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- Campesinos and the Crop
In this photo taken in June 2001, peasants along the Venezuelan border pick coca leaves from the few plants that remain in their field after aerial fumigation. While US-backed spraying programs have significantly reduced the total acreage planted with coca -- from 420,000 acres in 2001 to 280,000 acres in 2003 -- the production, availability, and street price of cocaine have remained nearly constant. Growers have moved to new regions (including Colombia's national parks), planted smaller plots more difficult to detect from the air, and switched to higher-yield coca varietals. Meanwhile, farmers have complained that indiscriminate aerial spraying has damaged or destroyed food crops, which are often planted adjacent to coca fields. Efforts by the Colombian government and a variety of NGOs to encourage farmers to plant substitute crops and pursue cattle ranching may show some promise, but have been underfunded and the results remain to be seen. For many Colombian farmers -- hard hit by industrialization and the drop in coffee prices that followed the collapse of the International Coffee Pact in 1989 -- the coca crop unfortunately remains one of their few realistic sources of income. CREDIT: Scott Dalton/Associated Press
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- Citizen-Soldiers
As part of his "Democratic Security" strategy, President Álvaro Uribe Vélez has mobilized a nationwide network of citizen informants in order to gather intelligence on the left- and right-wing armed groups. After calling for the creation of a force of 100,000 "peasant soldiers" by 2006 Uribe has, as of summer 2005, already accomplished this goal; approximately 120,000 peasants are now serving in local militias. Meanwhile as many as 1.6 million Colombians, known as the "Red de Cooperacion Ciudadana" (Network of Citizen Cooperation), participate as informants. The public face of the "Red" is the weekly "Reward Monday" presentation, at which informants (who are masked to avoid reprisals) are paid for fruitful leads. In a country where the majority of the population lives in poverty, the payouts -- which in 2004 averaged $403 -- are significant enough to make informing worth the risk for many. In 2003, the Colombian government credited the program with information leading to the capture of nearly two thousand armed fighters and the freeing of 97 hostages. Critics point out that the informants have been more successful at providing information on common criminals than guerrillas or paramilitaries, and human-rights groups claim that the militias of peasant soldiers dangerously blur the lines between civilians and combatants. CREDIT: Albeiro Lopera/Reuters
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- The Bystanders
Here, a Red Cross worker comforts a woman whose son was among the dead in a January 2003 car bombing at the state prosecutors' office in Medellín that killed five and injured 20. Of the estimated 3,000 people killed each year in Colombia's ongoing civil war, the great majority are civilian noncombatants. Rural Colombians, living in the areas where the guerrillas and paramilitiaries rule in place of the state, bear the brunt of the violence: Some are targeted for imagined "allegiance" with or sympathy for one group or another, others simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Over the past decade, the armed groups -- primarily the leftist "Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia" (FARC) -- have increasingly acted within Colombia's cities, and bombings have become a common tactic, bringing the threat of collateral damage previously reserved for the rural poor to the urban middle and upper classes. CREDIT: Albeiro Lopera/Reuters
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- Prisoners of the Cities
Since La Violencia, the period of open conflict during the 1940s and 50s that sparked the ongoing civil war, Colombia's population has been urbanizing. The trend has accelerated with the rise of drug trafficking in the 1980s and the displacement crisis of the late 1990s, as each year rural residents have abandoned the countryside to the warring groups in favor of the relative safety of the cities. Some 75 percent of Colombia's population lived in urban areas. The cities themselves struggle to provide services and to address not just the political and criminal violence that has become part of urban life, but the pollution and paralyzing automobile traffic that come with overcrowding. Meanwhile, urban residents -- fearful of kidnapping by the guerrillas or paramilitaries -- are afraid to travel outside of the cities; at home they accept an increasingly militarized police presence as the armed groups themselves have increased their presence in urban areas. CREDIT: October Films
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- The Kidnapped
In the last year Colombia has experienced a drastic decrease in the number of kidnappings occurring each year. Estimates made in the summer of 2004 suggested that about 3,000 kidnappings took place each year. As of summer 2005, that number has dropped to an estimated 1,900 kidnappings per year. Still, these 1,900 kidnappings are carried out not only by the left and right-wing armed groups but by drug traffickers and gangs of common criminals, ensuring that abduction is still very much a part of everyday life in Colombia. Here, in the studio of a radio program on which the friends and relatives of the kidnapped broadcast messages to their missing loved ones, one guest comforts another as she reads a message to her son. No sector of society is immune to the threat: Along with the presidential candidates, leading journalists, or business leaders taken each year, hundreds of everyday Colombian citizens (including many children) are abducted and held for ransoms of up to a few thousand dollars. While some kidnappings are politically motivated, the majority are economically driven; even the guerrillas are believed to carry out kidnappings primarily to raise funds rather than to make political statements. CREDIT: October Films
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- The Displaced
In 2004, Jan Egeland, the United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, called Colombia "by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere." Egeland's criticism is based largely on the fact that Colombia has the largest internally displaced population in the Americas. An estimated two million Colombians (some five percent of the country's population) have been forced by continuing violence to flee their homes and are living as refugees within Colombia's borders. Most of these people have made their way to shantytowns and encampments on the outskirts of Colombia's already overburdened cities, where they face continual unemployment, malnutrition, and an uncertain future. Here, people wait for a Red Cross food distribution in Viota, 35 miles southwest of Bogotá, in April 2003. CREDIT: Javier Galeano/Associated Press
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- The Future at Risk
Here Alex, a 13-year old member of the FARC, is escorted by government troops after being captured in a sweep in the northwestern region of Santander. As many as 11,000 minors, many younger than 15, are thought to be fighting in Colombia's civil war; 80 percent of them fight with the left-wing guerrilla groups (primarily the FARC); the rest with the paramilitaries. The situation facing the children of Colombia's rural poor is dire: some 70 percent of the country's displaced population is younger than 18; those who remain in the countryside face high absolute poverty rates, limited future employment opportunities outside of coca cultivation, and little incentive to continued education. Despite a high basic literacy rate nationwide (nearly 90 percent) and compulsory education through the ninth grade, in the primary coca-producing region of Putumayo, 85 percent of the population has only a fourth-grade education. Given such conditions, guerrillas and paramilitaries find a ready pool of recruits among rural youth. CREDIT: Scott Dalton/Associated Press
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- On Strike
Organized labor in Colombia has generally been opposed to the Uribe government's fiscal policies, which some have criticized for favoring military spending and the encouragement of foreign investment at the expense of public services and social programs. Unemployment rates remain high at 13.6 percent by the end of 2004. Uribe has remained committed to austerity programs, and public and private sector unions have responded with several large-scale strikes over the past two years. At this one-day strike in September 2002, public workers protested reductions in bonus pay, an increase in the retirement age, and increased funding for military action against the left- and right-wing armed groups. In Colombia, protest carries significant risk, as the country continues to be the most dangerous place in the world in which to be a member of a union -- in 2003, 90 union members were murdered (70 percent of all unionists killed worldwide that year). Most of these assassinations were carried out by right-wing paramilitaries, who see union members as be allies of the left-wing groups; union members claim that the paramilitaries operate with at least the tacit approval of the police and the military. CREDIT: Daniel Munoz/Reuters
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- Tired of War
In July of 2002, on the eve of President Uribe's inauguration, thousands of women staged a protest march in Bogotá, asking all of the groups at war -- the left, the right, and the incoming administration -- to cease hostilities and attempt to negotiate a political settlement. As civilians have suffered the most in the ongoing civil conflict, they have increasingly been disassociating themselves from the guerrillas and paramilitaries, who have been alienating even their core constituencies as they've moved into drug trafficking, the relocation of rural populations, and increasing urban violence. On the one hand, this disillusionment has led to widespread support for Uribe's hardline stance against the armed groups, yet on the other hand it has contributed to the growth of a civilian peace movement. While an influential mass movement has not yet developed, Colombians, tired of nearly a half century of war and willing to question the legitimacy of the country's political power groups, are beginning to reject the traditional violent alternatives of the armed groups in favor of marches, referenda, and the establishment of nonviolent, weapons-free "peace communities." CREDIT: Daniel Munoz/Reuters
