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Colombia's 3 Million Refugees, Hidden in Plain Sight
By JUAN FORERO, New York Times
Colombia
September 12, 2004
OACHA, Colombia - In a slum of several thousand people called La Isla, residents have put up everything from drugstores to laundry marts, evangelical churches to beauty salons. Battered buses ferry young women who work as maids in the nearby capital, Bogotá. Youngsters with neatly combed hair and pressed uniforms scamper off to school.
La Isla, with its cinderblock homes nestled in the hills of this town on Bogotá's southern rim, looks like any poor Colombian neighborhood. But inside those homes, it is clear that for many here this is just a temporary arrangement. The dirt floors are stacked with cardboard boxes still stuffed with belongings that were hastily packed.
La Isla, or "The Island,'' is a kind of halfway house between urban slum and refugee camp. The inhabitants live as "internally displaced persons," a term the world's bureaucrats use to describe refugees who stay in their own country, victims of war who were abruptly uprooted from homes elsewhere in Colombia, either by Marxist guerrillas or right-wing paramilitaries.
Increasingly, people like these are the face of war around the world - not refugees who cross borders and who can then claim protection under well-defined international accords as they settle in camps that attract United Nations assistance and media coverage. Instead, they are much less noticed, scratching out a living in sometimes hostile corners of their own societies, with few legal safeguards and little recognition from their own country's authorities.
"We continue to be displaced, until the government resolves our problems," said José Cuesta, 42, who has set up a television repair shop in La Isla. "We may have some belongings, but we've still been chased off our land."
Across the world, the number of people the United Nations considers refugees has dropped, though war seems as prevalent as ever. Instead, the United Nations says, it is seeing more internally displaced people, who flee their homes but not their countries. In all, the United Nations estimates that perhaps as many as 25 million people live like this, with the largest numbers in Africa's Congo basin, Sudan, Iraq and, with perhaps the least attention of all, in Colombia. The U.N. says that nearly 3 million Colombians, in a country of 42 million, have been displaced, double the number reported by the government in Bogotá.
"There are people in completely lawless conditions,'' Jan Egeland, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said in a recent interview, "More than 20 million of them, more than there ever were as refugees."
Here in Colombia, the displaced are, for the middle classes, mostly minor hindrances who beg for change on street corners. But they are changing the face of Bogotá and other cities, establishing entirely new neighborhoods on their periphery.
In La Isla, the ethnic background of the inhabitants is the first indication that they came from elsewhere. Many are Afro-Colombians from Choco, a jungle region near the Panamanian border that could not be more different from the windswept Andes location of Soacha, which has a population of several hundred thousand.
The migrants say they face discrimination when they seek jobs, which are always hard to find in Colombia. They were poor where they came from, but they did not need money in the countryside, nor jobs, for that matter. "Things were easy," said Roberto Camacho, 54, a community leader. "We had farms. We had fish. We could hunt. Here everything is about money. You need it for everything."
Among those struggling is Arquimedes Agredo, 48, who repairs clothes on a battered black Singer sewing machine. At first, he said, he received some emergency supplies - food, a mattress - from the government agency that deals with the displaced. Now there is no help. He barely makes a living, earning just enough to serve tepid coffee and bread to his children in the morning and a lunch of rice of rice and an egg. "We eat nothing later," he said.
Unlike some countries in conflict, Colombia does recognize its displaced as having a special status. A law establishes their rights and outlines some measures to protect them. But the government is strapped.
It doesn't help, humanitarian groups say, that Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, has claimed that there is no war in Colombia, just terrorist acts. "We just don't see them as victims of war," said Harvey Suárez of Codhes, a humanitarian group, of the displaced population.
Flor Barragan, 28, and her husband, José Pinzón, have done the best they can since coming to La Isla with their three children. Their little house has three bedrooms, two televisions and a birdcage with a green parrot. But as she held Luna, her 3-month-old daughter, all chubby cheeks and pink pajamas, Ms. Barragan dreamed of a better life.
"I would like for her to have what I had - a life in the countryside," she said. "That she will not have to live this life of violence, so far from her family."
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