Buenaventura is Colombia’s main Pacific port and one of the continent’s most strategic corridors for cocaine trafficking. For decades, this position has made the city a battleground between guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and criminal gangs fighting for control of drug routes toward Europe and North America. The result is a city where men and women are killed, children disappear, and families learn to live with uncertainty as a permanent companion.
In this episode, we travel to Buenaventura and meet Elena, an Afro-Colombian woman in her sixties who arrived in the city as a child after armed groups killed her parents in her hometown. Buenaventura took her in, and she made it her own. She had seven children and built a life.
But the war that brought her there never left.
Three of her children have disappeared. Each one, in a different way.
The first was Luis, who one day simply vanished. The second was Esteban, whose whereabouts Elena still does not know after years of searching. The third was Josué, her nephew whom she raised as a son, whose skull was found in an estuary by a forensic team in December 2021 — three years after his disappearance.
Carmen, Josué’s mother, died on August 14, 2024. Thirteen days later, authorities confirmed that the remains found in the estuary belonged to her son. She never had the chance to say goodbye.
Elena continues waiting for news about Esteban. Even if it is just a small bone, she says.
We investigate how the armed conflict in Buenaventura has attempted to destroy the social fabric of a city that, despite everything, preserves its joy, its rain, and the generosity of its people. Through Elena’s story, we understand how violence does not only kill — it erases people, breaks families, and leaves mothers waiting for answers that sometimes arrive too late, and sometimes never arrive at all.
Visit g to learn more about Buenaventura and the criminal dynamics shaping Colombia and the region.