Almost half of Colombia’s war victims live in poverty due to persistent State failures to help them rebuild their lives, according to the government accountability office.
The Comptroller General’s Office said Monday that the government would need to allocate more than $68 billion before 2031 and make “the required institutional reforms to effectively offer effective attention and reparation” to victims.
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, more than 8.8 million victims continue to wait for the aid they were promised by the so-called Victims and Land Restitution Law in 2011.
Only 12% of the more than 9 million registered victims effectively received financial aid over the past decade, said the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Among ethnic minorities, only 9% of war victims received the aid they were promised.
Of the more than 4.5 million women who needed psychological support to deal with war traumas, only 107,000 effectively received saw a social worker or a psychologist, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
President Gustavo Petro claimed that “it would take almost a century to repair the current victims” if the government would continue the policies of his predecessors.
Petro blasted his predecessors as he swore his director of the National Victims Unit (UNV), which is supposed to coordinate the attention to victims.
President Gustavo Petro
The new UNV director, Patricia Tobon, said that it was “ridiculous” that only 16 of the more than 400 collective reparation processes that were promised over the past decade were effectively executed.
According to the congressional commission that monitors government compliance with the victims law, former President Ivan Duque made the situation for victims even worse by lowering the UNV’s victims reparation budget.
Allegedly criminal former President Alvaro Uribe, Duque’s political patron, has consistently opposed the Victims Law, claiming that victims support was “too expensive.”
The refusal of Petro’s predecessor to implement a peace process that followed a 2016 peace deal with the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC further increased the number of war victims over the past few years.