‘Everyone wants to go back home’: Inside Catatumbo’s displacement crisis - Iqraa news

Cucuta, Colombia – On the eleventh of February, a baby girl was born by Caesarean section in the riverside town of Tibu, Colombia. Five days later, her family’s home lay empty.

Forced to flee Tibu under the cover of night, they had joined the more than 55,000 people who have been displaced by a fresh eruption of violence.

For more than six decades, Colombia has contended with a deadly internal conflict between government forces, left-wing rebels, criminal networks and right-wing paramilitaries.

A breakthrough, however, arrived in 2016: The Colombian government signed an agreement with the largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), for its fighters to lay down their arms.

But the violence in Catatumbo, the region where Tibu is located, is the latest indication of how elusive peace can be.

Since January 18, FARC dissidents who refused the 2016 peace deal have clashed with members of the National Liberation Army (ELN), another rebel group.

Confronted with kidnappings, shootings and explosions, tens of thousands of people in Catatumbo have since abandoned their homes. The United Nations has called it the largest mass displacement caused by a single event in Colombia since its records began.

The baby girl and her five-year-old brother are among those displaced. She cries as her stroller rattles over the paving stones that surround a medical care tent in the city of Cucuta, 120 kilometres (75 miles) south of where she was born.

Her 26-year-old mother, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons, was only days into her postpartum period when she had to pack her children and leave. In Tibu, she feared ELN fighters would come for her family.

“They were threatening us,” said the mother, her dark hair falling over the shoulders of her pink dress as she sat in one of the plastic chairs outside the medical tent. “We were so afraid that we had to leave.”

She explained the ELN had released a series of photos depicting supposed FARC collaborators — and her husband was among them. Fearing ELN fighters were watching the roads, she was forced to leave him behind in order to escape.

“I’m worried for my husband because he’s still there,” she said, a silver-coloured wedding ring flashing on the hand she used to rock the baby’s stroller. “I hope he will be able to leave so he can join us here.”

Situated on the border with Venezuela, Cucuta is now a temporary home to 27,000 of the people displaced in the current spate of violence.

In response to the conflict, the General Santander Stadium has been designated as a humanitarian aid centre, providing food, clothing and basic medical care to the displaced.

Beneath the concrete arches on the outside of the stadium, lines of people await assistance, some leaning against the metal bars that form barriers along the perimeter. The mood is tense.

“Right now they are still fighting, removing people, going house to house,” a 21-year-old man from Tibu told Al Jazeera, his youthful face peering out from a curtain of dark hair.

The braces on his teeth flashed in the midday sun. “They’ve already killed many of our friends.”

The local government and nonprofits in Cucuta are already feeling the strain of the growing crisis.

“We haven’t seen this kind of displacement before,” said Fernando Sandoval Sanchez, the director of the Colombian Civil Defense, a disaster-relief agency, for the department of Norte de Santander. “So many people taken from their homes, from their land, from their belongings.”

The mayor’s office says around 280 displaced people are currently staying in a shelter a short distance from Cucuta in Villa del Rosario, while 1,330 more are housed in local hotels — a costly short-term solution financed by the local government.

But many more are left to find housing on their own, with little support outside their own finances. Some stay with family. Others have considered returning to Catatumbo.

A few hotels have responded to the increased demand by raising their prices, making a profit from the crisis.

“The budget is already running out,” says Lusestella Maldonado, a volunteer for the mayor’s office who is part of the team coordinating the humanitarian response at the stadium.

“Obviously we don’t have many resources, and every day we see more and more displacement. The problem is growing.”

The exodus from the largely rural Catatumbo has also devastated the region’s economy.

Catatumbo’s farmers have been forced to leave their crops and livestock, creating food shortages. That has led locals to also seek support, increasing the burden on nonprofits and government services.

The mounting pressure on humanitarian aid has created uncertainty for the displaced population from Catatumbo.

“I don’t know until when we will receive help here,” said the 26-year-old mother. “We are just waiting.”

As Colombia heads deeper into its most significant period of internal conflict in recent times, the turmoil has also exposed cracks in President Gustavo Petro’s ambitious “total peace” policy.

Petro, a former guerrilla fighter himself, was elected in 2022 on the premise that he would seek an end to Colombia’s armed conflict through formal negotiations with rebel groups.

But peace talks with the ELN have been fitful, with outbursts of violence forcing the dialogues to start and stop repeatedly.

In 2024, for instance, talks were severed after the ELN was blamed for an attack that left two soldiers killed. And in January, Petro once again suspended peace negotiations with the ELN as a result of the violence in Catatumbo.

He also declared a state of emergency in the region, a move that allowed him to impose curfews and other restrictions.

Some, however, have accused the state of failing to fill the power vacuum left in rural Colombia after the FARC was dismantled in 2016.

“This conflict will only stop on the day when the apparatus of the state really arrives in the territory,” said Albeiro Bohorquez, an adviser to the mayor’s office in Cucuta.

He pointed to the slow progress in establishing rural infrastructure and social programmes as one of the reasons for the conflict in Catatumbo.

“Four years ago, the process to create the University of Catatumbo started. Construction has still not begun,” Bohórquez said. “Four years ago, they were speaking about the Catatumbo railway. It has also not been able to move forwards.”

The lack of infrastructure and opportunity has created an environment in which the coca trade, a key driver of Colombia’s internal conflict, has flourished.

Coca is the raw ingredient in cocaine, and Colombia is the world’s largest source for the drug.

“Unless the dominance of coca over the territory's financial and administrative dynamic changes, nothing will be able to compete with it," said Bohorquez.

In an effort to muster the necessary resources to deal with the ongoing crisis, Petro’s government has raised additional taxes on coal and oil.

But for many of the displaced residents in Cucuta, the state has yet to answer a simple question: When will we be able to go home?

The young man from Tibu, who lost friends to the ongoing violence, said he places the matter in God’s hands.

“Everyone wants to go back home,” he said as he waited for aid outside Cucuta’s stadium. “You have to have faith.”