By Susana Noguera
BOGOTA, Colombia
For decades, Colombia languished between second and third place on a list of the most mined countries in the world.
But that began to change in 2015.
As the nation observes International Mine Awareness Day on Wednesday, it is celebrating the significant progress it has made in the long process of demining its territory.
With the advance of the peace process with FARC guerrillas, new avenues for humanitarian demining were opened and the country began descending the ranks. Today, it occupies 10th place.
This progress was recorded in the Land Mine Monitor report published by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), two global organizations working toward a world free of anti-personal mines and cluster munitions.
“The agreement [with FARC] generated favorable security conditions and allowed us in the last 12 months not only to strengthen the sector but also to reach territories where it was not possible before,” said Sergio Bueno, head of Descontamina Colombia, the government entity that organizes demining efforts.
Improvements
Demining in Colombia is an arduous task. Most of the landmines are handcrafted and made of plastic or chemical materials that are not easily detected. Wet and mountainous fields frequently shift and erode, changing the location of the mines.
“The armed actors used to plant the mines where they hurt the most”, said Álvaro Jimenez, head of the Colombian Campaign Against Landmines, a humanitarian demining organization.
Researchers have found landmines on riverbanks, around coca crops, in soccer balls and animal corpses and other places that are hard to track.
In order to find the landmines, deminers have to talk first with the local communities and check the records of previous landmine incidents in each village, farm or town. Then when they have a defined field, finding and removing them is like finding a needle in a haystack.
They must use dogs, metal detectors, various technologies and even risk their own lives to provide the community with clean fields where they can live, go to school, harvest and walk without fear.
One of the most representative advances in Colombia’s demining efforts is the increase of trained and certified deminers for the workforce.
In the last two years, the Colombian government completed the certification of 10 civil demining organizations around the country. At the same time, it created and strengthened the Army Humanitarian Demining Brigade and the Explosives and Demining Association of the Marine Infantry (Aedim).
"In the first half of 2016, we had 1,342 men and women on the ground, and today we have 5,468 people accredited by the Organization of American States to carry out demining operations," said Sergio Bueno.
The improvement in security conditions was also vital to advance in the decontamination of the territory. People cannot carry out demining in a place that is likely to be contaminated again.
When the FARC has withdrawn from the territories, the government could initiate a large-scale anti-mining offensive.
The work has also been reflected in the decline of victims. In 2006, when the conflict was at a peak, there were 1,232 affected by antipersonnel mines. In 2017, that number dropped to 56.
It is estimated that the country has 52 million square meters contaminated with antipersonnel mines and unexploded ordnance. This year, demining organizations intervened in 53 percent of that area while 225 municipalities have already been declared mine-free and another 232 are in intervention.
In the municipalities that are now mine-free, there are stories of communities that have resisted the crudest stages of the conflict and now feel rewarded for their resilience.
Medium-term goals
Colombia has an ambitious goal of clearing all of its territory before 2021.
"We have a series of challenges: on the one hand, the acclimatization of peace in the areas where the FARC left; on the other hand, the challenge of trying to make sure that ELN guerrillas end their war against the state in order to decontaminate the areas where they have influence. And third, that we can consolidate the territorial presence of the state in regions such as Tumaco (in southern Colombia) and other places where bands linked to drug trafficking hinder our work," said Jimenez.
At present, demining has not been possible in 212 locations because there is still a strong presence of illegal armed groups and an absence of necessary security conditions.
Colombia is in a peace process with the ELN guerrillas, another armed group recognized for their use of mines as a war strategy. Achieving an agreement with the group could mean the opening of new humanitarian spaces to start demining.
Another challenge for the country is financing demining. At this time, the country has received international cooperation valued at US$144,534,604.
Of the total, $120,056,253 are resources allocated to operators or executing entities and $24,478,351 corresponds to pending resources for disbursement.
Descontamina Colombia has calculated that cleaning the country would cost $827 million, so the process of finding funding sources is still a long one.
*Daniela Mendoza and Maria Paula Triviño contributed to this story.
