaigned for the government to step up efforts to locate unmarked graves, and for armed groups to break the silence surrounding Colombia's missing and say where bodies are buried.

Hopes have now been raised that the whereabouts of the disappeared will come to light. Negotiators at peace talks between the government and FARC leaders agreed last week to create a special unit to search for the missing once a final deal to end a war that has killed over 200,000 people is signed.

"The government as well as the (FARC) insurgency will collaborate to speed up the work of locating, identifying and handing over the remains of the victims," Ivan Marquez, rebel leader and chief negotiator told reporters in Havana, Cuba, where peace talks are taking place.

The agreement addresses the issue of victim's rights as part of peace talks, which reached a breakthrough in late September when the two sides vowed to sign an accord by March 2016.

"What was agreed seeks to alleviate this pain, the profound pain of the families of the disappeared," Humberto de la Calle, the government's top peace negotiator, told reporters in Bogota.

The government also said it would speed up efforts to exhume the bodies of people who had been killed in fighting with security forces and who were then buried in unmarked graves known as "N.N." in cemeteries across Colombia.

HEALING WAR WOUNDS

The relatives of the disappeared say burying the remains of their loved ones is crucial to healing the wounds of war and to salvaging some kind of reparation and justice.

"Just 10 years ago, the issue of forced disappearances wasn't even talked about in Colombia. The truth about what happened to the missing is fundamental to us," Teresita Gaviria, whose son disappeared 16 years ago, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

Gaviria heads the Mothers of La Candelaria, a leading Colombian rights group set up in 1999, which includes 800 relatives of those who have disappeared.

She and others from the group visit prisons to speak to captured former rebels and paramilitary fighters to glean information and leads about the whereabouts of bodies.

This approach has helped the rights group locate around 100 bodies buried in unmarked graves in southwestern Colombia over the past decade.

"The latest agreement in Havana is a very important step," said Gaviria, who is one of 60 war victims who travelled to Cuba to give testimony to peace negotiators.

"It means the FARC are going to provide us the coordinates that will save us a lot of time in our searches for the missing. We have hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel."

Searching and digging for bodies is made difficult by Colombia's mountainous and jungle terrain, along with the landmines littering parts of the countryside.

Christoph Harnisch, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Colombia, has said the organisation will help authorities exhume bodies, a task that will take "years".

In recent years forensic teams and state prosecutors from Colombia's attorney-general's office have been searching for the disappeared and exhuming bodies, including those in mass graves.

Some captured former rebels and paramilitary fighters, who are in jail, have already cooperated with authorities to locate remains in exchange for lighter prison sentences.

In July Colombian authorities started to unearth what they say is the world's largest urban mass grave, located in a garbage tip in a sprawling mountainside slum in the city of Medellin. (Reporting By Anastasia Moloney, Editing by Ros Russell; Reuters Messaging: Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)

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