Some 260 families were forcibly displaced in Cauca and Valle during this Holy Week

Although Holy Week is being commemorated in Colombia, a time when families in the country enter a state of recollection, reflection and recess from activities, more than 260 families in the departments of Cauca and Valle, in western Colombia, will spend the holy days in improvised shelters after having to flee their homes in view of the fighting taking place in the rural areas of the municipality of Algeria and Buenaventura, respectively.

In the case of the port city in the Pacific, since last Monday, approximately 169 families, some 500 people, have been forcibly displaced from the towns of San Isidro and La Esperanza, due to intense fighting between the Eln guerrillas and the Gulf Clan who are fighting for territorial control and routes of drug trafficking in that area of the country, as reported on the public radio station Radio Nacional de Colombia.

This is the second time that the same situation has occurred in Buenaventura, which already suffers from internal violence between criminal gangs, where hundreds of people have to flee rural areas as happened in January, where it is estimated that around 700 people were displaced.

In this new mass displacement, the authorities in the port implemented a temporary shelter in their coliseum pending humanitarian aid in the face of the situation.

“We have been able to guarantee the main thing that food was, we know that the coliseum is not the best place to stay, but we are creating basic conditions such as mats, blankets, drinking water, so that the situation is as bearable as possible,” they quoted on the radio of the statements of local mayor Victor Hugo Vidal.

A similar situation occurs in the rural area of the municipality of Algeria, in western Valle del Cauca, where about 100 families, more than 200 people, also had to leave their homes in the district of Santa Clara and have been staying since Tuesday in the town's urban area due to the clashes between the Carlos structure Patiño, a dissident of the extinct FARC, and troops of the Third Division of the National Army.

On La W Radio, they consulted with Dan Harry Sánchez, director of the Cauca Victims Unit, who reported that 30 families were preventing from the municipal seat and another 70 from the Plateado sector.

“According to the alert launched by the Office of the Ombudsman, there are another 50 families who begin to move from the Lomitas village, because they are at risk to their lives,” the official said.

Forced displacement in Colombia last year increased by 179 percent last year, according to figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) compared to 2020.

In a report published by the France 24 agency, there would be 73,000 victims according to the data they cited from the same Ocha report that was released earlier this year.

“The actions of non-state armed groups against civilians are the main causes of forced displacement in Colombia,” the UN report states.

Precisely the departments of Chocó, Valle del Cauca and Nariño account for 75 per cent of the cases of displacement, and Afro-descendant and indigenous communities are the most affected. In addition, 18 percent of the victims of this scourge are minors.

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