In Colombia, Land Mines Are Cleared, Inch by Inch

In Colombia, Land Mines Are Cleared, Inch by Inch

William Neuman, New York Times

20 April 2015

 

COCORNÁ, Colombia — Luvin Mejía kneels on the ground, wearing a heavy Kevlar vest and pants, a thick clear plastic shield over his face.

It can take him an hour to move forward a single foot as he delicately clears brush from a long-abandoned mountain trail and passes a metal detector over each spot, the device’s high-pitched whine mixing with the whir of insects.

Mr. Mejía is part of an army battalion that searches for land mines in areas once contested by guerrilla fighters in Colombia, a country with one of the highest numbers of land mine victims in the world.

The painstakingly slow work was promised a much-needed boost last month when the government and the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, agreed to begin working together to find and destroy land mines laid by the guerrillas.

But the two sides have been negotiating a peace deal for over two years, and their ability to trust each other and work together was thrown into new doubt last week when 11 army soldiers and at least one rebel fighter were killed in a confrontation that President Juan Manuel Santos condemned as a violation of a rebel pledge in December not to attack government forces.

The military said the FARC attacked the soldiers while they were taking cover from a rainstorm in a remote hamlet. Calling the skirmish premeditated, Mr. Santos announced that the rebels involved in it would be hunted down, and he told the military that it could resume bombing raids on FARC encampments, lifting a ban he had imposed a month earlier with the goal of speeding up the peace talks.

On Thursday, a FARC representative in Havana, where the talks are being held, said the confrontation was the fault of the Colombian military for what he called a siege of guerrilla forces. In a video posted on a FARC website, the representative, Jorge Torres, who uses the alias Pablo Catatumbo, denied that the skirmish was “a premeditated action ordered from Havana,” but did not directly address the charge that the rebels attacked the troops.

The combat punctured a sense of optimism that had been growing around the talks in recent months, during which the two sides took important steps, including the FARC’s cease-fire pledge and Mr. Santos’s halting of aerial bombings, to de-escalate a conflict that has lasted more than 50 years.

The agreement to work together on mine removal was hailed as a crucial advance, offering the first prospect of tangible results from the lengthy negotiations.

“The peace process was in Havana, with declarations and lots of documents and speeches,” Álvaro Jiménez, national coordinator of the Colombian Campaign to Ban Land Mines, said. “But this is a way for it to become concrete and for the peace process to land here at home.”

Mr. Jiménez said that with the death of the soldiers last week, the process had entered “a very fragile time” and that “the risk is that there is an exacerbation of hatred and the dialogue is set back or slows down.” He worried that in such a case, the joint mine removal work could be put off.

A person close to the talks in Havana said, however, that military officers and FARC representatives working on the land mine project had met on Wednesday, the same day that news broke of the fatal skirmish, and again on Thursday. “Nothing has changed,” said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified. “They continue to work as before.”

Under the pilot program for mine clearance, rebels would work alongside government soldiers, helping them to find mines planted so they can be destroyed.

Currently, the specialized military unit that includes soldiers like Mr. Mejía clears mines only in areas free of a guerrilla presence. Under the joint program, guerrillas and soldiers would clear mines from sites in or near areas where the FARC is still active, according to Sergio Jaramillo, one of the government’s lead negotiators.

Before Mr. Mejía, 32, joined the land mine unit, he fought in battles against the FARC and saw colleagues killed and maimed by mines. He is not scheduled to take part in the pilot program, but if it is successful, the program could be expanded to include more experts like him.

Although Mr. Mejía said it would be hard to trust the rebels, he acknowledged that they could provide valuable information.

“The hope is that someday the country will be free of land mines,” he said.

According to the government, mines and unexploded munitions claimed 11,073 victims, including 2,216 who died, from 1990 through March 2015. More than a third of all victims were civilians, many of them children, and the rest were members of the security forces. So far this year, 11 people have been killed and 43 wounded by mines. Most of the mines were laid by the guerrillas, one of several strategies, including kidnappings and drug trafficking, that turned a majority of Colombians against them.

In the municipality surrounding Cocorná, a town near Medellín, the country’s second-largest city, Mr. Mejía’s unit has destroyed about 600 land mines in the last five years, according to Capt. Elkin Rondón.

In the case of the trail where Mr. Mejía was working recently, residents said they had stopped using it years ago after the FARC warned them that it had laid mines there.

It took Mr. Mejía and his colleagues about eight weeks to progress only about a third of a mile, clearing an area of about 10 feet on either side of the trail, and they had not found a single mine.

Many Colombians remain deeply skeptical about the peace talks, and the fatal fighting last week added to their wariness. Many critics demand that guerrilla leaders be punished and accuse Mr. Santos of being too lenient.

Others say they do not trust either the guerrillas or the government.

To reach his house in a slum that tilts up a hillside in Medellín, Duban Londoño has to climb 301 steep concrete steps — on crutches and two prosthetic legs.

He stepped on a land mine in December 2013, more than a year after the start of the talks.

The blast occurred in a remote rural region, and it took hours to get him to a hospital. He recalls the agony of losing his legs and what came after — his common-law wife left him, taking their two small children — and of his gritty passage to recovery, including learning to walk on his artificial legs.

While Mr. Londoño, 31, who also lost sight in his right eye, says he felt anger, he is reluctant to blame the guerrillas who laid the mine that maimed him, saying they were probably just following orders. And like other survivors, he seems most bitter about what he sees as the government’s failure to follow through on promises to help victims.

To him, peace seems just another promise that will never be kept.

“They can take the mines from one place, but how many more mines are there in other places?” he said. “Here in Colombia, we will never see the end of war.”

Mr. Londoño said that if a referendum were held to ratify a peace accord, he would not participate.

“It would be like tossing your vote into the wind,” he said.

Susan Abad contributed reporting.

Featured Image: A Colombian soldier searches for land mines laid by rebel fighters. Copyright: Raul Arboleda, AFP/Getty Images


Follow us:
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusyoutubemailby feather
Share this:
Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather