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COLOMBIA: Armed Conflict Generates Hunger, Violence in the Cities

Humberto Márquez

BOGOTÁ, Jun 21 2006 (IPS) - Ciudad Bolívar and Altos de Cazuca (Cazuca Heights) form an endless landscape of humble dwellings along mud or cement streets and sidewalks on the barren hills south of the Colombian capital, where thousands of displaced people continue to suffer the effects of the civil war.

Ciudad Bolívar and Altos de Cazuca (Cazuca Heights) form an endless landscape of humble dwellings along mud or cement streets and sidewalks on the barren hills south of the Colombian capital, where thousands of displaced people continue to suffer the effects of the civil war.

María Clemencia Alvarado, 30, who has five children, the oldest 15 and the youngest in her arms, fled from the fighting between the army and the guerrillas in the western department (province) of Tolima a year ago. Now all she asks for is “a little help, like a daily lunch,” which she is waiting for with 30 other mothers and dozens of children at the displaced families association centre.

Cazuca is mainly peopled by displaced former supporters of the now-defunct leftwing Patriotic Union party. E.L., the president of the neighbourhood council in one of Cazuca’s 38 districts, says he was already stabbed with a knife and warned that he must either leave town or be killed.

These are just two examples of the hunger, unemployment and social exclusion suffered by tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes by the internal conflict that has been tearing Colombia apart for the last half century.

But the displaced people from rural areas of the country are not the only ones who have settled in the most populous suburb of the capital.


Members of rightwing paramilitary groups have also come. Their networks in Cazuca have now mutated into violent gangs that settle old scores, steal, or extract forced payments from small shopkeepers, bus drivers and taxi drivers.

A group of journalists from the Andean countries who participated in a workshop organised by the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS) got a close-up look at the situation.

The Jun. 15-16 workshop was sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to monitor progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the U.N. in 2000.

Some 20 journalists from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela took part in the workshop “Sifting Through the News: Poverty, Development and the Environment; The MDGs in Media Coverage in the Andean Region.”

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that about 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes by the civil war in Colombia.

The displaced people who flock to Ciudad Bolívar, which is crowded with nearly one million of the eight million people who live in Bogotá, and Altos de Cazuca in the adjacent municipality of Soacha, swell virtually every poverty indicator, since they escaped with their lives leaving home, crops, land and loved ones behind.

“I’m not going back. Of course you miss your home, but the government can’t guarantee safe conditions for returning. Back there in Montes de María, Sucre (in the northwest of the country) they killed my wife, and that’s why I’ve come here with my two children,” said Germán Luna, 40, a shoemaker when he gets the opportunity, and president of the displaced people’s association “Seeds of Hope.”

“The government doesn’t support us, and when a person registers as a displaced person, their emergency aid takes two months to arrive,” Luna added.

His neighbour Miguel Saogal, a member of the town council, deplores the lack of drinking water, sewerage and telephones in their district, Santa Viviana. Although people have lived there for 13 years, the settlement “hasn’t been legalised,” that is, there is no official recognition yet that the land has been occupied by settlers.

The World Food Programme assists “Seeds of Hope”, sending provisions for a daily meal for 417 children. Luna’s helpers from among the association’s 350 families cook the meals on a three-burner stove.

While they wait for lunch in a room with unplastered walls but a panoramic view reaching almost to the bustling centre of Bogotá, Luna, Alvarado and other refugees from faraway departments tell all-too-similar stories of their dead relatives and sons who were forcibly recruited, the decision to flee and their abandoned homesteads.

They also lament their situation here in the city, where they are hungry, homeless and jobless.

The city government’s programme “Bogotá Without Hunger” has arrived with great fanfare in this district. The plan is to “deliver a nutritional supplement to 625,000 of the 1.1 million people in Bogotá who go hungry, and added to the efforts of the national government and private enterprise it may reach 925,000 people next year,” explained Eduardo Díaz, the coordinator of the project.

In another district of Ciudad Bolívar, a soup kitchen set up by the community 15 years ago using wood for fuel has been transformed by “Bogotá Without Hunger” into such a spotless establishment that the journalists were not even allowed into the kitchen, for lack of the hygienic gowns, masks and gloves required.

The dining hall serves 200 breakfasts and 300 lunches to schoolchildren, pregnant and lactating women, and disabled people.

“The lists of beneficiaries are publicly discussed in ‘food boards’ with the communities, and the most vulnerable people and displaced persons are given priority,” Díaz said.

The 220 soup kitchens throughout the city, operating in tandem with other health and education programmes, “will provide 40 percent of daily nutritional requirements to every person in the neediest sector. The rest will depend on complements that they can take home,” he said.

Consuelo Corredor, the city government’s director of Social Welfare, said the extent to which the city’s food, health and education problems are exacerbated by displaced persons is impossible to gauge. But she added that they have an undeniable effect.

In terms of safety and the right to life, “the displaced people are coming to a place that is not exactly peaceful, because the networks of informants of the armed agents in the conflict have become gangs of delinquents,” said Michael Jordan, of the German church humanitarian organisation Diakonie, which works with communities suffering the effects of the war.

As Jordan said at a press conference held jointly with European Union officials, “in spite of the supposed end to the paramilitary networks in Colombia, we are seeing a daily increase in their activity in the south of Bogotá.”

“They are conducting mass recruitment of young people for the ranks of the AUC (the paramilitary umbrella group, United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia), which officially reached a demobilisation agreement with the government,” he stated.

Jordan added that the AUC “pay children who become their informers 100,000 pesos (about 40 dollars) a month, and 400,000 pesos to those who participate in so-called social cleansing operations. We can attest to this fact,” he said.

In Cazuca, assistants in centres established by U.N. agencies and the Colombian Ombudsperson’s Office said that up to eight illegal armed networks operate in the area, three of which are probably heirs to the Central Santander Bloc of the AUC. “Once, two women made complaints that they had been raped by black men. A few days later the bodies of two Afro-Colombians were found in an alley. This is one of the ways in which these groups mark their territories,” one of the sources said.

Unlike in the rural conflict zones, recruitment here is not by force, but voluntary. Young unemployed people, with no prospects of a job or further education, without sports, cultural or community interest programmes, are easily lured into the networks of violence.

“It’s a way of getting money, a pretty girlfriend and a CD player,” one of the local youths told the journalists on the invisible border between the municipalities of Bogotá and Soacha. “But the worst thing is to tell a potential employer that you live in Altos de Cazuca: you have no chance, you’re trash, nobody wants you.”

In Jordan’s opinion, “the paramilitaries are reorganising.”

He added that “The guerrillas are also showing signs of renewed strength in regions like Caquetá and Cauca (in the south of Colombia). Neither side respects the neutrality of the civilian population, and the conflict is far from over.”

 
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COLOMBIA: Armed Conflict Generates Hunger, Violence in the Cities

Humberto Márquez

BOGOTÁ, Jun 21 2006 (IPS) - Ciudad Bolívar and Altos de Cazuca (Cazuca Heights) form an endless landscape of humble dwellings along mud or cement streets and sidewalks on the barren hills south of the Colombian capital, where thousands of displaced people continue to suffer the effects of the civil war.
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