Colombia: Shattered lives in the Cauca mountains
Colombia: Shattered lives in the Cauca mountains
10 October 2014
When the fighting starts, you say, oh my God, and you rush this way and that, in a panic to get home and shut yourself inside, and the bullets whistle over the house. The children cling to your legs and scream when they hear a helicopter. It’s horrible to live like that, and this is the life we are living here throughout the Cauca department.” Ana Silvia Muñoz has been displaced several times by the armed conflict between armed groups and the governmental forces that has been going on for the last 50 years in Colombia in various regions of the country.
Despite decreasing levels of fighting, the people of the Cauca mountains in southern Colombia continue to live in fear, pain, and silence. Cauca is home to some 450,000 people according to the last official census, and is one of the areas of the country with the most armed activity.
The conflict especially affects rural indigenous and peasant communities, who live in remote villages and account for 20% of the population of this department. Life in these villages seems tranquil. The houses are simple and are scattered across the mountains, surrounded by cultivated fields. The people work in the fields of corn, coffee or beans, and breed their chickens while the children go to the nearest school, sometimes two hours away, and play football like in any other place in the world.
But when the sound of bullets and the buzzing of helicopters breaks this tranquillity the inhabitants, by now used and resigned to it, run to hide in their houses or are forced to move to other places with their families until the violence stops and they can return.
It was on such a day that the bullets shattered the lives of Ana and her husband Carlos Héctor Zánchez one year ago. As usual, Carlos was sowing coffee in his field in the village of Luís Arriba, in Cauca. “Around two o’clock, the shooting from the front started. We live in between two hills and our house and our field are in the middle when there is fighting. We locked ourselves up in our house to have lunch. Forty-five minutes later everything seemed calm and my husband went outside to feed the dog,” recalls Ana with a serious face. He was hit by a bullet and fell at the feet of his six-year-old daughter, who ran into the house crying, thinking that her father was dead.
More:
http://www.msf.org/article/colombia-shattered-lives-cauca-mountains