Word: colombian
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...achievements had been stunning. Uribe's U.S.-backed military pounded Marxist guerrillas while his peace envoys convinced 30,000 right-wing paramilitaries to disarm - the two feats leading to a steep reduction in kidnappings and homicides and making Uribe the most popular Colombian leader in decades. But if the war is being won, why then are so many terrified Colombians abandoning their farms in the hinterlands and crowding into the cities...
Last year, 380,000 Colombians were forced off their land amid fighting between rebels, paramilitaries and the army, a 24% increase from 2007's figure, according to the Bogotá-based human-rights group Codhes (the Spanish acronym for the Human Rights and Displacement Office). Colombian officials, in turn, put the number of displaced at 294,000 for just the first six months of last year. "It's the million-dollar question," Marie-Helene Verney, spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Colombia, says of the perplexing trend. "Something is going on." (See pictures...
...registered during the most horrific years of the war. Many of the victims have been targeted by a new generation of private armies whose ranks include paramilitaries who disarmed earlier this decade. Unlike the ideologically driven death squads of the 1990s, these new militias are focused on drug-trafficking. Colombian police put the number of new armed groups at eight. But the New Rainbow Foundation, a Colombian NGO that investigates the war, puts the number at 82 and says they have between 4,000 and 10,000 fighters. The militias often clash with guerrillas and with each other for control...
...swaths of land to mine gold, drill for petroleum and produce palm oil for Colombia's booming biofuels industry. Says Jorge Rojas, who heads Codhes, "In almost every case where there is a big palm-oil development, there is widespread forced displacement." Adding to the confusion, members of the Colombian Army have been accused of killing civilians and dressing them up as rebels and of driving farmers off their land in guerrilla strongholds...
...Colombian government officials believe that IDP figures have been inflated by poor people trying to scam the government out of benefits provided to legitimate victims, such as food and temporary shelter. But they admit to being surprised by the rising numbers. "It's worse than what we had expected two, three or four years ago," says Armando Escobar, who heads IDP programs for the government's social-welfare agency...