The sky above the Barrio Nelson Mandela on a recent afternoon is a whirl of blue and black dots: blue from the makeshift kites that the neighborhood children improvise from plastic bags, black from the buzzards that circle over the nearby city garbage dump. The dry hills are covered with rickety shacks, their flimsy plastic walls flapping in the breeze, a cobweb of wires clinging precariously to electric posts overhead. Along the crooked dirt streets, dozens of barefoot children brave the heat to play with cars made out of plastic bottles. This is the other face of Cartagena de Indias.
The city is known as Colombia’s jewel on the Caribbean: an island of near-peace in a country wracked by decades of war, where tourists can roam through colorful colonial neighborhoods and sip cocktails perched on the majestic 400 year-old wall that surrounds the downtown area. Because of Cartagena’s tranquility, the city is the preferred destination of high-level American officials from the Pentagon and the State Department when they meet with Colombian counterparts to discuss weapons exchanges and joint training exercises.
But 20 minutes away by bus lies a world of misery: Barrio Nelson Mandela, a neighborhood that is home to almost 50,000 people displaced by Colombia’s war. Most have arrived in the last three years from rural communities, fleeing from paramilitary massacres, guerrilla incursions and military terror campaigns. A large majority are Afro-Colombian—hence the neighborhood’s name.
About two million Colombians have so far been internally displaced, adding to the layers of misery that blanket the country’s largest cities. They are the forgotten victims of the war. As the U.S. Congress prepares to send Colombia an $862 million aid package, mostly destined for an Armed Forces that human rights groups say is instrumental in forming and sustaining the paramilitary groups responsible for most displacements in the country, a visit to Barrio Nelson Mandela illustrates the human toll of a dirty war that is partially sponsored by Washington.
Nelson Mandela is a community of survivors. One of them is Vianeys Navarro, a community leader who was displaced from a village about 62 miles from Cartagena. The first time I visited her she was jaundiced with hepatitis but insisted on rolling out of bed to report on the state of affairs in her neighborhood. That was in 1997. Back then roughly 25,000 people lived in Nelson Mandela; families arrived every day with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Navarro’s task was to issue them a plot of land, help them build homes and make sure that no property squabbles erupted in the community. The war in Colombia is a war over land after all, and even among the displaced, this war wages on.
Women are particularly affected by displacement, Navarro emphasized. “They sometimes arrive with five, six children, all traumatized and hungry, and with not a peso on them,” she said. “The paramilitaries will often massacre the men in the communities and then force people to abandon their homes overnight. They leave everything behind, including their unburied dead.”
In a neighborhood that has few schools and only two health centers (both private), the women have created informal daycare centers using a popular system in Latin America called “community mothers.” Women open their modest homes to working mothers, and for a small stipend look after their children while they go to their day jobs as cooks, cleaners and street vendors. These centers are mere wooden shacks with dirt floors where women care for 15 to 20 children at a time.
By the time of my latest visit to Nelson Mandela this April, its population had doubled since 1997, but the community still did not have basic services such as plumbing, electricity and sewage. Francisco Galindo, who heads Corsonema, a community organization in Nelson Mandela, says the local government has turned its back on the barrio. “They think that it is best to ignore us because our needs are too overwhelming for them, and they fear that better living conditions will draw more people into the neighborhood,” he says.
Because of the lack of services or the money to pay for them, the neighborhood is dotted with perchas, illegal wires that hook onto the high voltage electrical poles to “steal” electricity. They are dangerous and have already caused several homes to burn, says Galindo. He also points to the pestilent streams that trickle down the hills. “Untreated sewage, that’s what the children play in all day,” he says.
The presence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is also weak. Only one humanitarian group worked consistently in Nelson Mandela during the first years of its existence, a Spanish peace organization called Movement for Peace, Disarmament and Freedom. But the group left last year after building several community centers, schools and other infrastructure. The Swiss organization Man’s Earth, which works with children, now has a youth project in Nelson Mandela. A few other groups sometimes drop by with food, medicine and building materials. “We still lack the sort of government or NGO presence that would really make a difference here,” says Galindo.
On a hot Sunday morning, I find most people home, relaxing. The sound of an accordion from a popular vallenato song, music from Colombia’s northern coast, drifts through the hills. Pedro Antonio Vázquez, a peasant in his forties, is standing outside his mother’s wooden shack with his wife and two sons. He is a recent arrival in Nelson Mandela. A few months ago, he and his family fled from Las Palmas, a small village in southern Bolívar, where paramilitaries and the guerrillas are fighting over valuable land. The prize: large deposits of gold.
“We had a normal life. I grew yucca and plantains, had a few animals, and my sons went to school,” Vázquez says. “A few months ago the paramilitaries arrived and murdered several people in my village. They were all good people. But the paramilitaries accused them of helping the guerrillas. Then we were all told that if we were not gone by the next day, they would do the same to us.” Vázquez and his family fled before dawn. “We left everything behind—our animals and tools, our house and the farmland,” he said. “Now we have nothing.”
His 14-year-old son Jesús shows me the only possession he took with him, his prized gaita, a long, flute-like instrument popular in northern Colombia. He wanted to be a musician. I ask him about the day he had to flee. His face shows pain. “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” Vázquez explains. His father encourages him to talk: “Jesús, tell her. Don’t worry, just tell her.”
“I was in school,” Jesús says. “These men came in. They were wearing masks and they had weapons. They told us to go to the village square. Everyone was there, our parents, the kids from school. Then they started picking out people from the crowd. They would drag them to the center and shoot them. Some of the kids were crying and they told them to shut up or they would kill them too.”
The Vázquez family roamed the department of Bolívar for months, finally heading for Nelson Mandela, where they joined Antonio’s elderly mother and other family who had left the village months before. They have since been sharing a little shack—14 people in one room.
Nancy Herrera sells fish door to door, balancing a large tin bowl of her wares on her head. She was displaced from María la Baja, a village just inland from Cartagena, about a year ago. “I also used to sell fish in my village, and I was able to support my seven children,” she says. “Now we are lucky if we eat breakfast and dinner. But back there, we were in the crossfire between the guerrillas and the paras. They would burn houses and kill people. We were always waiting for the day that there would be a massacre in our village. So I took my children and we left.”
The Vázquez family’s and Nancy Herrera’s openness is in sharp contrast with that of most Nelson Mandela residents. Most of the displaced have witnessed unspeakable terror and live with the fear that their tormentors will find them in their new homes. Every family I was able to speak with feared that paramilitaries and guerrillas still lived among them, so few would discuss the circumstances that led to their displacement.
Work is scarce for residents of Nelson Mandela, mostly because of the depressed economy but also because displaced people are often stigmatized in Colombia. Farmers, schoolteachers, plumbers, government employees find themselves a part of the “informal economy”—shining shoes, selling candy on buses or sharpening knives door to door. Galindo says that when job candidates from the community give their address, they are often turned away. “People think that the displaced are problematic and conflictive,” he explains.
Galindo’s group obtained money from several NGOs for a small program that gave the displaced seed money to start their own small businesses—modest ventures such as buying a sewing machine for a seamstress, or a refrigerator to hold food and drinks for sale. The money ran out last year, but he hopes to replicate the program soon.
Edison Marugo, a 23-year-old youth organizer, heads a group supported by Man’s Earth. He works with displaced children and youth, using music, theater and sports to help them out of their depression. He says young people suffer particularly harshly from the trauma of displacement, and from a general loss of hope. “Back home, many had everything they needed: a home, a family, friends, a future,” explains Marugo, who on this day is recruiting kids for a game of soccer. “Then they witnessed atrocities and had to leave their homes. They lost loved ones. Now they are confined to a tiny piece of land. Their future has been taken away from them. They walk around with their faces hung and their spirit broken.”
Marugo adds that his organization encourages the kids to deal with their trauma through group sessions and art. “They are unable to talk about it with their families because the parents are ashamed of their displacement,” he says. But Marugo says that he has hope, and mentions some his group’s successes. “Now, some of the youth that we worked with have dealt with their trauma,” he says. “They have become counselors, and they are transferring their healing on to others.”
A red, black and green pendant shaped like Africa dangles from Marugo’s neck, and I ask him about the significance of Barrio Nelson Mandela’s name. He explains that the neighborhood was christened after its black founders had to struggle for the right to the land. “As the displaced started to settle here, these thugs would appear and claim the land as theirs,” he says. “They demanded payment and threatened the settlers with death. The people fought for the right to settle here and won. They said that their struggle for land reminded them of Mandela’s in South Africa. This is a name that makes the community proud, and that is associated with blackness and with struggle.” Recently, Marugo and other youths wrote to the former president of South Africa to let him know that there was a community in Colombia named after him. “They wrote us back from South Africa, and sent us an autograph from Nelson Mandela and a rose that had been growing in the prison yard where he had been jailed,” Marugo says. “It was a great moment for us. We treasure that rose.”
Near the community soccer field, a construction site is brimming with activity. Residents, all volunteer parents, are building an elementary school called The Redeemers with the guidance and training of Jose Roveles, a professional builder who volunteers in displaced communities. The roof teems with people mixing cement, laying bricks and stacking concrete blocks. “We are building this school in the same way that we are building our lives: from scratch,” says Liliana Sarmiento, a displaced mother of six, as she lays bricks. “I want my kids to get an education, which will be their ticket out of poverty. And I am also bettering my life, by taking workshops here on how to be a construction worker.”
Roveles says that he began to volunteer his services when he realized that Colombian society was falling apart due to the massive displacement of its population. He heads an organization called, “This is How I Build My House,” a family-run group that provides free workshops in Nelson Mandela and that also works in other poor neighborhoods. “These people are living in shacks unfit for animals,” he says. “See the black plastic bags that cover all the shacks? Those bags used to hold petrochemicals. They are toxic. And when it rains here, some of the houses collapse under the weight of the water.”
The spirit of volunteerism runs through Nelson Mandela, and a few blocks from the building site, students from a Cartagena high school are holding a workshop on health and sanitation. Seventeen-year-old student Sandra Cortines is trying to get city funding for fumigation. “There are so many pests here, mosquitoes and other animals that make the children sick,” she says. “We try to teach people how to better their living environment, like not leaving uncovered water containers which become breeding places for insects.” But Cortines adds that the city causes much of the environmental pollution. “For instance, the municipal garbage dump on that hill: A lot of the toxic waste from there trickles down to the community. But the city refuses to do anything about it.”
Little has been said in Colombia or the United States about the links between multinational interests and displacement in Colombia. But many displaced, and the organizations that represent them, say that the connection is clear. Some displaced people speak of las compañías (the corporations)—gold, silver, nickel, oil, wood—that had been operating in their communities, often in conflict with the residents because of labor, economic or environmental concerns, and which they held responsible for their ultimate displacement.
For the past year, the region of Tibú has bled dry, its population massacred and displaced, its cities and villages turned into ghost towns overnight. Ramón, a peasant organizer from Tibú who would not give his last name, has been displaced from his farm five times. “This past year has been a nightmare,” he says. “The paras have swept through our lands, accused us of helping the guerrillas, threatened us with death. And they don’t just tell you they are going to kill you. They tell you how they plan to do it. They say: ‘We will rip off each of your limbs, one by one, then we will cut off your tongue and chop off your head.'”
Tibú had been an oil-producing area until a few years ago, when the Colombian oil company Ecopetrol’s wells ran dry. The company left. But recently, other oil deposits were discovered nearby that could be some of the richest in the country. Now, several companies are exploring the region. “The paramilitaries had not really been too interested in this area until last year,” Ramón says. “All of a sudden, as we organize around this drilling and demand that the community be consulted and included in the process, we are being massacred by the paramilitaries.”
Gloria Flores, Executive Director of a human rights organization called Minga (an indigenous word meaning “collective”), which works with the displaced, also thinks that displacements are often associated with multinational interests. “We have not been able to prove this, but we believe that the paramilitaries, who operate in the interests of large landowners and the state, by extension also defend the interests of the multinationals,” she says. “In the concrete case of Tibú, we know that there is a conglomerate of five oil companies involved in the exploration for oil. We have tried to get more information, find out which companies they are. But it is very difficult because they operate with a lot of secrecy. We have been able to determine that one of the companies is Amoco,” the California-based oil giant.
Flores, like many other human rights defenders in Colombia, believes that displacement is both a tool for warfare and an economic strategy. “In the case of multinationals, they prefer to operate in areas that are free of guerrillas and have weak unions and community organizations,” she says. “Displacing the civilian population is one way of creating these conditions.” And often, these communities are left with no human rights watchdogs, because human rights defenders are among the first who are targeted.
Mónica, a young school secretary and human rights activist from the town of Simití in southern Bolívar, was recently displaced after she denounced disappearances and murders by paramilitaries and the military in her community. She says that in the months prior to her displacement, the town of Simití “became immersed in a culture of silence. People would be killed or simply disappear, but no one would say anything.”
“You just never knew who was a paramilitary—it could be your neighbor, or your cousin,” remembers Mónica, who is afraid to give her last name. “Many of the boys I grew up with were recruited by the paras. They would be offered a lot of money to join. All of a sudden, I would see them armed, riding around in a four-wheel-drive truck, terrorizing people.”
About two months ago, an armed group visited her home and asked for her. Thankfully, she says, she was not there. She left the same day with her husband and baby boy. “I never thought this would happen to me,” she weeps. “You hear about it on television, but you never think that you will become one of the displaced.”
Mónica also believes the paramilitaries work for the interests of multinational corporations. She says that several gold companies, some U.S.-based, operate large mines close to Simití. She also believes that the United States should withhold military aid to Colombia’s army. “The U.S. public must realize that giving helicopters or training to the Colombian military is like giving it to the paramilitaries,” she says. “In my village, they shared the same weapons, the same radio frequencies, and they had the same enemy: the people. Us.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
María Carrión is a freelance journalist and human rights activist. She is the former Senior Producer for Pacifica Radio«s Democracy Now! and has also worked with BBC Radio and Spain«s national radio. She recently produced a feature film on human rights entitled The Back of the World.
