Drug-fuelled violence in cities is pushing growing numbers of people to move to different parts of town or to other urban centres
BUENAVENTURA, Colombia (AlertNet) - Drug-fuelled violence in Colombia's cities is pushing growing numbers of people to move to different parts of town or to other urban centres, a trend that is largely invisible and unaccounted for in government figures, says the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
In the past, most people displaced in Colombia were driven from their homes in the countryside to seek refuge in towns and cities as they fled the rural violence that has characterised the country's armed conflict.
Decades of fighting between the government, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups have uprooted as many as four million Colombians, local rights groups estimate. The South American nation is home to the second-highest internally displaced population in the world, after Sudan.
But these days, more people are leaving their homes within and between towns, moving from one slum neighbourhood to another in an attempt to escape drug turf wars and rising urban crime.
There are few official figures available, but local rights groups estimate that in Colombia's second-largest city, Medellin, nearly 4,000 people - the majority of them women - were displaced from urban neighbourhoods in 2008.
BUENAVENTURA HOT SPOT
This new pattern in Colombia's displacement crisis is perhaps most apparent in the city of Buenaventura, home to the country's main port.
Lying on the Pacific coast, the city is a key smuggling point for cocaine shipped by sea through Central America and Mexico en route to the United States.
"Inter-urban displacement in Buenaventura - that is people moving in and between neighbourhoods in urban areas - has displaced more people from 2004 onwards than all those who were displaced (to the city) during the previous 12 years," a UNHCR spokesperson in Buenaventura told AlertNet. "This is a trend that is hard to see and...hard to register."
Some 70,000 displaced people have arrived in Buenaventura since the late 1990s, many of them subsistence farmers from Afro-Colombian communities escaping fighting between paramilitary and guerrilla groups in the rainforests of Colombia's Pacific coast, according to the government.
They have swelled the ranks of what are perhaps Colombia's poorest slums, spread on the outskirts of Buenaventura and along the city's river banks, where many live in precariously built warrens of wooden shacks on stilts.
Drug gangs and criminal groups, some linked to rebel and paramilitary groups, fight over control of these waterside areas from where they can store and ship cocaine out to sea. This often puts communities right in the middle of drug turf wars.
"The violence has broken up generations of families and whole communities. Violence in the poor neighbourhoods of Buenaventura is a leading cause of urban displacement," said the UNHCR spokesperson, who did not wish to be named for security reasons.
"Drug trafficking is the fuel for everything. It is always a factor in the violence. Drugs traffickers tend to target poor neighbourhoods built on the water edge because of their access to the sea."
CHILD RECRUITMENT
Displaced families - many living in poverty on less than $2 a day - and unemployed youth make easy prey for drug gangs looking to recruit messengers, informants and fishermen to help them ship cocaine from the shores of Buenaventura. This threat has pushed some to leave their homes, often for a second time.
"Our youth is at risk of being recruited by illegal armed groups. There are no jobs here for our young people," said Jose Mario Riasgos, a community leader in La Gloria neighbourhood on the city's outskirts, which is home to hundreds of displaced families. "It's difficult to protect the youth from the temptation of easy money drug gangs promise them."
Control of poor areas in Colombia's cities often changes hands. Rebels from Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), started to gain a foothold in Buenaventura's city slums to fill the vacuum of power left when thousands of paramilitaries demobilised under a peace deal with the government from 2004 onwards.
"In the past, there have been cases where one day people living in some neighbourhoods under paramilitary control woke up the next day to find that they were under FARC control. People were told to leave their homes and were marched out," said the UNHCR spokesperson.
NEGLECTED PROBLEM
Colombia's growing problem of urban displacement is under-reported, says UNHCR.
Some displaced families prefer to stay anonymous for security reasons, while others are unaware they are entitled to government subsidies, albeit for a limited time.
Local rights groups say government officials are often reluctant to recognise families uprooted by urban, drug-related violence as internal refugees with the same rights as those who flee violence perpetrated by illegal armed groups in the countryside. The government says people forced to move within or between towns and cities are considered on a case-by-case basis.
Aid agencies are urging the government to create jobs for those affected.
"The government needs to revive the fishing industry in Buenaventura and set up micro-credit programmes to help displaced families, in accordance with their traditional income-generating activities and cultural practices," said the UNHCR spokesperson.
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