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Assignment: Colombia’s Forgotten Exodus

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Colombia’s Forgotten Exodus

18/08/2016 GMT

BBC World Service - Assignment, Colombia’s Forgotten Exodus

The people displaced by war in Colombia who fear they will never be able to return home.

Lucy Ash meets the people displaced by war in Colombia who fear they will never be able to return home even though the government is on the brink of a historic peace deal.

In the Colombian capital of Bogota, Lucy Ash meets two people who fear they will never be able to return to their homes. They both come from Choco, which is one of the poorest provinces and most violent parts of the country. Maria, an Afro-Colombian mother of four, fled her town after she was abducted and brutally attacked by paramilitaries. Plinio was trying to help members of his indigenous community go back to their farms when he received death threats from a splinter group of left wing guerrilla (the ELN) and his friend was assassinated.

Their stories illustrate a nationwide trauma – the government may be on the brink of a historic peace deal with the FARC rebels, but Colombia has even more internally displaced people than Syria. More than 200,000 have been killed and seven million driven off their land during half a century of war. Lucy travels down the River Baudo to meet people uprooted from their jungle villages in violent clashes earlier this year and finds that Latin America’s longest insurgency is far from over.

(A primary school pupil from the village of Las Delicias on the River Baudo holds a hygiene kit supplied by the Norwegian Refugee Council and has a new satchel of school equipment on her back. Very little humanitarian aid reaches this part of Western Colombia where fighting recently broke out between the National Liberation Army or ELN guerrillas and a paramilitary group.)

Reported and produced by Lucy Ash.

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