by Our Foreign Desk

COLOMBIAN forensic experts began excavating the suspected mass grave yesterday of as many as 300 victims of right-wing death squads.

The Escombra landfill site outside Medellin, the country’s second-largest city, could be the biggest mass grave in the the history of the US-backed dirty war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

Three sections of the site have been cordoned off while investigators search for victims’ remains. A camp is also being built for the relatives of the disappeared.

The search is complicated by the fact that construction debris has been continuously dumped on the site for more than a decade despite pleas by victims’ families for it to be closed and excavated.

“For years we denounced forced disappearances on a large scale and nothing was done,” said Inter-American Court of Human Rights lawyer Adriana Arboleda, whose organisation is helping victims’ families sue the government.

“Imagine how much money and effort could have been saved if they had listened to us earlier.”

Margarita Restrepo’s daughter Carol, aged 17, disappeared in October 2002 in the hillside Comuna 13 slum, where former president Alvaro Uribe launched the Operation Orion military offensive against Farc shortly after his election in 2002.

The military withdrew at the end of the operation but were replaced by masked right-wing militias. Allegations of killings of civilians and disappearances multiplied.

“If that light doesn’t shine for me, I hope it does for one of my companions,” said Ms Restrepo.

Many of the paramilitary crimes were carried out in alliance with US-trained security forces.

Former militia fighters including imprisoned warlord Diego Fernando Murillo — alias Don Berna — have testified that they dumped their victims in the Escombrera.

nThe search for 43 missing students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero has turned up at least 60 unmarked graves and 129 bodies over the last 10 months, Mexico’s attorney general’s office said on Sunday.

Hundreds of protesters led by parents of the missing youths marched in Mexico City to call for justice in the case.