The Dispossessed by Alfredo Molano contains a series of first-person accounts from the country’s internally displaced people, including the author himself. Molano was forced to exile in Spain in 1998, after the paramilitaries targeted him for assassination over his famous El Espectador column — which routinely denounced their brutality against peasants. “In spite of its pains,” he writes, “the drama of my exile is but a pale reflection of terrible tragedy that millions of Colombians live each day, uprooted and exiled in their own country.”
People told me thousands of stories and there was, and is, a common element to all of them: the forced displacement of people for political reasons and economic gain. The wealthy accuse campesinos of being Liberals, or Conservatives or communists in order to force them to flee and take their land. The spoils of war in Colombia have always been paid in land, and our history is the history of an incessant, almost uninterrupted displacement.
Colombia has somewhere around three million internally displaced people, one reads over and over when making study of this place. That’s the largest or second largest (or third largest after Syria) internally displaced population on Earth. It’s a travesty so colossal it's changed the face of the country. As the introductory essay notes:
Displacement is a palpable and tragic reality. But it is also a metaphor for life today in Colombia. Colombia is a country that for the people who live there has been transformed into a foreign land. It is unrecognizable, not only because of violence, but because of other processes that have been strengthened in recent years. The state has weakened; there is an absence of ideological discourse to link people to a struggle for democracy; unemployment looks like a ghost; socioeconomic imbalances resulting from drug trafficking and corruption are profoundly unsettling; the bankruptcy of industries that could not survive free market reforms which liberated imports and the crashing of coffee prices – all of these phantoms are the life companions with whom the Colombian people have had to learn to co-exist in recent years.
What I’ve wondered in reading other books is how, exactly this happens. What sequence of events lead a person to flee? How and where do they go? What does it look like on the ground, from the eyes of the people it’s happening to?
Seven Stories
Taken together, Molano’s recounting make flesh and bone of something that too often is described exclusively in flat, heartless numbers. They are relayed as testimonios, “a distinctively Latin American literary movement that flourished in the 1980s,” and that dates back to 16th century Dominican friar, Bartolome de las Casas who recorded the accounts of indigenous people brutalized by Spanish conquerors.
The Defeat: [Two old men living peacefully and happily on a quiet beach are joined by a young couple and the four form a community. After they shares a meal and drink with some passing Guerrillas, one of the old men is murdered and the others flee.] “You are a guerrilla son-of-a-bitch,” said the one in charge. “And we’ve come to pay you back for partying with those bandits.” Without another word, he pulled out a pistol and shot Anibal three times in the face.
Angela: After that the man who owned the yonson told my father he couldn’t work on the river anymore because the paramilitaries were furious when they found out the men we took across the river were guerillas. [the family is forced to abandon the house they spent their lives building and saving for and flee to Bogota.]
Silences: [A man flees the hometown he’s spent his entire life in after a massacre that kills half the people he knows, including his little brother. He returns after a few months because he can’t bear to live anywhere else.] When I went to have a closer look, I almost passed out. It was the president and secretary of the union hanging there…. The main problem was still the ranchers and lumber men and their greed for land…
The Turkish Boat: [A little boy flees his village alone after his entire family is slaughtered in a massacre. He hops boats and buses to the slums of Cartagena where he becomes a street criminal, and a doctor eventually tries to rescue him.] That’s what you hope when someone goes away, that you’ll see them again and be able to tell them you’re still alive. The thought that my family had been killed thinking that I was already dead tormented me because it would have made them even sadder.
The Garden: [A woman is forced to flee her home after her father is killed by paramilitaries when a jealous neighbor makes a false report about him being a guerrilla. She and her husband try to make a new life by growing illicit crops, but the husband is then killed by guerrillas when he accidentally pays the paramilitaries instead of them] Alvaro went back down to close the deal and came back with the seeds. We had no idea of the problems and pain that came with them. We were selling our souls to the devil. But after seeing so much death, crime and poverty, we had to take the risk… or resign ourselves to staying the way we were… I don’t understand how they can kill someone without even letting him speak. Sure, they told Alvaro not to have any dealings with the paracos, but how were we supposed to know the men who came for the money were paras?
Osiris: [A mother is forced to send two of her teenage children to live in Bogota, after her other three are murdered. Eventually she is forced to flee, herself, as the town becomes too violent.] I can’t seem to find myself here in Bogota. When you’re used to the country and the chickens and roosters, it’s very hard to get used to living all together in one room… I have nothing bad to say about people from the countryside and towns like Apartado, because they’ve suffered an awful lot and bled a great deal. But there are some envious people here who think as the rich do: everything a poor person has is stolen. They say things that hurt you. One day some girls from one of the schools here looked at us and said, “You’re turning this into a barrio of displaced people.”
Nubia, La Catira: [A young woman loses her mother and brother, and then her husband, to violence, and is forced repeatedly to flee her home to escape paramilitaries or guerrillas.] They whacked at him until the machete bent. He was mostly in pieces by then, his head hanging off his neck, and the killers left him that way. But he was still alive, and a neighbor was with him in his last moments. He asked her to move his head out of the puddle it was in and to clean him up as best she could.
But why
Over and over, the book comes back to the same central thesis: Displacement is the point. Terror is the point. Violence is not the true reason for anything. It’s only the instrument or weapon.
Forced displacement is a phenomenon linked to the history of Colombia and to the country’s unfinished historical processes. The economic and political elite have used displacement to homogenize the population in a given area and to maintain and expand large estates… people are not displaced “by violence”; rather, violence is the tool used to expel the population. The true causes for displacement include strategic control of military and political areas, restructuring of local and regional powers, control or disruption of social movements, control of production and extraction activities (of natural resources and minerals). Mega-projects, expansion of stockbreeding estates and agricultural industry, control of illicit crops, etc.
I found this list helpful.
Displacements are linked to historic tensions and contradictions such as:
1. Large urban migrations that have not been accompanied by an industrialization process (revolution) or economic development to ensure that this new labor force is absorbed into the formal sector
2. Permanent rural colonization that has never been regulated by the state, resulting in co-existence that is organized by the local people and groups rather than the state
3. Absence of state institutions in large regions and semi-feudal regional and local structures used to wield power
4. Increased cooperation among the armed actors who have turned violence into a means to serve their interests and to guarantee their survival
I could recount the entire book just unpacking each item here. But I think a good way to summarize is to say that displacement can be divided into three strands which all ultimately braid together.
One: La Violencia
As with so much of Colombia’s story, this one begins with Bogotazo and its long aftermath. From the book’s introduction:
For the first century and a half of Colombia’s existence as an independent state the elite-based Liberal and Conservative Parties whose influence reached from Bogota to every rural town, rotated in and out of government with regularity. Periodic Party competition led to armed conflict, with militias of Liberals and Conservatives squaring off in rural areas. Throughout most of this time, the mass of the population remained excluded from the political spoils or in the case of some peasants, remained tied to the Liberals or Conservatives.
This began to change in the 1930s, when, during the Great Depression, labor and peasant organizing put pressure on the political system. The Liberal governments of the 1930s enacted measures providing for social security and workers’ rights akin to US president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or the state-led reforms of Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas. As in the US, this period of reform was short-lived. The Second World War and the subsequent Cold War put a damper on popular aspirations, giving the Colombian Right an opening to roll back the 1930 reforms. President Alfonso Lopez Pumarej, who had played the FDR role in the 1930s, returned to power in the war years, only to lead a retrenchment in the reforms he had championed.
This ignited a populist movement inside (and outside) the Liberal Party, in which the Left, workers, and peasant organizations rallied behind the charismatic politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Gaitan came in third in the presidential elections of 1946, not far behind the official Liberal candidate. He looked to be in a strong position win the 1950 election. However, on April 9, 1948, an assassin cut down Gaitan on a Bogota street. The assassination ignited the Bogotazo, weeks of mass rioting in the capital and beyond as Gaitan supporters accused the Conservatives or official Liberals of murdering their leader. After a brief respite, the violence reignited, this time engulfing the country in a cycle, which has since been called La Violencia, lasting through 1958.
In all, some 300,000 people died, more than two million were forced to flee, and the basically never the same again. Among other things, more than 300,000 ownership deeds changed hands, “vast tracts of farmland wound up in the hands of estate owners and businessmen,” and the country as a whole tipped from predominantly rural to predominantly urban.
Two: Guerrillas, Paramilitaries, Cartels
In the middle of La Violencia, the Colombian government launched a major, U.S.-backed military campaign against pretty much any group who wanted to protect or extend the land reforms of the 1930s (mostly peasants who were duly labeled as communists and / or bandits). Those operations triggered the formation of peasant “self-defense” groups into actual guerrilla armies. These guerrillas tried to establish independent republics in some of the country’s most remote, uninhabited regions, including Meta and Coqueta, where they hoped to work the land and live without interference from the Central government. But the Central Government obviously did not stand for that, and so we ended up with a full-blown guerrilla war marked by the rise of FARC and other guerrilla groups.
By the 1980s the Colombian government was inviting these groups to lay down their arms in exchange for amnesty and a promise that they could form their own political parties and put their own candidates forth for public office. FARC and others took them up on the offer, forming the Union Patriotica, a political front that they hoped would win seats in the 1986 elections. But the government and the armed right famously and surreptitiously reneged on the agreement, and in a few years’ time some 3,000 UP members were murdered by the armed right. The guerrilla war thus resumed, only it was much worse because by then you had drug cartels and paramilitaries entering the fray. It started with the cartels investing their mega profits in land and cattle. The guerrillas responded by kidnapping cartel members, or their families, for ransom; and the cartels responded by creating or funding paramilitaries to protect their assets. Things spiraled quickly from there.
The result of all this was a huge increase from the 1980s to today in paramilitary activity, including massacres, disappearances, and forced displacements. Since the drug cartels, the traditional oligarchy, and the military represented an alliance of sectors of Colombia’s ruling class, it wasn’t long before paramilitary activity became directed not just at guerrillas, but at any force inside Colombian society that dared to challenge the status quo. Human rights workers, trade unionists, peasant leaders, left-of-center politicians, and others having little or nothing to do with guerrilla activity became targets of the paramilitaries. In the cities — especially in the slum areas where many of the displaced concentrate when they flee to urban areas – “social cleansing” by hired assassins (sicarios) annually murders hundreds of street children, prostitutes, and others deemed “undesirable.”
In the end, you have chaos with no clear purpose and a lot of terrified people basically running for their lives, over and over.
The lines separating the various armed groups are constantly changing and as a result… these areas can go from the control of one actor to another without warning. Residents of these communities are guaranteed to undergo some form of terror when power in their area changes hands, as they will most definitely be accused of supporting the previous controlling actor, or defeated party. In many cases the only choice left for community residents is to flee to the so-called shantytowns on the peripheries of the big cities, where anonymity and a certain degree of security are usually guaranteed.
Three: Landlords and Multinationals
Of course, it was not just the cartels and guerrillas and corrupt government officials who sewed and/or profited from the chaos. Wealthy landholders were all too happy to join the free-for-all. Using the threat of communism or the suspicion of guerrilla activity or some other related excuse to expel campesinos from various territories that they coveted for themselves. “War is the continuation of economics through other means,” as the introductory essay notes. The quote is from Claude Von Clausewitz, a Prussian military theorist. But it aptly describes “the historic employment of private landlord armies to seize prime farmland.”
A Census carried out by the National Farmers’ Association (ANUC) revealed that of 15.5 million farmers in 1990 at least five million left their lands or had given up traditional farming at some point during the preceding decade. This meant that 1.7 million hectares of farmland were abandoned and occupied for the most part by armed actors… and by large or medium estate owners who used terror to buy land at undervalued prices or to acquire the deeds of abandoned farms.
(It’s worth reiterating here that cartels themselves became vast estate holders. By 1997, according to the book’s concluding essay, they controlled some 4 million hectares of good flat fertile land).
And of course, it’s not just the wealthy Colombian landowners playing this game. The thing I most appreciated about the introduction and summary essays in this book was their focus on multinationals, something I haven’t encountered in the other Colombia books I’ve read so far. Turns out British Petroleum financed some of them paramilitaries themselves, and the United States based Occidental Petroleum pushed Congress to expand Plan Colombia to regions where the company had interests. Other multinationals — ones that invested in minerals, cash crops, timber, etc. — “contributed to the pressure to expel populations” whose communities were built on the land that they wanted or needed to access.
Again, interests (in this case, of rich landholders and global corporations) bleed into one another:
The elite have now entered into an alliance with multinational credit institutions and capital assets, which requires an expansion of capital circuits, bestows privileges upon capital assets, strengthens the economy’s primary sector (agricultural industry) through foreign markets, promotes foreign investments and exports, and toughens repression against social protest…. The Development Plan of the Pastrana administration envisaged the construction of eight transversal highways and eight main highways plus railways as well as air ferry and sea transportation and communications. The purpose was to guarantee multinationals and private investors access to the country’s resources. [which include more than 30 million hectares of non-commercially controlled forests of usable timbre.
When people flee, local landowners or multinational companies (and the alliances among them and other actors) can then appropriate these abandoned lands or buy them at very low costs. This is extremely easy in colonization areas where land deeds do not exist (for instance 80-85% of the land in Putumayo is not registered) …. [For example] In middle and lower Atrato, only two weeks after the plans for the Atrato-Turando interoceanic canal project were announced, land prices skyrocketed. Two months later, paramilitary groups appeared on the scene to intimidate the area’s local population and force them to leave.
Meanwhile, neoliberalism in general makes it harder and harder for Colombians to have say in how the nation’s land gets used. It also leads to the aggressive curbing of public services like education and health care, and huge swaths of the country are ultimately left “untouched by any state presence except the military.” It’s a void that the paramilitaries, guerrillas and cartels have been all too happy to fill. The rural outreaches of Colombia, “immune to Bogota’s influence,” are just about wholly governed by these other entities.
Some more bullet points:
- Antioquia alone represents 25% of the national total of displaced people
- People under the age of 18 comprise nearly half of the displaced population
- Though Guerrillas participate in more acts of displacement, their interventions affect fewer people. Paramilitaries, through a terror-oriented communication strategy, carry out more effective actions in terms of numbers: it is estimated that each massacre they perpetrate causes 170 people to flee.
- Farmers, black and indigenous people are especially affected
- The main trend is rural-urban displacement, but urban-urban is on the rise (or was at time of book’s writing)