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Tent city in Bogota serves as reminder of ongoing conflict

A sprawling refugee tent city just blocks from the presidential palace has become a nagging reminder to residents of Colombia’s cosmopolitan capital that a brutal conflict is being fought in far-flung provinces.

Since March, more than 2,000 people displaced by violence in rural Colombia have occupied the green hillocks and red-brick squares of Third Millennium Park, which was to be a jewel of Bogota’s urban renaissance as a military crackdown on leftist rebels brought greater safety to the nation’s main cities.

Instead, the park and its tent city are a reminder that the five-decade-long conflict still afflicts the countryside, causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes and generating the world’s worst internal refugee problem, UN statistics show.

The occupants of Third Millennium Park are demanding that Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s government heed a court order to provide them with food, education and jobs.

An agreement was announced on Friday in which authorities promised aid to those refugees who leave the park on Sunday. While the deal would remove an embarrassing eyesore, refugee groups say it doesn’t begin to address a domestic crisis that has only worsened in recent years.

“Here we are visible,” said Esteban, a 33-year-old farmer who said he was forcibly displaced from Medellin in the 1990s and then again two years ago from the eastern plains.

He wouldn’t give his last name, fearing for his safety.

“We leave here and we’re thrown in the shadows,” he said. “The displacement, the issues of war, don’t exist.”

The park has become a reconstituted puzzle of this conflict-fractured nation, where right-wing militias and leftist guerrillas, both fueled by cocaine profits, engage in a dirty war in which the chief victims are the poor.

In one section of the park is a faction of Afro-Colombians from Choco state. In an adjoining plaza, accordion-driven music from the Caribbean coast blasted from speakers and Jesus Medina, 39, sat with his two-year old son, Gelvis, flipping through cumbia CDs he brought from Valledupar.

“The songs relax you because here, you’ve got a lot of stress,” Medina said.

Afflicted by a brutal conflict in which poor farmers are routinely torn from their land, Colombia has more than 3 million internally displaced by UN counts — the world’s highest number last year, ahead of Iraq and Sudan.

Since Uribe was first elected in 2002, Colombia’s cities have become safer and life has improved for many, but the refugee population of Bogota has swelled.

“All roads lead to Bogota,” said Diana Rivera a researcher for the human rights group CODHES, which along with the Roman Catholic Church keeps the most trusted count of Colombia’s internally displaced.

Last year alone, more than 56,000 new refugees arrived in the city of 8 million, CODHES said. That was the largest number since the organization began tracking the population a decade ago.

Nationwide, it reported a 24.5 percent increase from 2007 to nearly 390,000 in new cases of internally displaced.
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