Glimmers of hope for families of Colombia's missing - Reuters

Margarita Lucia Fonnegra did not flinch when the needle pricked her finger. Others had needed reassurance from the forensic technician but the 71-year-old Colombian grandmother was ready.

What was a little blood if, after 13 years, she finally got answers? 

Julia Symmes Cobb

Margarita’s son, Carlos German Daza, was a 33-year-old mechanic when he disappeared on Aug. 12, 2004, from the town of Puerto Boyaca in central Colombia. 

Carlos German left home after receiving a phone call and never returned, one of at least 52,000 Colombians who went missing and were likely killed during five decades of civil war. 

“Sometimes I think it’s a dream: that there’s been a mistake and he’ll turn up,” Fonnegra said after her bleeding finger was pressed to a sample paper, its bright drops containing all the laboratory needed to check her DNA against a register of unidentified bodies. 

Fonnegra and her grandson Juan Guillermo Daza, 24, came to the industrial city of Sogamoso, high in the Andes, to find the missing generation between them.

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Colombia suspends peace talks with ELN rebels after bomb attacks - Reuters

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos on Monday suspended peace talks with Marxist ELN rebels after a series of bombings over the weekend killed seven police officers and injured dozens.

The government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) have been in talks since February 2017 to end a five decade war, but Santos said he will not accept the group’s continued violence after it launched attacks on three police stations nationwide on Saturday and Sunday.

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On visit to Cartagena, Pope to honor 'slave of slaves' role model - Reuters

Pope Francis on Sunday pays homage to the social justice legacy of one of his role models, Saint Peter Claver, who ministered to slaves in Colombia in the 1600s, defying Spanish colonial masters who treated them as chattel.

Francis wraps up his five-day trip with a stop in Cartagena, the walled Caribbean port city that was a gateway for the slave trade in the New World.

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Pope, in Medellin, recalls 'painful memory' of narco wars - Reuters

Reuters

Pope Francis on Saturday visited Medellin, epicenter of Colombia’s narco wars of the 1980s and asked that God convert the hearts of the “drug assassins” who cut short so many young lives.

On his penultimate day in Colombia, Francis flew to Medellin, the city northwest of the capital that was once notorious as the stomping grounds of drug lord Pablo Escobar.

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Pope arrives in Colombia to help heal wounds of 50-year war - Reuters

Pope Francis arrived in Colombia on Wednesday with a message of unity for a nation deeply divided by a peace deal that ended a five-decade war with Marxist FARC rebels but left many victims of the bloodshed wary of the fraught healing process.

Francis, making his 20th foreign trip since becoming pontiff in 2013 and his fifth to his native Latin America, started his visit in Colombian capital Bogota. He will travel later in the week to the cities of Villavicencio, Medellin and Cartagena.

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