Colombia: A New Century, an Old War, and More Internal Displacement

Abstract

At the dawn of the 21st century, Colombia clings to an uncertain hope of peace and seeks signs that might allow it to imagine a less anxious future. Many grassroots movements are attempting to introduce a new discourse of solidarity and to establish a vocabulary of reconciliation. At the same time, the power elites act, on their own rationales and interests, in the name of the collective welfare and the various peace projects that they profess to represent. Meanwhile, an incalculable number of families and individuals who have been violently expelled from the rural zones cross the nation seeking security and protection in cities and towns. Most of them quickly shed the label of "the displaced" and mingle with the poor urban masses, the majority of whom are themselves products of migrations resulting from earlier violence. The violence, which Colombia has endured for over fifty years, has had as its main stage the rural areas of the country and has made the peasantry and the colonizers of the agrarian frontier its principal, though not exclusive, victims. Today, migratory currents in multiple directions (country-to-city, intraurban, interand intraregional) witness to the shifting nature and extensive geography of the social conflicts and to the unprece dented proliferation of armed groups, a development which has already begun to compromise Colombia's relations with neighboring countries and to raise the temperature of conflict in the border zones. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the magnitude and degradation of the armed confrontation has made displacement the only option for security for many of the inhabit ants of the territories in conflict.