Colombia’s authorities refuse to register three quarter of the
displaced people who seek help in the North Antioquian town of Ituango,
the town’s mayor and refugees say.
The Presidency’s refugee agency Accion Social registered only 251 of the 1,028 displaced peasants in Ituango who were forced to flee violence in are around the town.
Jaime Avendaño of Accion Social told newspaper El Colombiano that everyone who arrived in the town three weeks ago is registered. But families who left their villages just recently, only came to Ituango to show “solidarity” with the displaced and are therefore “no victims of displacement”.
“It is not a displacement. The situation is being studied but we have serious doubts about this,” Avendaño told the newspaper.
“Tell me, do you think that you would leave your farm, let your animals die only to come and beg for some food? No. We are here because they made us come,” Gabriel Villa, one of those displaced by fighting between the army and the FARC said.
Just recently, the Constitutional Court demanded the government to report on displacement in a “profound, sufficient and adequate” way and to take the care of the country’s 3 million displaced seriously. The Court called Accion Social’s reports on displacement “insufficient and show how progress is slow in comparison to the
dimension of the problem and the humanitarian drama of the phenomenon.”