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?

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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