Javier Giraldo

Javier Giraldo Moreno was born in Colombia in 1944. A newspaper tribute published after his death gave his birthplace as La Ceja, in the department of Antioquia, and his date of birth as 19 July 1944. His mother was an artist and his father an administrator on hydroelectric projects, and he grew up with three brothers and a sister. He decided to join the clergy when he was fifteen.

As a young man he met the priest and sociologist Camilo Torres Restrepo once, in the early 1960s, before Torres joined the National Liberation Army guerrilla and was killed in his first combat in February 1966. Torres's ideas about effective love and the option for the poor shaped the direction of Giraldo's own life.

He entered the Society of Jesus and studied at the Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá, where he earned a degree in philosophy and a master's degree in theology. He later studied social sciences at the University of Paris, specialising in regional analysis.

After his ordination Giraldo began his ministry in a poor, working-class neighbourhood of Bogotá. He became more deeply involved in human rights during the presidency of Julio César Turbay Ayala from 1978 to 1982, when the Security Statute gave the armed forces sweeping powers. He joined the Centre for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), the Jesuit-supported research institute, where he worked as an investigator, coordinated its data bank on human rights and political violence, and helped found its journal Noche y Niebla.

In 1988 he co-founded the Intercongregational Commission for Justice and Peace, later the Inter-Church Commission, which brought Catholic religious congregations together to document abuses and accompany communities hit by violence. He served as its executive secretary. From 1989 to 1991 he was Latin American secretary of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal session on impunity for crimes against humanity in Latin America, and he later served as a vice-president of the tribunal and as a judge in its hearings on Sri Lanka.

Giraldo tried to establish the circumstances of every killing so that victims would not be anonymous. The cases he documented included the Trujillo massacres of 1988 to 1991, and his evidence in the 1985 disappearance of eleven people contributed to a 30-year prison sentence for a former army colonel. From 1997 he accompanied the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Urabá, a civilian community that refused to take sides in the conflict. He documented the killings of its members, including the 2005 massacre in which the community leader Luis Eduardo Guerra and members of his family were murdered, and he presented evidence implicating soldiers. His 2010 book Fusil o toga. Toga y fusil recorded 210 killings in the community.

The work made him a target. He was forced to leave Colombia in 1989 because of threats, refused the police protection the government offered, and in 1997 lost two CINEP colleagues, Mario Calderón and Elsa Alvarado, to a paramilitary killing. In 1999 his superiors ordered him abroad for his own safety and he lived for a time in California; he also spent a period of exile in the Netherlands. He was a strong critic of the 2005 Justice and Peace Law, arguing that the demobilisation of paramilitary groups was a fiction, and of former president Álvaro Uribe, whom he accused of ties to paramilitaries. In 2010 he wrote to Georgetown University, which had given Uribe a teaching post, in a letter signed by more than 100 scholars. Uribe in turn accused him of sympathy with the guerrillas. He later sat on the Historical Commission on the Conflict and its Victims set up during the Havana peace talks.

He wrote many books on the conflict, including Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy (1996, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky), El paramilitarismo en Colombia (2004), Derechos humanos y cristianismo (2008) and, with Iván Cepeda, Víctor Carranza, alias El patrón (2012). His honours included the 1994 international prize of the Human Rights Association of Spain, Canada's John Humphrey Freedom Award in 1997, whose prize money he gave to the U'wa people, and in 2004 the Juan María Bandrés prize for the defence of the right to asylum.

Giraldo took part in every search for the remains of Camilo Torres from the late 1960s onwards. After the 2016 peace agreement created the Search Unit for Missing Persons, he asked it in 2019 to take up the search. The remains were found in a niche in the military pantheon of the municipal cemetery in Bucaramanga, and in February 2026 the unit's director, Luz Janeth Forero, handed them to him.

Giraldo was a member of the Society of Jesus for 61 years and took his final vows 44 years before his death. Colleagues described him as slight in build, soft-spoken and calm, a contrast with the determination he showed in confronting powerful people on behalf of victims. In his last years, still recovering from a serious operation, he lived at the Jesuit residence in the Teusaquillo district of Bogotá and took part from time to time in meetings with communities.

On the evening of Monday 17 August 2026 Giraldo fell at his home in Bogotá and suffered a blow that left him in a delicate condition. He was taken to the San Ignacio Hospital, where his condition worsened, and he died there on the morning of Tuesday 25 August 2026, at the age of 82. The Jesuits of Colombia announced his death, giving thanks for his vocation and his generous service to the Gospel.

Senator Iván Cepeda called him a man of enormous ethical stature, and former president Gustavo Petro called him the best defender of human rights, saying Giraldo had taught him how to investigate the mass killings left by narco-paramilitary groups. The Peace and Reconciliation Foundation recalled his steady commitment to the San José de Apartadó Peace Community.

In a notarised document written in 2002, Giraldo had asked to be cremated immediately after his death and for his ashes to be scattered in a river, like the rivers that became the final resting place of so many anonymous victims of violence. He also asked to be allowed to die in silence, without biographies or obituaries and without a homily at an austere funeral Eucharist, which was arranged at the Church of San Ignacio in Bogotá.

Giraldo is remembered as one of the most rigorous documenters of Colombia's armed conflict. The data bank he helped build was described in 2010 as the only comprehensive record of killings, massacres and disappearances in the conflict, and his reports and books gave names and circumstances to thousands of victims whom official accounts had left anonymous. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community, which he accompanied for almost three decades, remains closely associated with his name.

The recovery of the remains of Camilo Torres in February 2026, six months before his death, completed a search he had pursued for most of his life. Those who wrote about him after his death often noted that they were honouring his legacy while respecting his wish to die in silence.