Equipo Nizkor - Mario Paciolla: Justice for a Poet.

Not even 24 hours had gone by after the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia submitted its latest report in New York when one of your colleagues found you dead--my dear friend, poet and journalist--in your house in San Vicente del Cagauán. That report should have gathered your findings as a volunteer for this organization in the Department of Caquetá; yet, just as with your death, the UN kept quiet.

And it is this silence, not worthy of you and our reality, that forces me to write, to try to use words to break the knot that has been clutching my throat since I heard that a rope had asphyxiated yours until it left you lifeless, there in the early morning of Wednesday, July 15.

The hypothesis of suicide seems unlikely for those of us who knew your lively spirit, your smile, and also how you criticized the Mission when a colleague fell ill with dengue and time passed by without him being evacuated to another city for proper medical attention. You wondered what would happen if you got bitten by a snake or if you got seriously ill in San Vicente. You had already made a plan about whom you would go to if something like that happened to you. It would not be anyone from the UN, as you were concerned that the bureaucratic disease would leave you even more exposed than sickness or accident.

That kind of self-love contradicts the idea that you would have been able to take your own life in a place so far away from your friends, family, and loves, and from the Naples of your soul, where you were be heading on July 20 to cleanse yourself in the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, washing away all the filth that had been cast over you in the previous weeks.

You had left the padlock open on the ceiling door that opened up onto the roof of the small building where you lived, to take precautions, in case "someone" came for you. Is that where they found you? I'll never know, not for now at least, because I never went to visit you, not in San Vicente, and not in Naples, like we had agreed.

"Vedi Napoli e poi muori" (see Naples and then die). You always repeated that melancholy phrase to me as a reminder of the promise that we made in 2018 when you left Peace Brigades International (PBI) and I travelled to Holland to catch my breath in the face of a new avalanche of threats: when you returned to Italy, I would visit you there.

While your contract with the Mission would have ended on August 20, something happened on July 10. You had gotten into a heated argument with your bosses that day, according to what you told your mother, Anna Motta, the next day when you let her know your travel plans had changed, and that you would be leaving earlier. You felt disgusted.

In those last days, you had firmly insisted that it was no longer safe for you to stay in Colombia or at the Mission. That's why you had opened the padlock and started getting ready to leave. On Wednesday the 15^th, you were to travel to Bogotá to begin your return. You were meant to apply for a permit to travel on the humanitarian flight that left on the 20^th, an easy procedure for an international public servant.

You had stayed connected on your personal WhatsApp until July 14 at 10:45 at night. What happened between then and the next morning when your body was found by another former PBI member and volunteer at the Mission is an enigma. I called her as soon as I heard the news, on the 16^th, to express my condolences, but I was drowning in tears myself. "Mario thought very highly of you. He would always speak of you. I know you had been keeping in touch," she told me, and the only response I could think of was to ask her if she could try to rescue the poems from your computer, the ones you had compiled because you wanted to publish them in Italy.

The third week of June, at an informal meeting in Florencia--the capital of Caquetá, where the Mission's Regional Office (RO) hosts its operations, on which the Caguán Sub Office depends--a colleague accused you of being a spy.

You said it laughing, because you always poked fun at the absurd. Today, with your smile that has been snuffed out by your violent and sudden departure, I wonder if this might have been the first sign of the danger you were in. What happened that day? Who was it that such a serious accusation? What measures were taken by Sergio Pirabal, the RO boss and a former colleague of mine at the Guatemalan Truth Commission?

Also laughing, you mentioned the recent comments made on your work record for expressing disagreement with the way the Mission was handling the pandemic, which you considered to be discriminatory. While travel plans and measures for telecommuting were facilitated for other organization employees, for volunteers, the norm was solitude and isolation.

You were the kind of person who laughs at serious things, like when you confessed to me that, using a pseudonym, you had published reports about Colombia in an Italian magazine. These past days, looking for clues, I went back over your articles, but the last one is from June 2018. Clearly, you never violated the Mission's principles. You stopped writing when you joined.

No. No, I do not believe the thesis of suicide due to loneliness and depression that a number of your friends would like to buy into as a way to ease the processing of their own pain. Nor do I believe that an autopsy takes 10 to 20 days. Maybe the toxicological analysis, but the forensic exam should be ready by now, and the National Institute of Legal Medicine should have made it public.

I know about your internal quarrels with an organisation that only mentioned the military bombardment that left 18 children dead in one six-line paragraph of its 2019 report. These were boys and girls who had been recruited by FARC dissidents, several of whom were shot again after they were already dead. It was the event that pressured the then Defence Minister, Guillermo Botero, to resign.

I know you documented other similar cases along with the forced displacements of the families of these child victims and the assassinations of others. I know you were bothered by the soft tone of the UN reports, the complex relationship that some of the Mission members had with public security forces, the hiring of civilians who had been working for the military, the organization's passiveness in the face of the bombardment against civilians in the south of Meta, and the increase in selective assassinations of former FARC combatants.

For months, you had been waiting for a third alert for San Vicente del Caguán to be activated by the Early Warning System (SAT) of the Colombian Ombudsman Office. This week, Mateo Gómez Vásquez, the coordinator of the SAT, confirmed for me that the alert will come out in approximately a month, and that it will emphasize the growing number of FARC dissidents under the command of alias Gentil Duarte along with the conflict's new dynamics in this region of the country.

But this time, the alert will come late. According to the last conversation you had with your mother, on July 10, you got into "some trouble" with your bosses, which I do not hesitate to assert as being what triggered the events that led to your simulated suicide.

Since a week ago, your name has been spinning around in my head alongside the expressions "exhaustive investigation", "diplomatic immunity" and "strange circumstances".

My soul aches for you, Mario Paciolla. As a Peace Brigades member, you saved my life. Today, there is only one way to settle this debt: by seeking the truth surrounding your death.

21jul20

Mario Paciolla: Justice for a Poet

[Source: By Claudia Julieta Duque, Team Nizkor, Translated by Laura Elliott, Bogota, 21Jul20]

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