‘Land Was a War Booty’: Colombia Confronts a Legacy of Mass Displacement

‘Land Was a War Booty’: Colombia Confronts a Legacy of Mass Displacement
A woman attends a march to promote a law backed by then-President Juan Manuel Santos concerning the restitution of land to victims of the country’s armed conflict, Necocli, Colombia, Feb. 11, 2012 (AP photo by Luis Benevides).

APARTADO, Colombia—The sun was sitting low in the sky when Luis Izquierdo noticed the group of armed men walking onto his family’s farm in this town in Uraba, a region of northwestern Colombia that abuts the Caribbean Sea. In the fading daylight, he couldn’t see them clearly at first; he and his parents and siblings thought they might be soldiers looking for something to eat or drink.

Their guts started to clench, however, when the men came closer with their rifles shouldered. They realized it was more likely that the men belonged to a paramilitary group that had recently started to terrorize the area.

Though the encounter happened more than 25 years ago, in February 1993, Luis, who was 18 years old at the time, has a clear memory of what happened next. The men forced the family to lie face down on the floor inside their house. Three times they asked for his father to identify himself. Three times his father gave his name. “That’s him,” one of the gunmen said. “No, it’s not,” another one replied.

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