Colombia’s Forgotten Exodus

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the Colombian capital of Bogota, Lucy Ash meets two people who fear they will never be able to return to their homes. They both come from Choco, which is one of the poorest provinces and most violent parts of the country. Maria, an Afro-Colombian mother of four, fled her town after she was abducted and brutally attacked by paramilitaries. Plinio was trying to help members of his indigenous community go back to their farms when he received death threats from a splinter group of left wing guerrilla (the ELN) and his friend was assassinated.

Their stories illustrate a nationwide trauma – the government may be on the brink of a historic peace deal with the FARC rebels, but Colombia has even more internally displaced people than Syria. More than 200,000 have been killed and seven million driven off their land during half a century of war. Lucy travels down the River Baudo to meet people uprooted from their jungle villages in violent clashes earlier this year and finds that Latin America’s longest insurgency is far from over.

Reported and produced by Lucy Ash.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a BBC podcast.
0:02.0	You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Ash in Colombia. A
0:19.8	statue-esque Afro-Columbian woman wearing a yellow turban and loose flowing robes hovers over her patient and gently prods her stomach.
0:29.0	Does it hurt here or here? she asks.
0:35.0	We're in a room filled with plants and brightly colored posters in a rundown neighborhood of the capital, Bogota.
0:42.0	It's a place where victims of Colombia's long-running
0:45.9	armed conflict come to share their stories and get some relief from their suffering.
0:51.2	The woman in the turban who I'm calling Maria not her real name. from their
0:55.0	reliefs, real name, is herself a refugee,
0:58.0	recovering from a terrible ordeal.
1:00.0	We help people that have been heard by the war, we do chantings and singing to help them heal and teach them that they can start a new life here.
1:14.0	Many hope for a new life and that the historic ceasefire agreement in Havana
1:21.0	between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC
1:26.0	will succeed in ending Latin America's longest running insurgency.
1:31.0	The left-wing guerrillas first took up arms in the 1960s to fight inequality and an unfair system of land ownership,
1:40.0	but after more than half a century of war this country is still bitterly divided.
1:48.6	If Colombia goes on being an
1:54.4	an equal place full of the discrimination, we are always going to be ill.
2:00.3	Colombia is going to be ill until that can be changed.
2:05.0	The conflict has claimed a quarter of a million lives and uprooted close to 7 million people.
2:12.0	There are now more internally displaced
2:14.9	citizens here than in Syria. I'll be meeting some of them both here in the
	...

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