The Tale of Two Landless Villages

The villagers of El Piñal, like many rural communities, do not have it so easy. There may be a health centre building, but it has no staff or medicines. There may be a primary school with two out of three of the teachers needed, but for a secondary education, students have to walk an hour to get the bus. In the winter they need a canoe to cross the 300 metres which is under water. They leave the house at 5am, returning by 3pm having not eaten in that time. This year there are 58 primary school pupils, but no one is travelling to the secondary school in Regidor.

Drinking water has to be transported by hand or donkey for 1 1/2 kilometres.

The man bitten by 'Doguidoca' snake (who was very lucky to get the antidote in time, as that's a very poisonous snake) now has problems with his sight. He paid to see a specialist once, but can't afford to again.



Many things are difficult, but for the moment they have somewhere to farm.

Twenty years ago, when FARC controlled the area, the owner of the 500 ha farm next to the village abandoned it to flee the conflict. The first villagers to start farming his land asked for and were given permission.

Now more than fifty families depend on this land for survival. Mostly they have smallholdings of 5 ha, some with up to 10 ha. They grow palm trees for roofing, and staple foods such as corn, yucca and plantain.

I've heard the figure a few times, that there are 8 million people dying of hunger in Colombia. It seems difficult to believe in a country with so much fertile land, but this is a result of the displacements caused by the conflict, and the lack of food sovereignty. In El Piñal, while access to healthcare, education, drinking water or a decent road are a problem, I think we can assume that hunger is not so much.



But this village lives with a great sense of insecurity. Five years ago an Oil Palm company approached the owner. The community strongly asked him not to sell, and he did not.

He has not visited the area for twenty years, so most of the community do not know him. They had no idea if he would say 'no' again. They do know that losing that land would be the end of their village. Resulting in a future of displacement for those fifty families. Meaning the choice between urban or rural poverty, and with most families joining the 8 million hungry.

Meanwhile, San Cayatano is already some way down that road.

When Señor Numa, the owner of a 900 ha farm died 23 years ago, the villagers waited five years for his relatives to claim the land before they started to farm it. They were there for fourteen years: around forty families, again growing staple foods.

It is still unclear whether the men who arrived claiming to have bought the land from Señor Numa's sons actually ever did. (A lawyer from the EU-funded Program for Peace and Development is providing a ray of hope by investigating this.) What was clear were the threats behind the request for these families to leave the land. People were offered some money (although 2800 000 pesos (775 pounds) for 5 ha is not much) and were told that if they didn't leave the good way, they would be leaving the bad way. Given the paramilitary presence in the area, people took this pretty seriously. The last man left was taken by the AUC (paramilitary organisation linked to the state) to be killed, but managed to escape.

That was three years ago. 'Misery' was the word used to describe life for them since. Unemployment is especially uncomfortable when there are eight children to feed. One meal a day becomes normal. Hunger universal.

It is understood that the land was acquired for growing Oil Palm, though it is currently being used for cattle.

Other than their lack of land and their geographical proximity, these two villages have some other links. Six years ago, the father of Regidor's Mayor is alleged to have blocked a water inlet, to drain his own farm. This dried out both the shallow lake by El Piñal and the canal by San Cayatano. The members of both communities who had made a good living from fishing were no longer able to.

It's this same man, believed to have drug-trafficking and paramilitary links, who is allegedly behind the acquisition of Sr Numa's land, and who is thought to be trying to buy the land by El Piñal. The current owner may well be a nice man who does not want to leave his previous neighbours hungry, but a request to sell from someone believed to have ordered the killing of two business associates, may not be so easy to refuse.