Colombia: Displaced Need Equal Attention

The recent visit of presidential candidate Senator John McCain to Colombia, the dramatic rescue of 15 hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and a subsequent visit to the United States by Colombian Defense Minister Santos, have all placed the Colombian Government and its approach to dealing with the violence in that country in the media spotlight. A common theme to these moments has been the notion, put forth by the Senator and the Minister, and repeated by our own Defense Secretary Gates, that the Colombian government has made overwhelming successes in their fight against illegal armed groups, and that “victory is on the horizon.” While it is no doubt true that the Government of Colombia has achieved remarkable success in creating a safe and secure environment in many of the major cities, Colombia has still seen a dramatic increase in the number of internally displaced people in the last two years, and it still ranks highest in the world in the numbers of new land mine accident survivors.

It is troubling that while the Defense Minister and his allies in Congress see fit to congratulate themselves on their remarkable success, they do not mention the most serious humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately, Colombia, one of the United States' strongest allies in South America, has embraced the attitude and policy of the Bush administration to emphasize military solutions to all of its problems. A recent report circulated by the Colombian Ministry of Defense to the State Department and Congress urgently argues against cutting any of the military support that the United States provides, saying that this will undermine their efforts against terrorism. However, the report makes no mention of the word displacement, conveniently leaving out the victims of the terror they wish to eradicate. Clearly, narco-trafficking and violence associated with it requires a comprehensive approach. Unfortunately, the Colombian government seems concerned solely with military hardware and technology and chooses to leave responding to the needs of its citizens to its civilian agency, Acción Social, and the international community. The United States administration, and the members of Congress who care deeply about Colombia would do well to emphasize to our allies in Colombia that in order to truly reach peace and prosperity, the Colombian government needs to extend its civil and social reach to all its citizens with as much energy and gusto as it has extended its military reach.

--Jake Kurtzer

Colombia: Finding Solutions for Displaced Together

Traveling back from Tame to Arauca, on the border region of Colombia and Venezuela, my colleagues and I stopped in a little town called Pueblo Nuevo to meet with displaced people there. We had been trying to reach a local religious figure who was providing assistance to families in need, but had not yet reached him. So, we chose to just drop in and try our luck. Unfortunately, on arrival, not only could we not find the priest, but we also couldn't find the church. People seemed to not know where it was.

We meandered around town for several hours looking for someone who knew the priest. Someone directed us to the church, but no luck. Another neighbor jumped in the trunk of our car to show us to the incoming mayor’s house. However, the mayor apologized and informed us he wasn’t starting his job until July, so he didn’t know much about services being delivered to displaced people. However, he hopped on his bicycle to find someone who might and reemerged, with the priest. Perfect!

We rode back to the church and proceeded to have a long discussion with the priest about the displaced and their needs. Even more fortunately, the incoming mayor sat in on the meeting and was given a crash course in his future responsibilities to those families who are victims of the increase in guerrilla fighting and who have taken residence in his town.

The situation in Arauca is increasingly dire, as more and more families and communities are being displaced in a territorial dispute between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). This is a place where violence is increasing, and the humanitarian response has slowly begun, but is not yet commensurate with the need.

We visited an area called “4 of December,” which was named for the day when displaced people took over what had been a tent town of vulnerable poor. People are living in homes made of plastic sheeting and wood taken from the forest. The presence of open flames for cooking in homes made of dried wood causes me to fear for the worst. The neighborhood, for lack of a better word, lacks electricity and running water -- a concerted decision made by the municipality in response to the “illegal presence of the displaced.”

Next, we head to Nariño to investigate the needs of displaced people there. I can only hope the situation has improved.

--Jake Kurtzer

Colombia: Investing in People

President Bush is wrong to state that free trade will miraculously bring peace and democracy to Colombia as he urges Congress to approve a new free trade agreement with the country. In Monday night’s State of the Union speech, the President said, “The first agreement that will come before you is with Colombia, a friend of America that is confronting violence and terror, and fighting drug traffickers. If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere. So we must come together, pass this agreement, and show our neighbors in the region that democracy leads to a better life.”

As he has done so many times before, the President is equating trade with democracy, a statement that rings hollow for many people in Latin America. This is especially true in Colombia, where the income gap between society’s richest and poorest people continues to grow, making it one of the most unequal societies in the world. Free trade will undoubtedly benefit Colombia’s rich, who are already fully integrated into the global economy. But the poor of Colombia often fight just to survive, and their idea of fair trade is a job that pays a living wage and freedom from exploitation.

As part of its effort to promote more international trade, Colombia has promoted a controversial policy of converting small land holdings into huge agribusinesses. This has been most visible in the promotion of the African palm, which is produced in mass quantities to extract its valuable oils. While the production of African palm oil has increased Colombia’s international trade, it has had dire consequences for Colombia’s poor.

In many Afro-Colombian parts of the country, which often coincide with its poorest parts, local farmers have too often been displaced by conflict, only to find that their land has been expropriated illegally and converted into African palm plantations. This reverse land reform is one of the nastiest consequences of Colombia’s civil war, and is increasingly benefitting those who are active in global markets, not the poor.

President Bush has unfortunately failed to realize that improving people’s lives is how to promote peace and democracy. The US Congress is beginning to get this message, though, and has reversed the President’s policy of providing only $1 of development and humanitarian assistance for every $4 of military aid. Now, the proportions will be roughly equal, and the US will start to reverse the trend of promoting peace through military might in Colombia.

Instead of urging Congress to pass the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, President Bush should follow Congress’ lead and begin investing in Colombia’s people. When the country’s economy begins to benefit all, then we can begin to talk about promoting free trade with Colombia.

-Sean Garcia

Internally Displaced People in Colombia Lack Vital Services

Tumaco is an island off the coast of southern Colombia, just north of the border with Ecuador, and just about one degree north of the equator. It’s a humid, tropical zone and today, while we were visiting a community of displaced people known as Bajo Tuma, the heavens opened up and soaked us to the bone. The community was built around a mangrove swamp and all the sand around us quickly turned to mud. It was amazing how fast the entire town flooded — the sea just rushed into the town.

The conditions in Bajo Tuma are some of the worst we’ve seen. People flee to these swamps since there’s nowhere else for them to go. They then cut down the trees, build stilt houses in the swamp, and build a series of very, very rickety bridges throughout the community to get from house to house and to leave the area. Most houses use plastic sheeting for roofing, which means that during the prevalent rains, water comes into the homes through holes that pop up when anything hits it. We were told that a new “roof” gets holes almost immediately, and people must constantly scrounge for money to replace the plastic.

They also have no fresh water and must rely on an elaborate series of garden hoses that run from public water sources closer to town. Bajo Tuma had one hose to service the entire community of 400 families, and the water often arrives so dirty that residents insist on boiling the water before using it.

Sanitary conditions are abhorrent. In the community of Brisa de los Angeles (translated as Angel’s Breeze), bathrooms are just holes in the floor, which empty out right below the house. Trash is just thrown into the water, but since this is a tidal zone, the water becomes a trashy, fecal stew that floats around beneath the houses. In Bajo Tuma, the people are forced to relieve themselves in plastic bags and throw them into the sea. Since the town floods regularly, excrement and garbage wash right back into town and then spread.

These conditions are prevalent in virtually every community we’ve visited in Tumaco. It raises serious questions in our heads when the government of Colombia says they are tackling displacement seriously. In a community meeting in Bajo Tuma, only four residents were able to claim getting any assistance at all – and it was from the Red Cross. Tumaco’s displaced have been abandoned by their government.

--Sean Garcia

Andrea Lari and Sean Garcia are currently in Colombia assessing the situation with internally displaced persons. Andrea's new report on IDP's "Striving For Better Days" can be found on our website: www.refugeesinternational.org/betterdays

When the Displaced Speak for Themselves

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has launched a new website called IDP Voices. In their press release IDMC says it will be "a platform for internally displaced people (IDPs) to tell the story of their lives before, during and after being driven from their homes by conflicts or human rights violations."

The first focus country of the new website is Colombia, which has one of the largest IDP populations in the world. Refugees International has long been following the situation of displacement in Colombia. Our last mission to Colombia was in early 2007. We found that despite laws established to assist the internally displaced, the Government of Colombia is failing in its commitment to help these vulnerable people.

On the IDP Voices website, in addition to reading testimonies, you can listen to audio recordings of the displaced people's stories. I think there is something very powerful about an individual’s story - it resonates with you more so than numbers and plain facts often can. When talking about displacement it is very easy to get caught up in the statistics, for example there are 24.5 million internally displaced people in the world, but that is almost too large of a number for most people to comprehend. Instead, learning about how being displaced has affected individual families and seeing images of the conditions they live in can leave a much bigger impression and hopefully prompt policy makers to work towards improving their situation.

In a related story, this recent blog post on AlertNet does a good job of explaining why it's important to present interviews of displaced people in a way that does not exploit their situation but rather allows the stories to be told from their own perspective.

Beauty and Horror (Colombia)

Sean filed his last post from Colombia today before he and Andrea return to the U.S.:

"So we did our last field trip yesterday - a three hour drive out of Pasto to
the town of Samaniego. The road was a crazy trip through winding roads up
and down the Andes. Going up and down thousands of feet at a time on potholed
roads makes for challenging driving.

Thankfully, the scenery made up for it - these are some of the most beautiful
mountains I have ever seen. The mountains touch the clouds, and on a day
with blue skies like yesterday, it really did feel like being on the ceiling of
the world. The mountains are an emerald green patchwork of small farms,
and it's amazing to see the valleys plunge thousands of feet below you to rise
again into the next mountain. Just as beautiful was the fact that
everything seemed to be in bloom - the mountains were studded everwhere with
huge trees blooming with yellow flowers. It looked like specks of gold
dotting the hillsides everwhere. And there were flowers of every color
along the road with butterflies and birds all around. When we would
descend a mountain, you'd find rushing streams that were lush with tropical
plants, really making it feel like a hidden paradise.

As I said, the scenery made up for the nausea-inducing drive!

What really is sad about all of this is that we got to the town of Samaniego
and you could cut the tension with a knife. There are two rebel groups on
one side of the town, two paramilitary groups on the other side of town, and
army forces in the town. The frontlines of fighting were only two hours
away, and they were counting the number of murders in town (8 over the weekend)
and land mine victims (one person every two days) with great trepidation that it
would get worse. There was a general resignation that war was about to
overrun their region.

We went to meet a community of displaced people who had arrived there on
Thursday of last week, but we were told that they had returned to their homes on
Monday. The horror of all this is that they were told to leave their town
by armed actors, so they did. Then they were told that they could
return. What they weren't told is that their town has been converted into a
battlefield, and that their farms have been littered with landmines. This
makes it impossible for them to work, or to even leave their homes once they get
there. As a result, these populations become trapped, and even more
vulnerable than before. It was the general consensus that things would
only get worse in the upcoming months."

I promise we'll keep you posted on Sean and Andrea's efforts to help this community and the other displaced people in Colombia.

Quiet as a Mouse in Colombia

More from Sean in Colombia. (Read all of Sean's Colombia posts here.) He filed this post yesterday. He and Andrea are heading home in a few days after their 3-week mission.

We arrived here in Pasto on Thursday afternoon - it's a small town high in the Andes mountains, (about 8,500 feet high) right near the border with Equador. The temperature change from Quibdo is immediately noticable. We went from 110 degrees and humid with little air conditioning to 50 degrees with no heating! Needless to say, my heat-loving body has cought a bit of a cold in its attempt to readjust to the weather.

It's not just the weather that's different here - pretty much everything is as different as night and day. Quibdo is mainly Afro-Colombian and Pasto is mainly indigenous. Quibdo was full of music in the streets all day long, while Pasto is quiet as a mouse.

Still, despite the differences many of the same problems that we've seen elsewhere repeat themselves here. Lack of adequate government attention to the displaced, lack of registration and recognition of displaced people, difficult living conditions, lack of work. What has been very noticable here is that we are talking to communities who have come here very recently - three or four months ago.

And the violence people are fleeing sounds horrible. We met one group of 9 children whose mother had been killed by paramilitaries in September. When we asked about their father, the response was that he wasn't targeted, he was just killed by war violence three years earlier. With no one to rely on, the children picked up and moved to Pasto. The two oldest sisters, 19 and 17, are providing for the rest of the kids - the youngest is 2. And to top it off the government says they don't qualify for an extension of emergency assistance - their situation doesn't merit it. Ridiculous!

The violence is also very palpable here in the sense that Colombia is probably the only place where I have done human rights abuse documentation where the victims don't want to talk about what happened to them. They are most focused on their needs right now. But when you ask why someone left, their answer is almost always ¨because of the violence¨ with no further explanation. This indicates to me that they are still living through the trauma, and don't necessarily feel like it is in the past. It's a hard reality to recognize, and adds a new layer of complexity to how I'm seeing my work.

Tomorrow is our last day in Pasto before heading to Bogota for the last three days of our trip. Should be an interesting last day though - we're joining the UN on a trip to a nearby village where 14 families just fled last week. So we'll get a sense of what's really going on on the ground. Then it's off to the relative comforts of a big city, and I'm especially looking forward to the food. Though I put myself up there with the biggest of meat eaters, I've had nothing but steak and grilled chicken to eat for the past three weeks. I'm going to hunker down in Bogota with a nice salad and maybe some pasta or Thai food - I can't wait!

Wishing for Rain

Here is another update from Sean in the field (You can read his previous post by clicking here). He and Andrea have spent the past few days in Quibdo, in the Choco District of western Colombia, visiting with displaced communities in the surrounding area.

I'm in the rainiest part of the world right now - Choco, Colombia gets over 35 feet of rain a year. Except for now - it hasn't rained here in 15 days. They don't have a public water system since everyone collects rain water and uses that. But since it hasn't rained, there's no water. Our hotel just ran out today and is trying to get some more so that we can bathe. Otherwise, the next four days here are going to be hot, sticky, and dusty - not something I'm looking forward to.

The displaced people we're working with have it much worse. They've resorted to going to the local river to collect water for their basic needs, and you can see people bathing and doing laundry in the rivers. To say the least, these rivers are not clean in the urban area - I wonder if things are getting cleaner or dirtier by using the rivers, but I realize people have no choice.

Work is going well, but our findings are also very depressing. It’s the same problems we’ve already seen in Colombia, with the authorities taking funding meant for the displaced and "disappearing" it. The displaced are being charged for services that are supposed to be free, and it seems like no matter who they go to with the local authorities, no one can help them. There are some very interesting NGOs here that represent the local displaced communities, and they can't get anyone (domestic or international) to fund them to do basic service provision projects.

We've spent the day today talking to indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups about their efforts to help their people despite the lack of support. It's incredibly inspiring to see what they're doing, but also depressing to think that they could be doing more if resources actually got to them. In the case of the indigenous organization, they just finished building a center for their people to convalesce in when they're ill - it's a beautiful place. But though they got some support from the Basque and Austrian governments, they have no funding to keep a nurse there or to bring a doctor in to care for the people who are there. One of the Afro-Colombian groups got a small bit of money to buy a computer and a printer, but they can't afford toner for the printer. Needless to say, we'll be drawing attention to this as best we can.

Displaced but Surviving in Colombia

Additional details from Sean on the Colombian communities he discussed in yesterday's post:

We had a long 3 hour drive from Sincelejo to the tiny community of Tierra Alta, a place that has been ravaged by war. We visited three communities of displaced people, and it was striking to see just how much luck plays into people's survival.

The first community we visited had received no government support – they were squatting on land and had to construct their homes themselves. Most were made of scavenged wood, plastic tarp, and any other materials that could be used to provide shelter. They had a little land to grow food, but they were right next to a river that floods three or four times a year and destroys all their crops. They had no sanitation, and pretty much no anything – they had been living like this for four years. Despite their very hard circumstances, they were joking with us and we had a good conversation...

The next two communities were just as interesting. One had received international support, and were able to build a school and a church, and had gotten some government support in housing. Despite this, they were mainly farmers who had no access to land to farm, and almost no one had received any job training to allow them to do anything but farm. But they were well organized and were trying to push hard for change.

The third community was similarly organized, although they had received some support for a model housing project, so they also had some tolerable living conditions. The problem here was that the government promised them water and it hadn't come for three years. Despite this, the government claims they have photos and video of the water project being completed in the community – we didn't see a drop of piping or water anywhere.

...Yesterday, we had meetings with a series of government officials – interesting to hear them say they were taking care of things that we had seen with our own eyes as being non-existent.

Next we're hopping onto a plane and heading to Quibdo for a week. The province gets more rain than almost anywhere else in the world – about 35 feet per year – and it's supposed to be hot as hell. But this is where I might get to take a canoe up to the indigenous village, so I'm excited for what the next few days hold!

RI Advocates on Mission in Colombia

Advocates Sean and Andrea are now on mission in Colombia, where three million people have been displaced from their homes. The focus of this mission is to assess the current situation for internally displaced people (IDPs) prior to the March visit of UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres.

RI last traveled to Colombia in June 2006, where we found hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in deplorable conditions in urban areas. In addition, the Colombian government was not adequately protecting displaced people or meeting their humanitarian needs, such as food, water, shelter or health care. Sean and Andrea are following up on this previous work in order to offer recommendations to the UN Refugee Agency and other policy makers as they discuss Colombia's policies towards displaced people.

Andrea and Sean have spent the past few days traveling in the north to meet with displaced communities. Here is a personal account from Sean in the field:

We left Cartagena for the inland city of Sinselejo early Sunday morning and made a stop in San Onofre along the way, where we were able to meet a few displaced families who have received absolutely no government assistance in four years. To top it off, they had to invade land to have somewhere to live, and after a year of fighting with the land owner (who finally sold the land to the city), they had to scrounge around to find materials to build their own houses. As a result, they were living in desperate conditions – one meal a day if they were lucky, houses that barn animals would complain about, health care services that thought the little red pill (Advil) was the solution to all ills, and few hopes for the future.

The worst part is that most of these people have left lives of farming for safety in the cities – as a result, they have no training to do any kind of urban work. They’re desperate to get a little piece of land to farm so they can support their families, and few hopes of doing so. And to make it worse, they’re usually on the outer edges of cities where they are surrounded by unused farmlands or grazing fields that land owners refuse to sell – so they can see their salvation, but know they’ll be shot if they try to reach it.

Unfortunately, we saw the same problem play out in Sinselejo and in the displaced communities of Tierra Alta – with the complication that these communities have often been robbed of government services – we heard one story of a woman who was promised a house by the government, and when she went to claim it, she was told that she was already living in it and that they had her signature from four different house visits – she has never seen the house. Another series of communities were told that the government had video footage of a new water system in their towns as proof that they were completed – we saw no water anywhere, and villages full of frustrated people as a result. The stories go on and on and on, and it makes you wonder how to move forward with a situation like this – when resources are stolen at every turn so that there are none left by the time they are supposed to reach the beneficiaries.

Despite this, we’re working hard on a few solid ideas for how to get some progress. I’ll fill you in on them when they are more concrete.

As for the rest of the trip so far, the cities of the past few days have been really interesting. We’re in cattle country, and I’ve had some of the best beef I’ve eaten in a long time. The restaurants are full of dozens of fruits – many that I know and many that I don’t – so we’re having fun drinking different things. Though I’m still a fan of my guanabana, I do like ordering lolo juice just so I can say the silly name.