A 40 page report of Human Rights Watch titled Mutilating the People: The Use of Land Mines and Other Indiscriminate Arms on the Part of Guerrillas in Colombia denounces this. In the dock of the accused before all others, the philo-marxist combatants of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, followed by the Army of National Liberation (ELN), a second guerrilla group, and then their forever enemies, the paramilitary groups on the right who often collude with the government army.

Stories like so many. “I feel incomplete. I have only one hand, the other children have two.” Pablo is nine years old, and he told Human Rights Watch what he has experienced since a mine made him disabled. Lucia, instead, is ten, and for the same reason now is blind and has a single hand that lacks several fingers. Because of the absence of specialists who could teach her to adapt to this new dark world, full of phantoms, the little girl has had to leave her village and move to a large city, Bucaramanga, where she lives in a special place. And hers is a fate that touches many, because to step on a mine doesn’t provoke only physical damage: it violates the entire life. The traumas are profound: mental equilibrium is strongly compromised and the family structure broken.

One for all. These are usually poor people who live in abandoned agricultural areas, often badly served and far from urban centers: for the survivors nothing is ever the same. And when the victims are adults, heads of families, the entire family is overwhelmed by the explosion. “I was a farmer, a cultivator of yucca, corn, plantains, and cocoa. I was born in a field. I thought I could live there for ever,” explained Edilberto Prada Ardila, 46 years old, blind in one eye and without both hands because of a land mine. Now he lives on charity in a big city.

 

Victims and Executioners. Those responsible for this butchery first and foremost are those who call themselves The People’s Army, or the FARC. This is a fact that clashes with the ideology that seems to inspire a guerrilla who says that for more than forty years he has fought for a new Colombia, to give it to the Colombians. “It’s the weapon of the poor,” they say as justification. “In war you have to use everything that allows you to defend yourself,” the commandant of the Magdalene Medio Pastor Alape bloc has told Peace Reporter. “So we also use mines. We make them ourselves. They are economical. And it is also true that every so often it happens that some civilian is wounded. But it’s always a matter of incidents. Certainly it isn’t very ethical, but the smart bombs of the rich empire of the war make mistakes, a farmer-guerrilla who must defend himself to survive can make a mistake. And anyway, one can’t generalize. One must analyze particular examples before judging. We always gather up our unexploded explosives. Our house is the forest. If every time that we have laid a trap for an enemy by mining an area we had left unexploded bombs, now we would be in prison. And then explosives cost; we can’t let ourselves waste them.” The same refrain in the declarations released by ELN. This justification is also extended to the explosives obtained from bottled gas and thrown at objectives that are supposed to be military, but that for lack of precision of the throwers happen to destroy houses, stables, churches.

So FARC, ELC, and the paramilitaries take a risk. Colombia is a country at war for more than forty years, and international law categorically prohibits

the use of arms of indiscriminate impact such as land mines. Therefore, the members and the commandants of the armed groups who intentionally order or direct attacks against civilians face trials for war crimes, and—if the aggression was part of a larger systematic attack against a community of civilians (as often happens with the paramilitaries on the right who tend to clear entire areas, improvising summary executions of hundreds of civilians, who are then hidden in common ditches) they risk being accused of crimes against humanity in accordance with the Statute of Rome of the International Penal Court.

And the government? Colombia is a member nation of the treaty banning land mines of 1997, and it signed the United Nations convention on the rights of disabled people. Therefore, it has a series of obligations toward all the victims of mines: medical and economic assistance, pensions for disability, and an entire series of specific benefits. Yet, for the majority of the thousands of Colombians disfigured by explosives all this is only a mirage. Notwithstanding that the South American country receives copious international aid, includine funds from the European Union earmarked to aid the wounded and to spread a culture of prevention and support, almost all of the survivors receive no assistance. Functionaries of local government, doctors and paramedics, and the very survivors of explosions continue to know nothing or almost nothing of their rights and the benefits that await them. Moreover, access to these benefits are made still more difficult by the too brief deadlines by which to present the complex documentation foreseen by the law. Everything is lost in bureaucratic labyrinths. And, even in the rare cases in which a wounded person succeeds in getting the money that is coming to him, it’s a question of an amount that is insufficient to guarantee a dignified life. In fact, Human Rights Watch closes its report with an appeal to the government to review and reform its programs of assistance, canceling serious deficiencies that worsen a situation that is already too dramatic.