Colombia: Latin America’s, if not the World’s, Capital

of Internally Displaced People

• Colombian civilians forced to flee homes and seek shelter in Ecuador to escape violence
• Homelessness is an issue of immense importance and has been consistently neglected by Bogotá
• Colombia – The world’s leader in homelessness

Having an estimated population of 43,677,372, Colombia possesses the second largest population on the South American continent. With a steamy history of political and social unrest, an undisputed leadership in the illicit narcotics trade, corruption, endemic violence, along with unrelenting guerrilla and paramilitary insurgencies, the quality of Bogotá’s execution of authority remains to be questioned. It also has caused the Colombian citizenry to seek refuge both internally within the nation and in the urban sprawl of cities in neighboring countries such as Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and the United States. Colombia’s current humanitarian pandemic is so dire that many analysts and organizations have noted that the country has surpassed Sudan as having the most staggering internal displacement crisis in the world. In 2007 alone, conflict between Colombian government forces and armed groups resulted in the displacement of more than 300,000 people, only adding to the millions that have been displaced in the country since the 1980s. According to the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a Colombian nongovernmental organization, about 380,000 nationals were forced to leave their homes in 2008 due to armed conflict, and it estimates that the total figure for displaced Colombians amounts to as many as 4.6 million since the early 1980s.

Perspective of Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre

Established by the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDM), an international entity based in Geneva, Switzerland that dedicates itself to monitoring conflict-induced internal displacement, maintains that Colombia is the only Latin American country with an increasing number of displaced people, even surpassing internally-displaced crises all over the world. Collectively, Colombians attribute death threats, recruitment pressure to join the guerrilla and / or paramilitary forces, and clashes between the military and other security forces as being among the top reasons that lead them to have to abandon their homes. Moreover, in their 2007 Global Overview of Trends and Development report, IDM has declared that Colombia, Iraq and Sudan together account for approximately 50 percent of the world’s displaced people.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Fellow Maya Wilson