Here they occupied the local school and numerous houses. They live in close quarters, two or three families in a classroom. They left crops they planted, so they can’t work. Now and then a few men go back to their village to bring back some bananas or a pig, but they are fearful. They have to get permission from the army, and the captain tells them he can’t guarantee their safety in Bojayá. But they ask me, “Where have the government and army been? They’re one of the armed groups; they are responsible for security, but they’ve never guaranteed our safety.”

A young girl cooks at one of the improvised kitchens in the street outside the school in Bellavista

I have spent time interviewing and photographing men and women, children and old people. They all tell the same story: the people from La Loma, the only real town on the Bojayá, sensing impending conflict which would catch them in the middle, decided to leave. They abandoned the town completely. When they passed Caimanero on their way downstream, they called to the people to join them. The seventeen families of Caimanero held a meeting, and decided to do just that. Within a few days, these villages, and others, were left vacant.

How did this develop? Large numbers of heavily-armed Colombian military and paras appeared in Bellavista and other places along the Atrato in Bojayá. It appeared a confrontation was coming soon. Rumors spread and as a result the people decided to abandon their homes and lands. But the troops and paras are still along the shores of the river; they haven’t actually started an operation. Still, it would seem that they got want they wanted—to get the people to leave their lands.

In this small house, each room was occupied by a family of four or five people, all related to each other.

The people in this area connect their problems to the push for “free trade,” because of the importance of the looming mega-projects—particularly large-scale plantations of African Palm and the construction of a “dry canal,” a highway system between the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of El Chocó—as a motivator of the violence and human rights abuses. They say aid from the US all seems to be for arms, abuse and death. They ask me to tell the US government to stop sending arms and violence into their zones. What they want is simple: to be able to live in their own areas in security, and perhaps to receive aid in the form of local, small-scale economic projects.

“All we want is to be able to go back to
our homes in secure conditions.”

—Steve Cagan
Quibdó, El Chocó, Colombia
March, 2005