The Victims of War Are Sick of War
I grew up on a beautiful island on Colombia’s Pacific Coast called Tumaco. My life was rooted in the land of my ancestors. We fished and traded. We were poor, and black, and neglected by the state, but lived in peace and with joy.
The decades-long armed conflict between the guerrillas and the paramilitaries erupted abruptly on our island in 2000, when I was 16. The guerrillas — members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, or FARC — had been in the region for many years, but then the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group, arrived. We were stuck in the middle.… Seguir leyendo »