A hydroelectric project flooded towns that had previously been the site of armed conflict. Under the water, unnamed bodies of the victims of that violence wait to be recovered. Here, buried bodies, the natural world and the memory of how to inhabit this place all coexist.
A person with albinism leaves home to never return. In sub-Saharan Africa, many people with albinism are trafficked for their body parts.
Robinson Mukhwana is among the thousands of people with albinism in Kenya. Ten years ago, he met a friend who offered him a job in Mwanza, Tanzania. Mukhwana had grown up homeless and without a family. He lived anywhere – on the streets, with neighbours, in abandoned houses.
On the evening he left Kitale, his village, he remembers crossing the river, passing two abandoned huts in his neighbourhood and smiling, because he would no longer live in poverty.
However, when he reached Mwanza, Mukhwana realized he was in danger. He was rescued by the Tanzanian police, who had been following Nathan Mutei, a man wanted for trafficking of persons with albinism – Mukhwana's new 'friend'. Mutei had been planning to murder Mukhwana for his bones.
In the last decade, hundreds of people with albinism have been attacked, mutilated or killed in sub-Saharan Africa, many of them for body parts intended to be trafficked for use in rituals or traditional medicine, as it is believed they hold special powers.
In Kenya, there are no accurate figures of those missing or killed because rejection of children with albinism begins at birth. People with albinism are either lured by traffickers with promises of better lives and jobs, as in the case of Mukhwana, or kidnapped and killed for their bones.
The two huts near the place Mukhwana now calls home remind him of the evening he left his village to meet his new friend Mutei to travel to Mwanza. It was during the maize harvesting season. He remembers seeing people harvesting maize into bundles and wondering when he would be back in Kitale after his long trip to Tanzania.
Kitale, Kenya. In sub-Saharan Africa, people with albinism are abducted and killed for their body parts.
Judie Kaberia is a journalist who focuses on legal and justice issues, human rights, equality and health.
From a number of villages, young people arrive to work in the mines in the east of the country. They become modern slaves.
This is the Mumba River, the great river that crosses the Rubaya mining area in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Its name comes from the community that lives there, also called Mumba. Here, children come to clean minerals for their employers. They also look for mining residue left over from the mines located on the other side of the river.
This region, part of North Kibu province, has experienced many armed conflicts for the past 25 years, and is an area coveted by politicians as well as by neighbouring countries who want to monopolize the natural resources it has to offer.
The city of Rubaya is a mining zone that produces minerals that are used for the manufacture of electronic equipment such as cell phones, computers and laptops. In order to meet the demand, many residents and workers are subjected to human rights violations, including human trafficking, modern forms of slavery and disappearances.
Many young people who come from the towns bordering the mining area are brought here under false pretenses or flee armed conflicts in their own regions. But upon arrival, since they do not have the means to provide for themselves, they become victims of different forms of modern slavery.
Benoit Kikwaya is a community organizer focused on the rights and wellbeing of children and youth, and the fight against modern slavery in the Rubaya mining area in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
When the families of the disappeared walk through an area in search of these graves, they activate that space. The histories of those places, preserved in the earth, in the trees, in the animals and in the air, awaken to tell them: here.
We receive the maps via chat, message, phone. People see me in the street and give me a little piece of paper. We look for gravesites based on anonymous messages. The first messages that we got took us to San Rafael Calería, a town in Veracruz. There, we found a grave; the public prosecutor said they were rags and burnt wood, but it wasn’t wood – what we had held in our hands was burnt bones. Those bones are fragile, already touched by rain, wind and fire.
I think that they were moved when they were already dead; sometimes we think that they also made them walk, still alive, to get here, because we’ve seen bullet casings in the graves. What might they be thinking on their way to this place?
When you stop in sites where a body was discovered, you feel anger, helplessness, imagining the horror of what happened there. The scent of fear. Rain mixes with your tears when you find a site.
They are areas with water, they always have water: a river, a little canal. Green, turquoise water, the kind that comes down from the mountain already filtered. Sometimes they are rivers that appear and disappear with the rains, and that’s when we find the bones.
All of the encampments have a road and an entrance and exit, an emergency exit. They all have mobile phone reception; we haven’t found a single one that’s cut off from communication.
They have beds, sheets of plywood thrown together. There are lots of mesquite plants, they call it huizache, and then in the middle are the places where they sleep. In other camps, there are houses.
The majority of camps are nearby. For example, one is 10 minutes away, and everything around it on that hillside is very clean, there are really lovely ranches, tidy, well cultivated, prosperous, and in the middle, there’s that horror.
And nearly the vast majority have a river. Or a stream. Everyone needs water – even them; if not, they die.
We searched for our daughter for many years in the hope of finding here alive, until we saw that they were burying people in the countryside, in the hillside.
They say that there were a lot of people around there, and you could hear the screams and those with any information would hide. We went, we saw someone, and we talked to him: ‘We’re not interested in the perpetrators, we don’t want to know about them. We just want to find our relative, help us out. Really, you don’t know what we’re going through.’ ‘Look,’ he said, ‘search along the canal, but don’t say that I told you.’ It was a guy around our age, 50-something. And that’s where we started.
We found Patrocinio, a clandestine extermination camp, because of him. It’s a very remote place, far away… I imagine them there, screaming, and no one heard them. Who heard them? Who could help?
Here, in this notebook, we wrote down the places we found and planned how we’d start the search. Because it’s so big, so big that how do you start? The world is very big when you’re searching for your disappeared.
We’ve reached the point where the demand, ‘They took them alive; we want them back alive’ is not valid any more. Not any more because, you know what, a lot of people have gotten it into their heads – too many people – that they’re going to get them back alive, and they don’t recognize that we’re harming people, the mothers, when we say that. I know it’s a slogan, but they’re internalizing it as something real, literal… I’m not willing to say, ‘They took them alive; we want them back alive’ – because this will give false hope to some of the mothers.
I’m not denying that some are alive, but they’re finding bodies all across the country, all across the country.
My brother was kidnapped in 2012. My sister Mayra started to search for him in the newspapers’ crime and accidents sections. Every time a death was reported, she read the descriptions of the bodies. She never found anything that could have been linked to him.
After a while, my mother told me, ‘They are saying that they kill people and bury them in the countryside. Why don’t you go look?’. I didn’t know how. I would see the hills through the window. They’re huge.
When we started digging up graves, we went up the mountainside. Along the way, we ran into someone, a farmer. He told us that a while back that area smelled horrible. ‘I keep animals, and I thought one of them had died,’ he told us, ‘but I counted them and, no, it wasn’t one of my animals.’
Later we went back, during the rainy season, and we were there in La Laguna. It was the first piece of land we searched. We started to dig, and the bones came to the surface. The first thing we discovered was a femur, it was a long bone. We broke down.
The bones sprouted from the ground with the rain, and we recovered between 18 and 21 bodies.
We knew we were going to look for people buried there, but we didn’t know we were actually going to find them.
I started looking for him along the edges of roads, in abandoned houses, ranches. I started alone, but after I posted about it on social media, I saw that there were a lot of people with their own disappeared.
The first search was on a Saturday, in the town where we used to live. It was raining, and the rain washed the earth away, and a knee sprouted from the earth. That’s how we found the first grave, which had two bodies. We kept looking and found two more bodies.
It was a hillside just behind a swamp, in that town, a plot of land that was never used for planting. A place that lent itself to this because there were trees that covered it up, and the ground was also very soft, ground that was practical for digging and burying someone. Because it takes work to dig a grave – it’s not easy.
That day they didn’t let us work because of the rain. ‘Come back tomorrow, in the morning,’ the authorities told us. We stayed there, waiting; we didn’t want to leave. We thought that someone might show up and take the bodies away, and so we stayed there all night. And it rained all night too.
The next day, the authorities arrived and cordoned off the area. I don’t remember if I could hear or see. Only that knee emerging from the grave remained etched in my mind.
Because when you’re at a grave, you lose all notion of time, you don’t hear, you don’t see. We become someone else, we transform. A lot of times you might think you’re getting used to it, but the truth is you never get used to it, you can’t. Because when you find someone, you feel that that body won’t have to suffer there any longer.
We’ve heard about some corpses, and the reports are so painful, that it hurts us, makes our bones ache, our heads ache, as though we’d been run over by a truck. If we don’t find anything in that place, we promise to go back. Because we’re sure that there are bodies there.
Once we went out to search, and a man stopped searching because he found a snake nest – they’re worth 100 pesos each. He changed his mind about going with us and kept the snakes.
We’ve had all kinds of experiences, some really sad ones, because of how we found the bodies, others that are lovely. Sometimes we cry, sometimes we argue, sometimes we sing.
There is a garbage dump where bodies are thrown with the aim of letting them disintegrate from the constant humidity of the moisture trickling down. Teeth. Bones mixed with bodies. Humans who were tossed there. And animals. Clothing, shoes, bottles, hamburger wrappers, fast-food wrappers, there was water, boots, bullet casings.
A place turned into a specialized area for handling the bodies, for disposing of them, not only by cutting them into pieces but accelerating the decomposition of those small pieces.
The fisherman told us that he had found the bodies floating near the dock. First one, then another. It’s not common to see bodies floating in the sea; he thought it was a log, like those that herons perch on to rest. But it wasn’t a log, it was a man, the body of a man.
