Battered Colombian town fears return to war
Bojaya residents voted ‘yes’ for peace despite 2002 attack still fresh in many memories
BOJAYA, COLOMBIA— Of all the acts of violence that have scarred Colombia during five decades of armed conflict, few have cut so deep for so many as the slaughter that occurred in this municipality 14 years ago.
As a battle raged between leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary fighters aligned with the government, a rudimentary mortar fired by the guerrillas landed on a church where hundreds of townspeople had sought shelter. The explosion killed at least 79 people, more than half of them children, and wounded about 100. That attack, on May 2, 2002, and the long, painful process of recovery that Bojaya has endured, was very much on the minds of voters who cast ballots here on Oct. 2 in a national referendum on a peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the same rebel group that bombed the church.
While the accord was defeated nationally, with opponents arguing that its terms were too generous to the guerrillas, the residents of Bojaya saw it differently: support here was at 96 per cent of voters, among the highest approval rates in the country.
Such was the deep, almost desperate, desire here for an end to this war.
Though the defeat of the pact plunged the peace initiative into uncertainty and left residents of Bojaya despondent and scared, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to President Juan Manuel Santos for his work to end the conflict lifted emotions here.
On Sunday, Santos visited the municipality, where he attended a Mass and vowed to continue working to achieve peace. He also said he would donate his Nobel Prize money — about $930,000 — to the victims of the armed conflict.
“He has put so much effort into moving this process forward,” said Maxima Asprilla Palomecki, 49, a lifelong resident of Bojaya and survivor of the attack. The community’s hope is that the Nobel Prize “gives the process more momentum.”
Bojaya, with a mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous population of about 12,000, covers a vast area of soggy, tropical forest in the Pacific coast department of Choco, the poorest region in Colombia.
Residents live in rustic settlements along the muddy waters of the Atrato River and several of its tributaries, mostly surviving on fishing, subsistence farming and informal timber harvesting. There are no roads. To get from village to village, people travel by boat and estimate travel times by the size of the outboard engine.
This isolation has been particularly attractive to Colombia’s illegal armed groups, which for years have sought to dominate Choco’s armsand drug-trafficking routes that connect the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea and the Colombian interior with the coasts.
The 2002 attack was part of this struggle. At the time, one of the preferred weapons of the FARC was a homemade mortar fashioned from a gas cylinder. It was as inaccurate as it was deadly. One crashed through the roof of the church in Bellavista, the seat of the municipality.
After the attack, more than 4,000 residents of Bojaya — including the entire population of Bellavista — fled, seeking refuge in the departmental capital of Quibdo and elsewhere. They did not begin to return for several months; many have yet to come back.
The attack became not just a symbol of the barbarity of the guerrilla conflict but also of the failings of the Colombian authorities to protect its most vulnerable, rural populations. The government scrambled to make amends, saturating the area with security forces and building a new municipal capital from scratch about half a mile up the Atrato River from Bellavista. The entire population of the old town was relocated to the new one, called Bellevista Nuevo — New Bellavista — starting in 2007.
The FARC helped its case with Bojaya residents in December when several of its commanders flew to the original Bellavista in a helicopter to apologize to the community in a ceremony outside the church.
Two weeks ago, before the referendum, FARC commanders presented the community with a 6-foot-tall wooden crucifix, made in Havana.
While the residents welcomed the gestures, several explained in interviews last week that in their efforts to shed the emotional baggage of the war, they had to muster forgiveness not only for the FARC but for all the other actors in the conflict, especially the government.
Many say the government neglected them for many years, leaving them vulnerable to the guerrillas and the paramilitaries.
Townspeople say they warned federal officials in the days leading up to the attack that combat was imminent, yet their appeals for government forces to protect them went unheeded.
“If you judge the FARC, you have to judge the government, too,” Maxima Asprilla Palomecki said.
“It was their responsibility. We told them and they didn’t do anything.”