Colombia: heavy rain adds another layer of misery
Friday, May 27, 2011
Locals travel by canoe through a floodd street in the municipality of Rionegro near Medellin
Photo: REUTERS/John Vizcaino
Colombians caught up in decades of conflict are now enduring months of endless rain and landslides that have left a tenth of the population suffering.
Since April last year, around 90% of the country – principally the central, western and northern areas - has been regularly deluged with heavy rain and landslides costing people their homes, their farmland and even their lives. Rainfall around Bogota has been four times normal levels, and has destroyed the villages of Gramalote and Utica in the north. In one low-lying department of the country, residents have put down wooden boards to elevate the floor above the water level.
The Colombian government expects the emergency to continue until at least June, making this extraordinary situation one of the worse in the country’s history.
Residents prepare sandbags in a flooded area in the municipality Lenguazaque near Bogota.
Photo: REUTERS/John Vizcaino
The total number of dead since April 2010 now stands at nearly 470. But this figure rises daily and excludes people not registered with local authorities, says Jairo Suarez of ACT Alliance member the Evangelical Lutheran Church. His small church in Bogota has been sheltering families whose homes on undeveloped wasteland were destroyed by mudslides.
“This crisis is very hard,” Suarez says. “The country is spending a lot of money – more than US $3 bn – attending to this emergency. Money for this is taken from the national budget so some of the country’s development funds are being used to respond to the emergency. Colombia doesn’t have the capacity to attend to all survivors. After this, a lot of people will be without houses, school, social security and health care because the country is not prepared.”
ACT Alliance members in Colombia claim the government has helped only relatively few people, and describe hearing reports of inefficiency, a lack of coordination and corruption. ACT is working to provide villages and towns with food aid and other basic needs, supported by a US $701,760 appeal.
The disaster adds to the misery of people already suffering from decades of conflict, immense social problems and poverty. For years, rural areas have been the scene of fighting between guerilla groups, paramilitaries and regular forces which have put civilians at permanent risk of being forced off their lands. With five million people displaced, Colombia has the world’s highest level of displacement after Sudan.
“Most people come to the big cities,” says Suarez. “Others go to the areas where the population has not been established, such as beside rivers. Along the border belt of cities, the land is often not fit for living on, and is subject landslides. For these reasons, people are suffering all over again.”
In the north of the department of Cauca, where Afro-Colombian and native populations are at the mercy of illegal groups, rainfall worsens the despair. A young native mother from a reserve survived a bombing by the air force and police last month - but it killed her husband, the father of her two children. A fortnight later, a mudslide destroyed her house and belongings in seconds. She must now survive in a community house with another five families.
Suarez is adamant the weather is the result of the changing climate. He backs scientists who claim this abnormal quantity of rain over such a sustained period to be an effect of climate change. Colombia and the Ecuador lane are suffering harsh and sustained weather patterns – more so than other parts of Latin America. “Maybe the land attracts more rain and clouds. In Colombia the situation is worse than in other countries because it has so many social problems as well. We are a poor country that just doesn’t have the platform to attend this kind of emergency,” Suarez says.
Resources
For more information on ACT’s appeal on the flooding in Colombia, please contact Carlos Rauda at carlos.rauda@actalliance.org