Separated from her parents in the Armero tragedy, “daughter of the volcano” found her sister 30 years later

Baby was “reborn from the ashes” in Spain, far from home. The journalist went looking for the family 30 years later. 20 thousand died in the Armero tragedy, 40 years ago.

Anyone who was alive remembers the little girl Omayra Sanchezthe face of one of the biggest tragedies in Latin America in recent years. At the age of 13, she was trapped between rubble and water, with her body immobilized by the remains of the house where she lived.

For almost three days, rescue teams, journalists and volunteers tried to save her, but the lack of resources, the instability of the debris and the absence of adequate equipment made it impossible to free her.

The photograph taken by Frank Fournierwhich shows Omayra in her last moments, has become a symbol of the enormous Armero tragedy.

On November 13, 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz — the — volcano erupted and released a torrent of mud, water and rocks that devastated everything in its path, including the city of Armero, Colombia, where De La Rosa lived with her parents.

Nearly 20 thousand people out of a total of 29 thousand inhabitants died in the Colombian city during the tragedy. In neighboring municipalities, another around 5,000 people lost their lives in neighboring municipalities.

Armero is today an open-air memorial in the department of Tolima, in the center of the country. Tourists and victims visit the site every year and visit ruins, parks, the cemetery and various monuments. Some survivors continue to live in nearby locations. Others, including hundreds of children, suffered very different fates.

“The daughter of the volcano”

With just a week to live, Jennifer de la Rosa received the nickname “daughter of the volcano” for having survived the avalanche that buried his city.

“I was adopted by a Spanish couple and didn’t return to Colombia for 30 years. Then, I found out I had a sisterabout whom I never knew anything — neither me nor my adoptive parents”, says De la Rosa, currently a journalist, in an interview with BBC News Mundo.

Jenifer de la Rosa, the baby who survived the Armero tragedy, was adopted by Spaniards and was reunited with her sister 30 years later

— BBC News Mundo (@bbcmundo)

Around 500 children were placed for adoption through “regular and irregular processes” after the tragedy, according to the Armando Armero Foundation, dedicated to rebuilding the memory of the municipality and reconnecting adoptees to their families of origin.

Some of these survivors live in Colombia; others, abroad — like De la Rosa, who lives in Spain. The foundation believes that Some of the so-called “Armero boys”, now adults, do not even know that they are from the city.

For the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, due to legal gaps at the time, it was necessary to investigate each of the irregular processes reported by survivors like De la Rosa.

Mother changed name, father died, sister adopted elsewhere

Ashes had been falling on Armero since the early hours of that Wednesday afternoon. It was the foreshadowing of what would happen around 9pm (local time).

Flows from the volcano, more than 5,000 meters above sea level, have melted about 10% of the ice and snow on the slopes. The melting caused landslides and flooded everything below. Along the way, the water mixed with the soil and sediments on the slopes, transforming into a kind of wet cement that slid out of control.

These flows, known as lahars (a mixture of water, ice, pumice and other rocky debris), filled with stones of various sizes, destroyed Armero and injured its inhabitants.

Tens of thousands died buried or suffocated in the mud.

Dorian Tapazco Téllez was one of the few survivors. With her one-week-old daughter in her arms, she managed to reach a shelter where other survivors were.

“I was the youngest baby there. A Red Cross rescuer told me that my mother returned to the rubble of the house and never came back. I never heard anything more about my mother, just that she changed her name”, says De la Rosa. The father died in the tragedy — or at least that’s what the adoptive parents were told, who never knew that the baby they took in had an older sister, also given up for adoption some time before, in another place.

A life full of questions

De la Rosa says that, from an early age, he wanted to know where he came from. “When I looked in the mirror and saw how different I was from my parents, family, cousins ​​and friends, I always wanted to know my origins.”

Her adoptive parents picked her up from an orphanage in Manizales, 174 km from Armero and very close to Nevado del Ruiz, when she was just over a year old, and took her to live in Valladolid200 km north of Madrid.

“My parents told me since I was little that I was from Colombia and that my life was linked to the Nevado del Ruiz volcano,” she says. The Valladolid of the late 1990s and early 2000s had not yet seen the wave of Latin American migration that would mark Spain in the following years.

“I attracted a lot of attention. The question ‘where are you from?’ it was frequent and they continue to do it to this day”, says De La Rosa, who explains that, as a teenager, decided to stop talking about Colombia. The topic irritated her. He blocked the past for years and then moved to other countries. One of them was Brazil, where he reconnected with the nature of his continent, with another reality and where, curiously, he found a new best friend, a Colombian.

He returned to Spain and, shortly after, at the age of 30, he set the goal of returning to Colombia on his birthday. It was then that he thought about looking for answers and making a documentary about his own life.

Puzzle pieces begin to come together

In 2016, De la Rosa took the first steps in what she calls her obsession with finding her biological mother. He contacted the Armando Armero Foundation, did research, watched videos of adopted people, recorded phone calls, and traveled to Colombia for the first time.

“There, I realized the reality of so many testimonies: sons, daughters, parents who were looking for someone who could perfectly be me.” The pieces of the puzzle began to fit together.

“I met a woman whose house I went to when I was little and where I learned to walk. And the Red Cross rescuer who looked after me as a baby in the shelter and who told me about my mother and how much I looked like her”, she tells the BBC.

“It was something very strong for an adopted person. Although I couldn’t find my mother, I understood her context, her life and Colombia in 1985, with all the problems that explain how difficult it is to find my biological mother”, he adds.

De la Rosa’s life is marked by two dates that continue to torment the country. He was born on November 6, 1985, the same day that M-19 guerrillas attacked the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, and the military responded with an operation that left around 100 people dead.

“It was the Colombia of the FARC, the M-19 and drug trafficking. When the volcano erupts on the 13th and destroys an entire city, the country collapses. It was the worst time to be born”, he analyzes. De la Rosa attributes part of what happened to adoptions like hers to that convulsive and chaotic period.

A note in a newspaper

Rosa wrote her mother’s name countless times on Google without finding results, until one day she came across a note published in a newspaper.

An adopted woman, Ángela Rendón, then 32 years old and from the city of Barrancabermeja, was also looking for information about her mother, who left her with a caregiver when she was 3 months old and never returned. Mother’s name was Dorian Tapazco Tellez.

“The first thing I did was protect myself and think that there could have been a change of names, but that I couldn’t have a sister,” recalls De la Rosa. After that call, the Armando Armero Foundation took action.

Francisco González, director of the entity, sought out Rendón to explain the case, collect a DNA sample and compare it with that of De la Rosa. Weeks later, the test came back positive. De la Rosa and Rendón discovered they had a sisterthree decades later.

“Is it true, Francisco? Oh, how happy”, says Rendón through tears upon receiving the news from González and De la Rosa, in a moment recorded in the documentary “”.

The sisters met at González’s house. When they saw each other, they shyly shook hands and exchanged a “hello, how are you?”

“When I saw her for the first time, the hug was felt, I thought she was a stranger, someone from outside. My first reaction was cold, but she overflowed with love”, describes De la Rosa. She, in shock, had difficulty showing emotions, but Rendón hugged her and asked them to make up for lost time and start acting like sisters from now on.

“When I received the news, it was close to my birthday and I thought it was the best gift possible. When I met her, I thought it was a dream”, says Rendón to BBC News Mundo.

“At first, I didn’t see any similarities, but then I met Paola, my niece, and I was struck by how much she looked like me when I was a teenager,” says De la Rosa.

The reunion gained prominence in Colombia. The sisters held a press conference alongside the foundation, which brought together dozens of journalists.

“This family relationship grew and, at the same time, proved to be so complex. It’s still difficult for me to face that I have a sister. For her, however, it cost little. I wanted to share, find the family”, says De la Rosa.

Frustrations about the mother. “There were interests”

About their mother, the sisters found few answers. They learned that he spent time in prison and changed his name, something difficult for De la Rosa to understand.

“People tell me that it is possible that my mother was displaced by the armed conflict and that, therefore, she was able to change her name”, he reveals.

Along the way, De la Rosa encountered several frustrations.

A silence surrounds the conditions under which many children were adopted, as in her case, and information about the existence of the other sister was “deliberately” hidden in the records, according to the journalist.

“They tell us that, at the time, officials thought the best thing was to simplify the paperwork and make it easier for us to find families, but there were also interests”, he states.

Rosa learned about the case of an adopted person whose father paid 5 thousand dollars. “There was such a lack of control that, in my host home, they thought for a long time that I had ended up in Italy and not Spain”, he says.

De la Rosa also feels that some people she has met know more than they are letting on. “I understand that they are suspicious people due to the trauma of war, but I have suspicions. The same thing happens with Ángela. In relation to the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, I feel like there is a lot of veneer and a lack of transparency.”

The Armando Armero Foundation and other victims have repeatedly asked the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare for more information about the protocols used to place children for adoption following the Armero tragedy. For the 40th anniversary, the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare announced the digitization and recovery of the so-called “Red Book” of the tragedy, which brings together part of the records of minors rescued and placed under the institute’s protection after the avalanche.

The initiative is part of the strategy with which the organization, currently led by Astrid Cáceres, intends to contribute to the recovery of the victims’ memory. Regarding possible irregularities in adoptions, Cáceres told BBC News Mundo that, at the time, there were “gaps” in the legislation which make it difficult to classify whether the cases were irregular or not.

“To do this, we have to investigate everyone before drawing conclusions,” he said.

According to Francisco González, director of the Armando Armero Foundation, more than 400 families and 75 registered adoptees underwent DNA tests thanks to the foundation’s work.

So far, four reunions have been possible through genetic comparison.

Every year, dozens of survivors continue to arrive in Armero to ask, to hope that their sons or daughters will appear one day.

“These are not people who seek to recover the bodies of their children, but who have seen their faces on the covers of magazines or on lists of rescued people. The country owes a historic debt to them”, concludes De la Rosa.