When Colombia’s conflict-displaced come to the capital
This story was first published on www.thenewhumanitarian.org follow the link to read this and other stories on humanitarian crises around the world. Just a few kilometres from President Gustavo Petro’s palace in downtown Bogotá, hundreds of mostly Emberá Indigenous people live in a makeshift tent community in one of the Colombian capital’s most iconic parks. Fire smoke wafts from shelters fashioned from tarps and from signs that once hung as large advertisements on nearby buildings. Children play barefooted alongside 7th Avenue, competing for noise with the traffic screeching down one of the city’s main arteries. Roughly 600 people, displaced by conflict from their rural homes in Chocó, Risaralda, and Antioquia – in central and western Colombia – now live here in the Parque Nacional, in the shadows of skyscrapers, begging or selling their artisanal jewellery to survive. What sets them apart isn’t so much their forced displacement from their native regions, but their proximity to Petro, and to the seat of power of an administration that promised to prioritise their rural areas – wracked by violence and neglect for decades. A peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016 officially ended a 53-year civil war. There was hope then that the process would eventually end the other conflicts in the country as well. It has not. In fact, the last two years have seen the annual number of people internally displaced by conflict in Colombia soar above 250,000, surpassing even pre-2016 levels. This rising displacement is due to threats or active fighting between the dozens of armed groups that stepped into the vacuum when FARC fighters disarmed en masse. Most victims of the conflict live in rural parts of Colombia, in areas that lack the investment and infrastructure that urban centres like Bogotá enjoy. Too easily ignored in their native regions, the Emberá have become a symbol that politicians in the capital find harder to overlook – one that underlines the government’s unkept promises to invest in communities still suffering the effects of conflict. Jairo, an Indigenous leader who asked to be identified only by his first name, believes the lack of action by the government illustrates “systemic and structural discrimination” against Indigenous peoples that goes far beyond the current administration. He demanded not just a return to their lands, but a restitution of land and economic opportunities guaranteed under Colombian law and under the 2016 peace accords. “The government has made no shortage of promises,” Jairo continued. “But we have learned not to put much faith in their offers.” Three years of neglect in the capital In September 2021, 15 Indigenous people from different parts of the country arrived in Parque Nacional – the first members of a forcibly displaced community that would grow more than thirtyfold over the next three years.