This site lets internally displaced people tell their life stories – in their own words. The narratives in these pages are valuable complements to the official information on conflicts which governments and international organisations offer.

These stories deal with the real lives of real people. The narrators share their personal experiences, their sensations, hopes and dreams, and the impact for them of being forced from their homes.

The first IDP Voices oral testimonies project took place in Colombia. IDP Voices from further countries will be added as the projects progress.

http://www.idpvoices.org/80257297004E5CC5/(httpLifeStories)/09E8AD5F97A50CD8C12572F1003D7E9A?OpenDocument 

COLOMBIA

Ana Dilia

I was raised in the Countryside - I was born in a small town called Las Mercedes (in Norte de Santander). I lived in the countryside until I was 17. Since my dad never had his own property, we moved from farm to farm. Then we went to live in a small hamlet. There I made all the sacrifices imaginable. I studied at night, worked by day, helped to keep up the house and paid the expenses of my siblings. We are 14 kids in the family. Then, because of an illness, my mom had to move to Cúcuta, and my dad and half my family went too. I was the oldest.

Out of the blue, a boy who was a close friend of mine asked me if I wanted to work as a teacher. I thought that he was kidding. I said yes. But I also told him that I had worked all my life in agricultural jobs, and, when the opportunity presented itself, in households. But I made my decision. We went to talk to a town council member – the very person I had helped with housework – and she assisted me in contacting the mayor. Then I began to work.

With that job, I was able to pay debts, the rent and food for my family. I think I was lucky because, as if by magic, I got a contract. Never in my life would I have imagined that. I had dreamed of studying and being somebody important in life, but not as a teacher.

I learned to work with the community

At that time, I was teaching seventh grade at the school. I would sit and read school books day after day. I would walk an hour from the hamlet to the school and go to bed at 1am or 2am reading, studying, and correcting homework. I continued like that for one hectic year. I learned to work with the community and the kids. I got along well with people – they didn’t want to let me leave. But I fell in love. So I left the school to go to another hamlet and start again as a farm labourer.

Far away - eight hours walking distance from the hamlet - there was a little school that didn’t have a teacher. They sought me out and I went to work there. Again, I ended up walking an hour from the house to the school. I worked for three years there in the midst of the conflict. Because the hamlet was isolated, there was a large guerrilla presence. There I lived in terror of the guerrillas, because I not seen those groups much before.

Because of a law that was passed, those who hadn’t graduated from high school couldn’t work as teachers. So the municipality fired us. We went back to working in the same farm where we started doing farm work, picking coffee. Then one day, my father called me. At that time, he was living in La Gabarra (1). He told me I should go work there, that they needed a teacher there. I had never liked that town, because there was lots of prostitution there. But out of necessity we decided to go anyway, because where we lived was isolated. It was hard to make a living there.

I began to work in La Gabarra and I heard that there were many armed groups around – groups here, groups there. After a month, I regretted my decision. When the day arrived for signing the contract, I said that I wouldn’t take the job. Eight days later, I went to help my mother register my siblings for school and heard that they needed a teacher there. When I went to hand in the necessary documents for my siblings, I asked at the school if they needed a teacher. They said “yes.” I said: “I have experience as a teacher, I’d like to teach.” They said “No, here we don’t take on strangers, only people from the region.” My spirits sagged. I continued to live with my relatives, selling ayaca (2), tamales wrapped in plantain leaves, to support myself. My daughters got sick as soon as we arrived because of the change in climate. My husband went to work in the countryside. But he wasn’t used to the culture of the area or the kind of work: raspar hoja (3) , fertilizing, and fumigating, and he too got sick. Maybe he got sick because of the waters contaminated with the residues from coca processing, because all the chemicals that they use to process the coca leaves end up in the streams. The environment is very contaminated.

I told my husband that we should go back and live where we were before because there weren’t any work opportunities in La Gabarra. Then a lady from the neighbourhood approached me and told me that on the day of school registration, she had heard that I wanted to work as a teacher. She asked if I still felt like teaching. I told her yes, because I had five years of experience and enjoyed it. I still hadn’t finished high school. But I went to speak with the director of the school and I had an interview so I could start to work. I was lucky because I stayed in the hamlet. I ended up working there for four years.

A problem of nerves

Those four years were very tough. The kids got sick, my husband was sick. And I had to work to pay the rent, the food, the medicines, everything. But little by little, I made progress. Every day I saw the dead. That’s what most affected me: every day, every day, a dead body arrived in town. Every day, the stabbed, the clubbed to death, the shot, the recently dead, the rotten dead; every day the dead arrived. I wanted to see the dead because I said to myself: “What if one of them is from the area around my home; I should tell my people.”

God gives courage to you in a certain moment. At midday, when the students left for home, I would arrive at my house and hold my jaws. It was as if they were about to fall off with the stress and headache. I would lay down at once to sleep. I would sleep a little and then wake up to eat. But I couldn’t eat much. I couldn’t eat much for all the pain I was feeling. When I had eaten, I would do the household chores. Then at night I would prepare my classes for the next day. I would make the effort because everything is very expensive there and if you don’t work it’s difficult to support yourself.

The effect of seeing so much violence built up in me. I came to suffer from a problem of nerves, which became worse with the excess of stress. With everything there so expensive and so difficult, I worked as a teacher. I made and sold tamales wrapped in plantain leaves, I set up a little food and drink stand on the sidewalk, and worked for some neighbourhood leaders as a secretary.

Meanwhile, it all built up in me until I nearly went crazy. I couldn’t renew my contract (as a teacher) during those months, and I neglected my daughters. My life consisted of sitting in a chair and then falling asleep. I didn’t eat, drink, bath, dress or do anything else. I spent my savings on medicines, but I still didn’t recover; I didn’t do anything. In the end after spending a lot of money, I found a drug that worked. I began to recover little by little.

Every day I travelled: I felt lost, I didn’t know if I was in my right mind and I decided to come live in the city. I arrived in the city. But in July, when classes started again, they didn’t want to re-employ me, and I had to return to where we were living before. The day that we arrived, they seized the husband of a companion and slit his throat.

And the self-defence forces began to arrive

I began to work when the self-defence forces began their incursion. It was 29 May (1999) at a site called Socuavo (4). I began to get sick again from so much anxiety. People would tell me that the self-defence forces would come to town or that they wouldn’t come to town; that they would come at night or that they would come in the day. We didn’t eat, we didn’t drink, we didn’t sleep. People went down to the river to flee. I didn’t want to leave because I didn’t want to leave behind my things or my husband. He had to stay behind because at that moment they weren’t letting men embark, but only the women and children. Those they sent to Venezuela.

My problem was psychological, and it had got severe. I was about to end up with my mind erased, according to the doctor. I spoke with my husband about whether we should leave too and he told me: “You have psychological problems. Yes, it’s better that you go; I don’t want you to go crazy. I don’t want to have to take you to a mental asylum because of a public order problem.” The doctor told him, “She will end up in a mental asylum or dead. She is suffering from a severe stress problem that could affect her heart.” My husband wanted to send me out with the kids to work for our daily food. But I refused. I said to him: “Alone, what am I going to do? I’m sick. If I go thinking that you’re going to stay behind that might affect me more.” But he said: “What I know how to do is work in the countryside. I don’t want to go to the city because there life is harder.” But I wasn’t able to convince him. By the time I had made my decision to return, they had surrounded the town and there was no way out.

Though I had decided to return, when I checked to see if there was transport, I found out there was only a truck. There were no more cars. There was no fuel for the canoes and there wasn’t any way to bring fuel into the area. So what did I do? I took a small bag and packed it with my two daughters’ clothes, clothes that I had on hand at the moment. Then I went and stood in the middle of the highway at a flat spot: “The truck will have to stop to pick me up because I can’t stay here,” I said to myself. I asked a neighbour who also was leaving to stand with me in the middle of the highway so that the truck would stop and pick us up. It was the only way we could get the driver to stop. That’s how we were able to get out of there: there was no other transport.

I found myself in the truck alongside my students. They said to me “Ay, where are you going teacher,?” “No, darling, I’m going to Tibú for another doctor’s appointment, but I’ll be back.” I said that because I felt really bad leaving them behind. They would go out onto the highway, see people passing by, and feel sad that they had to stay behind. I was asked the same thing at all the roadblocks, and as I had my medical prescriptions, I would say: “I’m sick and I’m going to a doctor’s appointment in Tibú.” That was the strategy for getting out of there. My husband stayed behind; he stayed behind working. I got my daughters out. But everything else was left behind, everything, everything. My husband didn’t want to leave. He said that we hadn’t done anything wrong, that nothing was going to happen to us. He said there was nothing for us in the city, that all our lives we had been farmers. The only thing that he likes is the countryside. So he stayed. I said to him “Come, give away our house, give away our refrigerator, but come.” I said that because at that time he was a community leader and they were taking and killing community leaders.

More than 100 dead in La Gabarra

When the paramilitaries entered our hamlet it was their sixth incursion into La Gabarra; the first had been at Socuavo. Nine people were killed. As the paramilitaries advanced further, they kept killing, killing, killing, killing. When they arrived in Vetas, next to a site called 46, they attacked a building and killed and wounded some of the occupants. That same afternoon, they returned to the site and killed some civilians there. This was a place where people came to catch rides. There were people from the countryside who normally came on Friday afternoons to get rides into town. The paramilitaries came and killed everybody. Then they burned the building down.

My husband was working on a road up above and he heard the shooting. He was too afraid to come down and try to get a ride; so instead he went down the next day and had to walk over nine bodies in order to get a ride. He went down to the hamlet of La Gabarra on Saturday afternoon. That night there was another incursion into La Gabarra, and it was really the worst. The media that night talked about a few dead. But, in reality, there were more than 100. There were bodies on the road wherever the paramilitaries had moved.

He stayed for a few days there until he realized that he couldn’t convince me to return. Then he left. When he decided to leave, the men from the self-defence forces were not letting anybody take anything from their homes. Whoever tried to move their household belongings by car was made to return and then prevented from leaving the town. So he had to leave with a small bag and two sets of clothing. And he had to say: “I’m going to run an errand in Tibú, that’s all.” He couldn’t bring anything and that’s how we lost everything, everything.

I come from La Gabarra

When I arrived in Cúcuta, the first thing I did was look for my sister-in-law who was working there and knew the city. Everything else had to wait because I felt sick. I didn’t know what to do, whether to look for work or not, because my daughters were very little, and I couldn’t leave them alone. I didn’t feel well enough to subject myself to just any kind of job. I stayed put, and my sister-in-law helped me out for a month. She brought me food. Every Sunday she would come and visit, bringing friends so we could talk and get everything off our chests. Because I had arrived there, taken a room and shut myself away. I shut my daughters away too. They didn’t have a radio or a television or anything there; I would make them dinner and that’s it. I would go out to wash clothes and come back and shut myself away with the girls. I didn’t go out because, as I was sick, the doctor told me that I had to rest. I stayed there until I was well enough to go out and look for work.

My sister-in-law told me to go out, to not shut myself away, not to be silly, that these things happened in life. She said that the most important thing was that I had escaped with my life, that I hadn’t lost anything. I had lost only material things, not my life and I had to get well again. On the weekends, she brought friends. She would say: “Let’s make a stew, have a get-together.” It ended up being a big help to me because it cleared my mind. She was very good to my daughters. Sometime she would say: “Let’s go, get out, go to a park.” and they would force me out of the house. She brought us food, clothes for the girls, shoes... doing all those things that you don’t forget.

When I was separated from my husband, we didn’t communicate because the paramilitaries had cut the telephone lines when they arrived in La Gabarra. The only thing I could do was listen to the news. He sent word with an evangelical pastor that he would leave. But he said that he had to wait to be paid. He had been working as an assistant in the construction of a house. Until he finished laying some bricks, he wouldn’t get paid.

He had worked for a month and saved up because he knew we had to pay rent. Then he turned up at the room that we had rented. He hadn’t been there 24 hours when two guys appeared, shoved him under the bed, put weapons to his head and to those of my girls and carried off everything he had brought in savings, everything. I wasn’t there at that precise moment because I was buying lunch. But when I arrived they had him on the floor. They asked me for the bag that he had brought, because the idea was that, since he worked in the countryside, he had come with “merchandise” (5). But no, when working in the countryside became too dangerous, he began to work in construction and for that reason he had a bag full of tools. He said to them: “No, look this is what I do.” They realized that he didn’t have anything. So they stole the money that he had earned in a month of work. Then they took off and left us without anything, broke.

After we were robbed in the city, he decided to go back to our plot of land to work; I stayed alone working, washing clothes. But it was difficult: people didn’t give you work. They said: “Where did you come from, where are you from?” You would innocently say: “I come from La Gabarra” and with that “No, no, I can’t give you work.”

I don’t know what reasons they had, maybe it was fear, distrust. But I spent three months begging for laundry work so I could support my daughters. My husband had left and hadn’t returned. Nor did he sent money or letters, because he was afraid that I would go back to our plot of land. I was worried because the self-defence forces began to go there. I was determined to work, washing and ironing, and so support my daughters, if he didn’t want to come to us.

And so we went from place to place

I tracked down my grandmother in El Zulia and took the decision to go and live there for free, because paying rent for a room was too expensive. But in that way I took on an additional responsibility. I had to support my grandmother, and pay the bills. She was letting me stay there because she lived alone. It worked out for me because I kept her company and she kept me company. I went out to work and she took care of my daughters. I kept on that way, working and ironing, whatever came up. If they said to me “Come, sweep up” then I swept up; if they said “Come, wash” then I washed; if they said “Come, I need you to do this job” I would do it. I would do anything to support myself. Then he decided to leave Las Mercedes, because things had got difficult, with rumours that the paramilitaries were going to appear there. We talked on the phone and when he was doing well in his job, he would send some money for food; when not, I would scramble to get by.

We lived for two years like that, practically separated. Then we got together again and set ourselves up on a small plot of land that we were given. We worked for nine months there and then everything was lost. They didn’t pay us and we had to leave again for another place. We worked for three years at that new place until problems began with the boss. He was jailed and had to pay some money to get out. Since he didn’t have any money, he told us he would pay us, but that first we had to move off the farm so he could sell it. If he sold it, he would pay us something. We moved off the farm, and he never paid us.

And so we moved from place to place. At present we are living in house a man left us to live in. We pay the services, but it’s in a hamlet so it takes a half an hour to get to town. He plants spicy peppers, and we survive from that harvest. He’s left with 40,000 pesos, 25,000 (6) pesos weekly and with that we get by. With that, five people can eat. There are months when he earns 150,000 pesos, but there are months where he makes 100,000, 80,000 and we have to get by with that. It’s not enough. You have to achieve miracles. What are you going to do? You can’t be excessive either. If you end up owing money, you’re worse off.

I’m not used to living by begging

It’s difficult. You’re brought up so that, with a little or a lot, you have money you can count on each month. To arrive in a city and live off people’s good will, to ask for clothes in which to dress and dress your daughters... no, no, I don’t like it. I’m not used to living by begging. I would like to have my old job back again, an independent job, a source of income that could satisfy our needs. It makes me very sad to see our daughters asking for things and not be able to give them what they need. It’s very difficult. I haven’t been able to get over it. Because if you have a source of income that’s at least dignified, if you’re earning at least 200,000, 300,000 pesos each month, there’s a lot you can solve. But it’s not even that amount ...! So when sickness strikes, everything gets complicated. You can’t put off dealing with sickness.

School is the hardest thing. My daughters have always studied by begging, by asking for money, and they are tired of not having the things they need, of being the last ones to hand in their homework because there’s no money to pay for copies. They’re frustrated. The older girl tells me that she doesn’t want to study anymore. At 13 years old, she’s in the eighth grade and wants to quit school. She says she’s tired: to get to school, she has to walk a half an hour each morning to school and another half hour in the afternoon to get home. At school, they don’t even give her a coupon for lunch. I tell her that she has to study, and I plead with her, but I can’t satisfy her needs. On top of that, she’s a teenager. She’s started to see that her companions have nice things, a bracelet, nice notebooks... and I can’t give her that pleasure. I think that’s why she feels frustrated and wants to quit school.

That’s not a problem with the other two girls because they’re still young and they settle for what you can give them. But with a teenager it’s different. “Look, my classmates have nice shoes, I want those shoes,” whereas with the smallest ones, no. Since they’re still little, they don’t focus on those things. It has me a bit worried because I don’t know what to do. The teenager has to help with household chores so I can run errands. I think maybe that’s why she’s getting tired. I don’t know what to do.

My head spins. One solution would be to send her to a boarding school where she could spend all her time studying. But I don’t have money to pay for a boarding school. I’ve thought of pleading with her and motivating her to study, of insisting that she stay in school even if she has to repeat a year, but of insisting that she finish high school. If she quits she’ll get demoralized. She’ll lose her rhythm even more. I dream that they can study and not just take any old job, like sometimes you have to do.

In the countryside, things are easier if you have your own property. You can economize. But when that property is someone else’s, you can economize for a while, but then a moment arrives when all your effort is lost, and someone else ends up enjoying the fruits of your labour. My greatest wish is to get or have given to us another plot of land. I tell my husband that we should buy a house near an urban area where we can work a hectare or two of land, because his happiness is working the land. He does whatever work he can find because in the city a person like him, who has only completed third grade, can’t get a job. He tells me that as long as he has land to plant vegetables, grow a crop with modern methods – because he understands that well, that’s his profession – that he will accompany me to a city.

I don’t want to accompany him to the countryside because I worry about my daughters’ education. If I go to the countryside where will they study? It will be harder to find them a place to study, especially in secondary school. And the girls say the same thing. One of them says to me: “Mom, I want us to buy a house, but one with a good garden. I want to have chickens. I don’t want to kill them or sell them.” They don’t like normal houses, because they were brought up to be in the countryside, in the fresh air. But they want to study.

As a teacher, you always have a ten-month contract. So it’s impossible to move. Three years after I left, they offered me a contract in a municipality. But I didn’t want to take it because it was eight hours away, and especially because of the security concerns. On top of that, my daughters were studying. I couldn’t go and leave them behind or take them with me without knowing where I would end up. At the time, I was supporting them because my husband was working far away. So I didn’t want to take the job. You leave displaced from one place and go to another and from there you aren’t displaced by the same group but by another group. I told myself: “I prefer to live calmly. If I have to beg, I’ll beg, but I won’t take that job.” It was because of the safety issue... I just didn’t want to take it.

Now, he’s more aware of things; he’s become more responsible... Everything else has been normal. We haven’t had problems. Our home hasn’t been a aggressive one of fights or anything like that. We talk a lot. Sometimes, he tells me not to leave the house, because I leave it alone for long stretches of time and the children need me around. I tell him: “Yes, its true, I understand. But if I don’t leave home, if I don’t talk to people and look around, what solutions are we going to find? Where will we end up going? We have to get out and talk to people. We don’t have anything of our own; we go from place to place. If today we are told ”leave” then we will have to leave. If I’m here with you doing nothing, what will we do? We can’t do anything.” On that point, he doesn’t contradict me much. He says: “Well, that’s fine, find a way to resolve our problems, see how you can improve our situation.” Still, he tells me sometimes not to leave home. He says he doesn’t want me running around, spending money. He says that not only do I end up spending the little that I get, but that I waste time and I end up all worn out. But I tell him that I have to do my best to try and improve our situation. Because nothing is going to rain down on us from the sky.

I have a housing subsidy that helps. Our future is buying a house. But we won’t buy one in a small municipality. My thinking is this: we lived in a small town once and were displaced and had to leave everything behind. The same thing could happen in any small municipality. That’s my first thought. The second is that, as a leader, you can be displaced at any time. If they give you a deadline, you have to leave your things behind, discarded. And finally, I still dream that my daughters can get an education. I know that in a city, if they can’t find a place to study, they can train in some art or other thing. But in a small town, it’s hard to imagine a future like that.

So I’ve decided to buy a house nearby or look for something a bit farther from the city, a place with a small piece of land and access to the city so my daughters can go to school. They are my future. My husband says that he wants to find a place where he can work. He doesn’t want to leave again after all the trauma we’ve suffered and because of his illness. But he doesn’t do the talking. It’s me that has to go out and look for things and talk to people. When I leave home, he just keeps our daughters company in the house.

I decided to take on the role of leader

I’ve gone from house to house, from place to place, working, losing work. His illness keeps getting worse every day. He feels really sick, and our financial situation has made it impossible to find stability in any one place. As a displaced person, people look at you as if you were a problem and you are discriminated against by society, it’s difficult to survive. It’s hard to recover that tranquillity you once had. It was while thinking these things that I decided to become a leader. All my life I’ve enjoyed working as a leader of something, whether of children or women. I decided to work as a leader of displaced people, of people who are poorer in spirit. I wanted to fight for things. Because it’s unfair that you are never able to recover what you’ve lost, and there is the lingering psychological trauma. I’ve suffered need, trauma. I don’t want anyone else to have to suffer as I suffered. I don’t want any other child to have to go through the same things my daughters had to go through.

I think the best way to get things off your chest is through a connection with other people. At the time, I didn’t have a job that connected me directly with people, like before. So I decided to become a leader. It’s a lot of work. But you are involved with people and you dispel the worries that you have. I ended up getting used to working with the communities. It was something I needed. It wasn’t a job; I didn’t have an income or anything. But I said to myself: “At least, I have something to do.” Though I don’t earn anything doing this, I’m content. I’m working for something and someone.

You see lots of people exploited. You see displaced people with many needs, and you see the distance of the municipal governments and their employees. Sometimes programmes are implemented, but they are given other uses than those that were intended. You notice, and you feel bad that you could help and aren’t doing anything about it. If a simple donation for the most needy arrives, for example, you can ensure that that donation is given to the people who really need it and not to the few who have what they need, the most privileged.

Honourably, you are displaced people

The label of displaced person is still very oppressive for us, because as soon as you say displaced person, people begin to give you ugly looks. They try to find out “Why did he come, where did he come from, what was he doing?” But it’s something real that you can’t deny. Before the eyes of God, you can’t deny what you’ve suffered. And even less before the eyes of the state, because if we all agreed to say that we weren’t displaced, or to hide it, it would suit the state. We have no reason to hide our reality when the state is responsible for what we’ve suffered.

I was among those who proposed to my association that we should not use the word “displaced” in the association’s name. But then a man said: “No, you are displaced and they can’t take that title away from your organization. By the very fact of saying that you are displaced - and you are displaced and have suffered that trauma, you don’t deny it - the state has to give you assistance. The municipality has to give you assistance. So why would you want to lose that option? Leave it there in the name of the association. It might seem ridiculous to some. But honourably, you are displaced people. You were displaced by actors against your will. Don’t let them use another title that wouldn’t be as honest. Better that they call you displaced than that they call you criminals.” So I said: “If that’s true, let’s leave it that way. There are still many people for whom its very difficult to accept. But when you are made aware, it doesn’t affect you that much.” Still, there are many people who get scared when you say, “You are a displaced person.” It’s because of the insecurity that exists in our country.

You don't negotiate peace, you have to build it

I say demobilization is a big lie. It’s a big lie because people have given declarations who were with the guerrillas and with the self-defence forces and are now with the armed forces. So for me it’s a lie, it’s like camouflage. It’s a lie that they’re demobilized. They’ve been legalized, not demobilized. Many people in our communities say the same thing. And those people have been unable to get rid of their feelings of fear and anxiety. So it seems it’s government camouflage; that it’s not real, that they have camouflaged themselves to be able to do certain things: perhaps to find out where people are and what they are doing.

When talk began of a peace agreement, of a demobilization, we began to speak with various people, both displaced people and non-displaced people, who had been victims of these now demobilized fighters. Many of their beloved ones had died because of these people. We asked ourselves: “What are they going to do with all these people that got used to living off the labour of others, that got used to living, as an old man told me, ‘very cushy,’ well dressed, well fed, taking money from other people?” We’ve always concluded that the demobilized will have to form another group. Or maybe the government will have to finance them for some time. For people who never liked to work, it was convenient to get involved in this. After being involved, they’re not going to want to go back to sweating in their t-shirts under the sun like the peasant farmers who had to leave their lands behind.

We believe that the demobilized fighters have benefited the most from this and not the victims. There are many programmes for the displaced. But the programmes created for the demobilized are much more efficient than those created for us, the displaced. The demobilized get their training paid for – not only the demobilized, but also those who deserted from the guerrillas. For having handed in a weapon and confessed some truths and lies, they get protection. They get help in leaving the country, and, if necessary, their families are offered protection as well. A peasant farmer, who has worked honourably all his life, doesn’t get that kind of help. So it’s one of the injustices of life. Sometimes we get talking. We say: “To get a benefit from the state these days you have to kill. It seems that for honest labourers, for peasant farmers, there is no future. There’s no promising future. That’s only for people who commit crimes, who violate human rights. They look at those kind of people and immediately they help them out. But for us ... no!”

I think that war generates more war. I think that a family that has lost a beloved one will never be a whole family. So I think that if you don’t build peace in your home, there won’t be peace. Peace isn’t negotiated. Peace is built up from the base, from the family, from childhood. The child is the first to see this kind of violence. He is the first to see how all types of human rights are violated and to see the kind of films that the media transmits on television. I think that peace has to be built from below and not negotiated. Sometimes I get thinking about our family. I talk to my husband. I say: “What peace, what agreements can you achieve negotiating with a group of old men who’ve been raised in stubbornness and who aren’t going to change their way of thinking.?”

You have to change your way of thinking. The future is for the children, nor for the old people. The old ones have already got used to living a certain way and that’s how they’ll die. The old ones have been through these peace negotiations all their lives. The negotiations are strategies for providing reports to other countries, perhaps to get money, but they won’t create a better future for the country.

The good times I lived with the students. I’ve always liked working with kids. I have fond memories of going to workshops when I finished high school. And when I managed to leave La Gabarra, I felt a great relief. I had been thinking only about getting my daughters out of there. After that, there was more tranquillity. There are traumas that have been difficult to erase. Nonetheless, I’ve overcome many of those things. I’m frightened by the rumours going around that the self-defence forces are going to take up arms again. I worry that on the least expected day they could come for us. But not the rest. You assimilate it and forget it. It’s not as bad as the moment when you had to leave your home and couldn’t find anything to do.

(1) In Santander del Norte, near the border with Venezuela
(2) Tamales or food wrapped in plantain leaves
(3) Collecting coca leaves
(4) They stayed in the zone for a month., leaving more than 130 people dead and causing the massive displacement of peasant farmer families
(5) Coca base
(6) A dollar is worth $2,200 and a euro, $3,000