Julio Quijano
Quijano & Associates
It must be difficult to imagine a lawyer of an established world-class law firm arriving at his desk, during the month of January of 1992, to pick up the phone only to hear the voice of some unknown person, thousands of miles away, almost gasping to grieve, stating that his son has disappeared in some jungle in Colombia and that he didn’t know what to do, what could possibly be done to trace him, if anything was possible to find out if anything had happened to him.
The voice I heard was the voice of Mr. Mark Berkowitz, a Canadian citizen who was going to tell me that his son Stephen had ventured into the Colombian jungle near that country’s frontier with Panama where the same jungle culture and social structure still existed in a region practically under a state of war between neighboring paramilitary and revolutionary forces and the Colombian army. Mr. Berkowitz’s voice was that of a simply helpless human being with that agonizing fear one can only feel before losing a loved one, and the person he was trying to find was his own son. His son, Stephen Berkowitz, coincided with me in Colgate University when I was in my freshman year and he was a senior, but I cannot recall having actually met him. By the way, a friend in Montreal suggested Mark contact Julio Quijano, a lawyer in Panama City, and this is how I became involved in this odyssey.
Violence in Colombia was in the normal flow of news then, so I was quite conscious of the kind of danger Stephen might have walked into, and I decided to find someone in Panama with the necessary familiarity and expertise concerning the region where the last news from Stephen had been received.
The region from Panama’s province of Darien to the Los Katios National Natural Park was not described then in Panama’s or Colombia’s tourism brochure as a place where any visitors could be attacked, kidnapped or killed by ambushed criminals or local thugs, but I could infer that Stephen’s plight could have had such an outcome. Therefore, I decided to find someone in Panama who would be fully capable of conducting an investigation there, who would be familiar with the place and the mores, and I was lucky enough to find Mr. Pedro Souza who began to trace the way to a final solution. We had to find Stephen or find out what had happened to him and where.
Months of efforts with no results elapsed until, through Mr. Souza, we found a woman 60 years old who had always lived there and had acquired valuable experience searching for some Swedes who had also disappeared in the same area. Sometimes it is the unexpected that provides the key to solutions one cannot find, and it so happened that a neighbor of this old woman knocked the window of her house to tell her that she knew what had happened to Stephen and that some thugs had killed him. Upon hearing about such information, Mr. Pedro Souza immediately returned to the area because he felt that the story sounded quite possible. After the most thorough investigations, he found an improvised jungle grave, got some other men to help him and exhumed the remains of Stephen.
I insisted in having a forensic examination of those remains performed as soon as we managed to get them on Panamanian territory, and the examination confirmed it was Stephen’s remains. It is difficult to describe Mr. Mark Berkowitz reaction on the 2nd of December, 1992 when I informed him that the death of his son had been confirmed. Almost a year had elapsed after that morning I arrived at my desk to hear him gasping about the disappearance of his son. Burial of the remains took place on the 13th of December 1992 in Montreal, Canada, the place the call was coming from when I was back answering that call on my desk in January that year.
To be honest, I don’t really have these memories sprouting in my mind when I look back on the various unusual things that I have had to deal with. But, I do feel now that human beings should care more about the suffering of others. After all, tragedies can knock on any door.