Displaced persons in Colombia struggle for aid

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Monday, 06.14.10
Displaced persons in Colombia struggle for aid

Human rights groups that work with displaced persons in Colombia are accusing the government of excluding people from the system.

BY SIBYLLA BRODZINSKY
Special to The Miami Herald

SOACHA, Colombia -- The first time Marleine Linares had to flee her family home, it was right wing paramilitaries who drove her parents from their farm to this sprawling slum just outside the Colombian capital. The second time she fled, after she married and had returned to the countryside, it was to prevent leftist guerrillas from forcibly recruiting her 14-year-old daughter. Again she came to Soacha.

Linares is one of millions of Colombians who leave everything behind to escape violence that, despite major gains in security, plagues the country. But, officially, Linares, 34, doesn't exist in the ranks of displaced persons.

DENIED

Despite documenting her most recent displacement before the human rights ombudsman when she and her family arrived in Soacha last February, she was rejected by the government social aid agency Acción Social.

``They told me that because I had once signed up for government assistance in Soacha years ago, that I was lying about having been displaced from Tolima province,'' she said. ``And just like that, they dismissed me. For them I am no one.''

The government officially recognizes that 3.3 million Colombians have been displaced by violence since 1997. Codhes, the top Colombia human rights organization that deals with displacement, puts the number at 4.9 million since the mid-1980s, including 2 million in the past eight years.

Human rights groups and humanitarian organizations that work with displaced persons in Colombia say cases like Linares' are part of an effort by the government to exclude people from the system, to try to make the problem go away. The government denies the allegation.

Since 1997, the average inclusion rate has been 80 percent. But in 2009, a full 43 percent of those who declared they had been displaced were rejected and therefore not included in the official registry.

``Between the number of people declaring to be displaced and those actually registered, there is an abyss,'' said Jorge Rojas, director of Codhes, an NGO that monitors Colombia's displacement problems. ``With those rejections the government has been trying to hide the drama of displacement.''

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