1st Place, Henry Agudelo, Colombia

Indelible Marks

In Colombia there are more than 130,000 people who are listed as ‘disappeared’. Because of the war and violence in this country, many bodies that are not identified go to medical universities to be studied pending a family member recognising and claiming them.
Hundreds of bodies of disappeared people are waiting to be recognised or identified by different departments of the Colombian state Public Prosecutor's Office, which is why a mark on some part of their body, whether a tattoo, a mark on one of their bones , a prosthesis, or some belonging (chain, rings, glasses, watches, shoes, etc.) is important. Meanwhile, thousands of medical students gain their professional knowledge from these little things, fragments of skin, bones, fingerprints, dental records.
In 2016 the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, received the Nobel Peace Prize for executing the treaty and the peace agreement with the country’s oldest existing subversive group, the FARC (armed revolutionary group of Colombia) to end more than 50 years of armed conflict. But the nation, and the whole world, must not ignore the thousands of people who are missing and the millions of relatives who are waiting for some response from the state and the groups that remain outside the law.