Operation Orion and the Murals That Followed

The first dense cluster of murals you reach on the Comuna 13 escalator route deals openly, and without flinching, with Operation Orion. The murals are not decoration. They are a public ledger, maintained by the residents of the neighborhood, of what happened on October 16 and 17, 2002. To stand in front of them and read what you are looking at, you need to know the operation's outline. The painters who made them assumed you do.

What the operation was

By late 2002 the Colombian state had been at war for four decades with two main left-wing insurgencies, the FARC and the ELN, and with right-wing paramilitary federations, most notably the AUC. The city of Medellín, and especially its hillside western neighborhoods, had been contested terrain for the better part of fifteen years. Comuna 13, the cluster of barrios on the western valley wall, was strategically important because it sat along the corridor running from Medellín to the Urabá Gulf on the Caribbean coast. The Urabá corridor was a major trafficking route. Whoever controlled the corridor's urban end controlled a piece of the cocaine economy.

By mid-2002, three factions claimed parts of Comuna 13. The Nineteen Sixth Front of the FARC operated in the upper barrios. ELN cells held other blocks. AUC-aligned urban militias contested both. Civilians lived under shifting curfews enforced by whoever held the corner. School attendance collapsed. Murder rates in the neighborhood ran higher than the city average, and the city average was already among the worst in the world.

In May 2002 Álvaro Uribe Vélez had been elected President of Colombia on a hard-security platform. His doctrine, seguridad democrática, democratic security, prioritized military reassertion of state control over territory that the state had effectively lost. Comuna 13 was an explicit target. Operations Mariscal in May and Antorcha in August preceded Orion. Each was a military insertion into the neighborhood. Each cleared the upper barrios temporarily and then retreated. The insurgents returned.

Orion was different in scale. On the morning of October 16, 2002, more than 1,000 Colombian soldiers, police, and members of the DAS intelligence service entered Comuna 13. They were supported by Blackhawk helicopters, armored vehicles, and snipers positioned on the surrounding ridges. The official goal was capturing or killing the FARC and ELN fighters operating inside the neighborhood, and seizing the corridor.

The operation took two days. By its end, the army held the upper barrios. Several insurgents had been killed and others captured. Civilian casualties, depending on whose count you accept, ranged from around 10 confirmed dead to dozens. Hundreds of homes had been raided. The Colombian Constitutional Court would later rule, in 2008, that civilians' fundamental rights had been violated during the operation.

The disappeared

The harder part of the story begins after Orion was officially concluded. In the months following October 2002, residents of Comuna 13 began to report that family members had vanished. Young men, mostly, but also women and a few children. The pattern was specific: a person would leave home for a normal errand, an aunt's house, a shop, a job, and not return. No body. No notification. No record.

By 2003 community organizations were collecting names. The total, by the most cautious estimates, runs to around 70 forced disappearances directly attributable to events during and after Orion. Less conservative counts, including the figures the Victims' Unit of Colombia later accepted, range above 300. The Victims' Unit has registered over 3,000 victims overall from the various 2002 Comuna 13 operations, of whom the disappeared are a subset.

Where the disappeared went is the question that has shaped two decades of forensic work. The most credible answer, based on testimony from former paramilitaries who participated in or witnessed the disposals, is La Escombrera. La Escombrera is a construction debris dump on the upper hillside above Comuna 13. Truckloads of urban rubble had been deposited there for years. Witnesses described bodies being driven up the hill, often at night, and buried under fresh layers of construction waste.

Forensic excavation at La Escombrera began only in 2015. The site is enormous, hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of material, and the digging is slow and expensive. As of the mid-2020s, only partial searches have been completed and only a small number of remains have been identified. The mothers of Comuna 13, organized under the group Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad, Women Walking for the Truth, have led the public pressure for continued excavation. They have lost their children. They are still digging.

What the murals encode

The first mural cluster on the escalator route reads as a coordinated, painted version of the same story. The recurring iconography is specific.

Helicopters. Painted in dark silhouette, often against a yellow or red sky. They are the visual anchor of the October 16 morning. Residents recall the noise more vividly than almost any other detail. The Blackhawks of Orion are the visual shorthand for the operation itself.

Empty chairs. A common motif, sometimes single, sometimes arranged in rows. Each chair represents an absence. The image was popularized by the Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad and has become the most legible symbol of the disappeared.

Families huddled. Multi-generational groups, often without faces or with faces turned away. The vagueness is deliberate. The disappeared often have no closure for their families to do public mourning around; the murals show grief without insisting on a single victim.

Birds. Birds appear constantly in Comuna 13 murals, but in the Orion cluster specifically they are often broken, mid-flight, or in cages. The bird is the recurring local motif for freedom; in the Orion cluster it is the freedom that did not arrive.

The painters of these murals are local artists, mostly young men and women in their twenties and thirties when the works were created. Some are anonymous. Some are well-known within the neighborhood and signed publicly. Casa Kolacho, the cultural house founded by the hip-hop pioneer Jeihhco, has helped negotiate wall space and protect the works from being overpainted by tour companies seeking lighter, more saleable imagery.

The walls are also a contested space. There has been pressure, sometimes from city officials and sometimes from outside investors, to soften the iconography. The argument is usually framed in terms of tourism. The community has, so far, mostly resisted. The position is that the Orion cluster has to stay legible, in its current vocabulary, because the Operation Orion story is not a closed historical chapter. The digging at La Escombrera continues. The mothers are still alive. To soften the murals would be to suggest the matter is settled.

How to stand in front of it

The escalator slows you down at this point in the route by design. The first mural cluster sits at the lower-to-middle section of the climb, at one of the natural pause landings. You will be there for two or three minutes whether you want to be or not. That is not accident. The architecture of the escalators was developed with the community's input, and the slow points line up with the densest expressive zones.

What the painters of the Orion cluster have asked from visitors, when asked directly in interviews, is small. Stop. Look. Do not photograph the empty chairs without thinking about what they are. Do not photograph residents who live in the apartments behind the murals without their consent. Do not treat the painted helicopters as background for a selfie.

Beyond that, the gesture the community is making by leaving these murals in public view is itself worth understanding. The neighborhood could have chosen to keep the memory of Orion private. It chose to put it on the retaining walls of the most-photographed tourist site in Colombia. That choice is doing political work. The painters are insisting that the price of visiting this place is engagement with what happened here.

Higher on the escalator, the murals shift. Bird cages open. Flowers grow through rubble. The palette brightens. The story is not always painted in this order, but it is meant to be read in this order, and the Orion cluster is the part you read first.