Thirteen years ago, the town of Granada in Colombia’s northwestern Antioquia province and its surrounding rural areas were at the epicentre of Colombia’s war. Here, right-wing paramilitary groups and rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) fought for territorial control and inflicted a reign of terror on civilians living in this farming region of rolling green hills.
By 2002, warring factions had forced 70 percent of Granada’s population of 20,000 inhabitants to flee their homes. Surrounding rural areas became ghost villages. Today, abandoned homes choked with weeds line the windy road leading to Granada, testimony to the thousands of families who fled.
Colombia’s armed conflict, concentrated in the country’s southern provinces and border areas, continues. But in Granada the fighting is largely over after a 2004 government military offensive pushed rebels into more remote hideouts.
As the security situation improves, displaced families are slowly trickling back to Granada to rebuild their lives. Over the past six months, 700 displaced people, who found refuge in nearby cities, have returned to Granada. They are given local government subsidies for farming and to help rebuild their homes.
It will take at least three years for coffee, fruit and vegetable farms to be fully up and running again. Today, there are around 10,000 people living in Granada, half of the town’s population at its height in 1998.
Granada’s residents have vowed not to forget the town’s tragic past. Next to a church in the town square is a small museum, known as the “Room of Never Again.” It serves as a memorial to Granada’s victims and is the first of its kind in Colombia.
On one entire wall there are 182 photos of Granada’s dead and missing, posted by families of the victims. Photos of boys, some as young as 12, a nun and the town’s mayor sit alongside pictures of community leaders and farmers. From 1998 to 2008, 400 people in Granada were killed by both warring factions and 128 locals went missing. Around 200 children lost either one or both parents in this town alone.
Granada was attacked 10 times by the two main sides of Colombia’s conflict – the FARC rebels and the paramilitaries. In one of the worst attacks in late 2000, over 300 FARC fighters invaded Granada during an 18-hour siege and placed a car bomb outside the town’s police station, killing 17 civilians and 6 policemen.
“We want to raise awareness about Granada’s victims. We only recently started talking about our pain and it’s brought us closer together as a community because you realise you’re not the only one suffering. It’s important to remember what happened here so history doesn’t repeat itself. School children from other parts of Colombia visit the memorial and they have no idea about what Granada suffered,” says Gloria Ramirez, who heads Granada’s victims’ association and who helped set up the memorial in 2007.
Granada’s residents have made a concerted effort to honour and remember the town’s victims, which locals say is crucial for lasting peace.
In a small square, scores of painted stones bear the names of those who went missing between 1998 and 2008. In total, 128 people disappeared at the hands of both warring factions. Locals say their bodies were most likely thrown into the nearby river or into mass graves. In 2008, state forensic experts dug up the bodies of eight people who had gone missing in the rural areas surrounding Granada. Over the next few years, it’s likely dozens more bodies will be exhumed.
Granada’s stone memorial and its museum are just some of the ways in which Granada’s residents are helping each other to deal with their grief. They have set up a weekly ‘hug group’ were families of victims can come together and talk, along with a ritual known as the ‘sale of bad memories’.
“Once we had a sale of bad memories in a market stall. You could come and write down your memory and someone would buy it symbolically with a sweet and chocolates,” said Ramirez.
Monday 18 March 2013
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/alertnet-news-blog/photo-blog-granada-the-colombian-town-determined-to-break-with-its-bloody-past
