One week before the presidential election: drug violence wreaks havoc on towns and sends refugees drifting into Colombia

Deserted streets, doors secured by padlocks, suspicious looks, silence reigns. Most fled before the drug traffickers and rebels who settled in their homes arrived. The war for cocaine booty is emptying the towns Pacific of Colombia.

People stayedit is confined, threatened, frightened. And they resist because they prefer to die in their homes and not outside begging, ”Diego Portocarrero, one of hundreds of displaced black people who fled the riverside town of La Colonia, says in the AFP and now lives in the city of Buenaventura, the main port in the Pacific.

Fighters from the ELN, the last recognized guerrilla group in the country, and from the Clan del Golfo, the dreaded narco army, the peoples are battered by blood and fire bordering the Calima and San Juan rivers, a route for cocaine trafficking.

In a low voice, a La Colonia resident said drug traffickers prevailed and some lived in houses abandoned by their owners: “What we have lived, seen and heard is indescribable”sorry under reservation.

disputes

The walls prove it: full of gunshots and marked with the initials of two disputed groups, the ELN and the AGC or Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, as the Clan del Golfo itself is called. As a group progresses He crosses the graffiti of one of the facades.

The war jumped from the mountains to the villages and now illegals roam freely among civilians. Suddenly the military appeared to accompany a humanitarian caravan.

Framed in a lush jungle on the Pacific coast, the region of 317,000 inhabitants (91% Afro) is a postcard of fear. 90% of the 9.2 million victims of armed conflict have fled and of the nearly 300,000 correspond to Buenaventura, the port that handles 40% of the country’s non-mining-energy trade.

The local economy is at the expense of extortion. Despite the 2016 peace agreement that disarmed the FARC guerrillas, violence continues. “The displacement mutated (…) now it’s drops by drop, quiet” and “it’s worse” because the agreement didn’t prevent non-repetition and now there are more “barriers” to recognizing victims before the State, observations. Juan Manuel Torres, researcher at the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation study center (Pares).

Indigenous and displaced blacks was confined to uncomfortable hostels in Buenaventura at the mercy of gangs inherited paramilitarism and drug trafficking. In addition to extortion, poverty (41%), unemployment (18%), forced recruitment, homicide, sexual abuse and disappearance haunt the neighborhoods where they live.

“They come on the hunt, take people out of the houses, the kids. It’s a sad thing, it’s hard, because you leave your territory to go here to spend your necessities,” laments Nancy Hurtado (52 years old), who lived under soccer goals in a coliseum with hundreds of Afros who came to San Isidro by rivers and steep roads.

In the sports complex, families make kitchens, laundry rooms, bedrooms, television rooms. Even miles away from her attackers, Nancy feels their stalk. “Let them catch you, bite you, throw you in a bucket (…) who wants to die like this?“he wondered.

crimes

Homicides in Buenaventura went from 73 in 2017 to 195 in 2021, pushed by cocaine traffic leaving for Central America and Mexico, towards the United States. The mutilated bodies were thrown into the sea, according to testimonies from residents and human rights defenders.

On the eve of the May 29 presidential election, in which they could not vote for deportation from their places of registration, the displaced people of Buenaventura looked with no interest in the elections where for the first time the left was can be seated in power. in Colombia, former guerrilla and senator Gustavo Petro hold hands.

“We’re not going to win communitiesWe always lose, “Diego suspected.

At the headquarters of an indigenous radio station, 158 displaced people of the Wounaan Nonam ethnic group live in crowded conditions. A group of women were washing clothes in the dark, taking advantage of the flow of water that reached them every other day for five hours. The community experienced displacement in 2004, 2010, 2017, but in November 2021 they all fled for the first time.

“What’s left are the houses, the puppies, the chickens,” said leader Édgar García, 45.

When the government surrendered the Clan del Golfo, after capturing and extraditing their capo “Otoniel” to the United States, they showed muscle, researcher Torres explained.

With 3,260 members according to Pares, the Clan removed the ELN in Buenaventura because of military superiority. In the south and east of the rural area, dissidences of the FARC who refused the peace agreement are also growing; on the urban perimeter, hundreds of young people divided into Shotas and Espartanos, two opposing factions of the paramilitary organization La Local, are fighting.

Luis Ismare fled in fear from his community in Bajo San Juan one morning in February along with 80 other Wounaan natives. This 36-year-old craftsman carved out a sense of displacement: “It’s like disappearing, it’s a decision where you have to throw yourself into that deep hole, (where) imaginable you will not be able to go out (…) and you will be separated from the motherland. “

AFP agency

PB