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Colombia's 62,000 disappeared

by Anastasia Moloney | @anastasiabogota | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Tuesday, 30 August 2011 17:11 GMT

* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The ICRC has urged the Colombian government to provide more support to families searching for missing relatives

Nearly 62,000 people have gone missing in Colombia during the country’s decades-long armed conflict, a rise of 30 percent in the number of people reported missing last June, according to the country's Ombudsman.

“People on all sides of a conflict are affected. Civilians, military personnel, or members of armed groups may be killed in fighting or made to disappear as part of an effort to spread fear in a community,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a statement.

In recent years, thousands of Colombia’s disappeared have been discovered in clandestine graves across the country.

The ICRC has urged the Colombian government to provide more support to families searching for missing relatives.

"For the families, it's like going through a maze. They need to receive information that they can understand. They need support, and they need to be treated with respect," Guilhem Ravier, from the ICRC in Colombia, said in a statement.

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