Barrio Nelson Mandela
Carrión, María
Twenty minutes away by bus from beautiful Cartagena lies a world of misery, home to some of the almost two million Colombians displaced by war. The sky above the Barrio Nelson Mandela on a...
...Many of the boys I grew up with were recruited by the paras...
...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...
...All of a sudden, I would see them armed, riding around in a four-wheel-drive truck, terrorizing people...
...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...
...Tibfi had been an oil-producing area until a few years ago, when the Colombian oil company Ecopetrol's wells ran dry...
...Work is scarce for residents of Nelson Mandela, mostly because of the depressed economy but also because displaced people are often stigmatized in Colombia...
...She says that in the months prior to her displacement, the town of Simiti "became immersed in a culture of silence...
...Now, several companies are exploring the region...
...We had a normal life...
...As the displaced started to settle here, these thugs would appear and claim the land as theirs," he says...
...The Swiss organization Man's Earth, which works with children, now has a youth project in Nelson Mandela...
...She was displaced from Maria la Baja, a village just inland from Cartagena, about a year ago...
...Then they witnessed atrocities and had to leave their homes...
...About two months ago, an armed group visited her home and asked for her...
...About two million Colombians massacre i have so far been internally displaced, adding to the layers of So I took misery that blanket the country's and v largest cities...
...n a ai n e By the time of my latest visit to the crossfire Nelson Mandela this April, its population had doubled since guerrillas and 1997, but the community still did not have basic services such ries...
...The Vizquez family roamed the department of Bolivar for months, finally heading for Nelson Mandela, where they joined Antonio's elderly mother and other family who had left the village months before...
...The paramilitaries had not really been too interested in this area until last year," Ram6n says...
...They would drag them to the center and shoot them...
...That was in 1997...
...They were wearing masks and they had weapons...
...I grew yucca and plantains, had a few animals, and my sons went to school," Vdzquez says...
...Most of the displaced have witnessed unspeakable terror and live with the fear that their tormentors will find them in their new homes...
...A few months ago the paramilitaries arrived and murdered several people in my village...
...These centers are mere wooden shacks with dirt floors where women care for 15 to 20 children at a time...
...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...
...They are the forgotten victims of the war...
...M6nica also believes the paramilitaries work for the interests of multinational corporations...
...Roveles says that he began to vol- omes...
...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...
...And often, these communities are left with no human rights watchdogs, because human rights defenders are among the first who are targeted...
...You just never knew who was a paramilitary-it could be your neighbor, or your cousin," remembers M6nica, who is afraid to give her last name...
...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...
...But it is very difficult because they operate with a lot of secrecy...
...Some of the kids were crying and they told them to shut up or they would kill them too...
...People think that the displaced are problematic and conflictive," he explains...
...So I took my children and we left...
...I also used to sell fish in my village, and I was able to support my seven children," she says...
...The Vdzquez family's and Nancy Herrera's openness is in sharp contrast with that of most Nelson Mandela residents...
...n witnessed And I am also bettering my life, by taking workshops here on how to be nd had to a construction worker...
...The paras have swept through our lands, accused us of helping the guerrillas, threatened us with death...
...A few months ago, he and his family fled from Las Palmas, a small village in southern Bolfvar, where paramilitaries and the guerrillas are fighting over valuable land...
...Some displaced people speak of las compafias (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...
...Edison Marugo, a 23-year-old youth organizer, heads a group supported by Man's Earth...
...included in the process, we are being massacred by the paramilitaries...
...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...
...The war in Colombia is a war over land after all, and even among the displaced, this war wages on...
...Nelson Mandela is a community of survivors...
...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...
...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...
...Now we are lucky if we eat breakfast and dinner...
...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...
...I want my kids to get an education, which will be their ticket out of poverty...
...She says that several gold companies, some U.S.-based, operate large mines close to Simitf...
...Seventeen-year-old student Sandra Cortines is trying to get city funding for fumigation...
...The sound of an accordion from a popular vallenato song, music from Colombia's northern coast, drifts through the hills...
...A large majority are Afro- the paramilit Colombian--hence the neigh- always w borhood's name...
...These people are living in shacks unfit for animals," he says...
...We still lack the sort of government or NGO presence that would really make a difference here," says Galindo...
...Because of Cartagena's tranquility, the city is the preferred destination of highlevel American officials from the Pentagon and the State Department when they meet with Colombian counterparts to discuss weapons exchanges and joint training exercises...
...All of a sudden, as we organize around this drilling and demand that the community be consulted and Turbo (UrabJ Province), Colombia...
...Francisco Galindo, who heads Corsonema, a community our village...
...The roof teems with people mixing cement, laying bricks and stacking concrete blocks...
...We have tried to get more information, find out which companies they are...
...They told us to go to the village square...
...But the paramilitaries 44 NMZLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 44REPORT ON COLOMBIA accused them of helping the guerrillas...
...organization in Nelson Mandela, y children says the local government has turned its back on the barrio...
...They tell you how they plan to do it...
...They would burn houses and kill people...
...But many displaced, and the organizations that represent them, say that the connection is clear...
...They unteer his services when he realized ones...
...Then they started picking out people from the crowd...
...In this province and in Choco a hidden and dirty war is taking place between guerrillas, paramilitary groups and the army...
...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...
...These babies are living in a temporary shelter in Cartagena...
...For the past year, the region of Tibti has bled dry, its population massacred and displaced, its cities and villages turned into ghost towns overnight...
...This is a name that makes the community proud, and that is associated with blackness and with struggle...
...They leave everything behind, including their unburied dead...
...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...
...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...
...Now they are confined to a tiny piece of land...
...One of them is Vianeys Navarro, a community leader who was displaced from a village about 62 miles from Cartagena...
...M6nica, a young school secretary and human rights activist from the town of Simiti in southern Bolivar, was recently displaced after she denounced disappearances and murders by paramilitaries and the military in her community...
...A few other groups sometimes drop by with food, medicine and building materials...
...Back then roughly 25,000 people lived in Nelson Mandela...
...I ask him about the day he had to flee...
...For instance, the municipal garbage dump on that hill: A lot of the toxic waste from there trickles down to the community...
...public must realize that giving helicopters or training to the Colombian military is like giving it to the paramilitaries," she says...
...says...
...Along the crooked dirt streets, dozens of barefoot children brave the heat to play with cars made out of plastic bottles...
...He also points to the pestilent streams that trickle down the hills...
...They have since been sharing a little shack-14 people in one room...
...She left the same day with her husband and baby boy...
...The company left...
...They would be offered a lot of money to join...
...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...
...The people fought for the right to settle here and won...
...They are toxic...
...Women are particularly affected by displacement, Navarro emphasized...
...In the concrete case of Tibd, we know that there is a conglomerate of five oil companies involved in the exploration for oil...
...Their future has been taken away from them...
...They said that their struggle for land reminded them of Mandela's in South Africa...
...We left everything behindour animals and tools, our house and the farmland," he said...
...She also believes that the United States should withhold military aid to Colombia's army...
...In my village, they shared the same weapons, the same radio frequencies, and they had the same enemy: the people...
...Everyone was there, our parents, the kids from school...
...He works with displaced children and youth, using music, theater and sports to help them out of their depression...
...Vizquez and his family fled before dawn...
...His face shows pain...
...Tens of thousands of people have fled the fighting and are temporarily sheltered in camps...
...They demanded payment and threatened the settlers with death...
...We treasure that rose...
...They have become counselors, and they are transferring their healing on to others...
...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...
...You hear about it on television, but you never think that you will become one of the displaced...
...They lost loved ones...
...Now we have nothing...
...She recently produced a feature film on human rights entitled The Back of the World...
...These men came in...
...As the U.S...
...But Cortines adds that the city causes much of the environmental pollution...
...Marugo adds that his organization encourages the kids to deal with "The childre atrocities a leave their h lost loved they are cor tiny piece their trauma through group sessions and art...
...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...
...But the city refuses to do anything about it...
...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 money ran out last year, but he hopes to replicate the program soon...
...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...
...But Marugo says that he has hope, and mentions some of his group's successes...
...This is the other face of Cartagena de Indias...
...43REPORT ON COLOMBIA Most have arrived in the last three years from rural communi"We were ii ties, fleeing from paramilitary massacres, guerrilla incursions between the and military terror campaigns...
...He doesn't like to talk about it," Vdzquez explains...
...Displacing the civilian population is one way of creating these conditions...
...This past year has been a nightmare," he says...
...They walk around with their faces hung and their spirit broken...
...We have been able to determine that one of the companies is Amoco," the California-based oil giant...
...We were always waiting for the day that there would be a massacre in our village...
...But the group left last year after building several community centers, schools and other infrastructure...
...families arrived every day with nothing but the clothes on their backs...
...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...
...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...
...He wanted to be a musician...
...He explains that the neighborhood was christened after its black founders had to struggle for the right to the land...
...They were all good people...
...Ram6n, a peasant organizer from Tibd who would not give his last name, has been displaced from his farm five times...
...We were as plumbing, electricity and ting for a sewage...
...They are unable to talk about it with their families because the parents are ashamed of their displacement," he says...
...She is the former Senior Producer for Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now...
...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...
...The prize: large deposits of gold...
...His 14-year-old son Jesds shows me the only possession he took with him, his prized gaita, a long, flute-like instrument popular in northern Colombia...
...And NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 46REPORT ON COLOMBIA they don't just tell you they are going to kill you...
...I never thought this would happen to me," she weeps...
...His father encourages him to talk: "Jests, tell her...
...I was in school," Jestis Approximately two million Colombians have been internally displaced by the war...
...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...
...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...
...Untreated sewage, that's what the children play in all day," he says...
...Now that Colombian society was falling apart due to the massive displacenfined to a ment of its population...
...There are so many pests here, mosquitoes and other animals that make the children sick," she says...
...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...
...He says young people suffer particularly harshly from the trauma of displacement, and from a general loss of VoL XXXIV, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2000 45REPORT ON COLOMBIA hope...
...Pedro Antonio Vizquez, a peasant in his forties, is standing outside his mother's wooden shack with his wife and two sons...
...Then we were all told that if we were not gone by the next day, they would do the same to us...
...Now, some of the youth that we worked with have dealt with their trauma," he says...
...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...
...They sometimes arrive with five, six children, all traumatized and hungry, and with not a peso on them," she said...
...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...
...Don't worry, just tell her...
...And when it rains here, some of the houses collapse under the weight of the water...
...They are dangerous and have already caused several homes to burn, says Galindo...
...Thankfully, she says, she was not there...
...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...
...Sleft...
...The U.S...
...The paramilitaries will often massacre the men in the communities and then force people to abandon their homes overnight...
...ittle has been said in Colombia or the United States about the links between multinational interests and displacement in Colombia...
...On a hot Sunday morning, I find most people home, relaxing...
...See the black plastic bags that cover all the shacks...
...The presence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is also weak...
...He heads an of land...
...Those bags used to hold petrochemicals...
...and has also worked with BBC Radio and Spain's national radio...
...We try to teach people how to better their living environment, like not leaving uncovered water containers which become breeding places for insects...
...Galindo says that when job candidates from the community give their address, they are often turned away...
...But back there, we were in the crossfire between the guerrillas and the paras...
...He is a recent arrival in Nelson Mandela...
...People would be killed or simply disappear, but no one would say anything...
...VOL XXXIV, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2000 Maria Carri6n is a freelance journalist and human rights activist...
...But recently, other oil deposits were discovered nearby that could be some of the richest in the country...
...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...
...Nancy Herrera sells fish door to door, balancing a large tin bowl of her wares on her head...
...It was a great moment for us...
...Flores, like many other human rights defenders in Colombia, believes that displacement is both a tool for warfare and an economic strategy...
Vol. 34 • September 2000 • No. 2
