Los Desplazados

Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

Bogotá, Colombia — When the violence swept through the village of Libano in 2001, Gloria Arieza was in no shape to leave. She had a one-year-old child and a second in her belly. Still, she and her partner, Don Guillermo, had no choice but to flee.

Guillermo had been threatened by members of the National Liberation Army — one of the left-wing insurgent groups embroiled in Colombia's long-running armed conflict — because the ranch he worked on once rented rooms to army soldiers. "Se va o se muere," they said. Leave or die.

So Gloria, Guilermo and son José became three of the more than 375,000 Colombians who fled their homes and resettled elsewhere in the country in 2001, according to government tallies of people who register for a 90-day package of emergency aid offered to deplazados. Two million Colombians have registered since 1995; a leading human-rights group estimates that 3.8 million Colombians have been displaced by the country's internal conflict in the last two decades.

Gloria's family fled their once-idyllic surrounding for the relative safety of Cuidad Bolivar, a sprawling settlement of more than a million people on the southern outskirts of Colombia's capital. Two out of every three households in this neighborhood fall below the poverty line, and some sections are four times denser than New York City.

Today they share an apartment with two other families on a roughly paved street crowded with two-story buildings, several made from hollow bricks and engineered by unskilled homeowners. Inside the house, seven of us squeeze onto the two twin beds that fill most of the family's one room. For Gloria, a gentle 26-year-old with long black hair, explaining how she arrived here still conjures up bitter memories.

"It was an awful time," she says, wiping away a tear from her eye as her 5-year-old son, Edward, climbs onto her lap for a hug. He and his older brother are poignant reminders of that turbulent past: each is named after an uncle killed by the guerrillas. But for Gloria, there is no looking back. "Even though it's tough here, we know what it's like. But if we go back, everything is uncertain."

The simple brick houses of Ciudad Bolivar climb the hills south of downtown Bogotá. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

Instead, she is moving forward here in Ciudad Bolivar, where Mercy Corps and Minuto de Dios, one of Colombia's largest anti-poverty organisations, are providing families like Gloria's with agricultural opportunities rarely found in Colombia's largest city. More than 450 families are cultivating vegetables, herbs, chickens, mushrooms — even snail secretions that are processed and sold as a facial cream — on a hillside tract of land behind Minuto de Dios' large community centre. The facilities include six greenhouses, two henhouses and rooms for propagating mushrooms and snails. Seventy percent of the participants are from displaced families; the others are also considered vulnerable residents, living on the margins.

Gloria's job within the project is to help care for some 570 chickens that live in two large coops. Once a week, she pulls an all-day shift, feeding, watering, cleaning, and collecting eggs, which she and other project participants can purchase at a heavy discount. By the time the programme ends in June, Gloria will have attended 72 hours of classes taught by agronomists, 30 hours of business training, and 40 hours of life counselling.

She'll also receive around 400,000 pesos, or £108, to use towards an individual or cooperative business. Gloria and Don Guillermo say the prospect of startup money lured them into the programme. The couple already use their own ingenuity and hard work to scrape by; on weekends, they rise before dawn to buy flowers from a downtown wholesaler and resell them outside a busy supermarket closer to home.

Guillermo, who is talkative and energetic, also resells clothes and snacks. With Gloria's newfound skills — she says she's learned how to estimate costs and set prices — he expresses confidence in their ability to start a more-successful enterprise. "We just need resources," he says.

From their cramped living space, Gloria and Guillermo still manage to put a brave face on their predicament and remain hopeful about the future. They are but two examples of an uncommon resiliency revealed in dozens of interviews with Colombians in similar straits. For all the terror they've witnessed and all the inequities they now face, Colombia's desplazados display a remarkable determination to march forward.

"You have to be an optimist if you want to be successful," Gloria explains. "If not, you're always going to be in the same situation."

Read more ▸