Podcast | Three Ways to Lose a Son

Podcast | Three Ways to Lose a Son

InSight Crime’s co-director Steven Dudley introduces the story of a mother’s search for her missing children in Buenaventura, Colombia, a city plagued by armed conflict and drug trafficking. The city, Colombia’s main Pacific port, has seen decades of battles between guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and criminal gangs. As a result, families live with ongoing grief and uncertainty.

Elena, a 60-year-old Afro-Colombian woman, is the subject of the story. She arrived in Buenaventura as a child after her parents were killed by armed groups in her hometown. She built a life in the city and had seven children, but three of them have disappeared. Two children vanished without a trace, leaving Elena searching for clues to their fate. The third child’s skull was found three years after he disappeared.

The armed conflict has eroded the social fabric of Buenaventura, marking neighborhoods as territory controlled by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and street gangs. Elena has lived through every wave of violence and continues to search for her missing children. This podcast takes listeners behind the headlines to the frontlines of organized crime in the Americas, exploring how violence not only kills but also erases people and breaks families apart, leaving mothers waiting for answers that sometimes arrive too late and sometimes never at all.