Colombia -

Colombia

Colombia is a country which has been shattered by

civil war for many years.Poverty is rife.

Unemployment, a shortage of housing and a complete

lack of social welfare threatens the very existence of

much of the country’s population. It is often the

children who su!er most in this cycle of poverty and

family disintegration. They are left to their own

devices and sent out on to the street to work, beg and

steal. Parents, struggling to survive themselves, often

have very little interest in the fate of their children.

The gamines, orphans and outcasts form street gangs

to protect one another and counter their loneliness.

They steal to survive, work as drug runners, take

drugs themselves and sni! glue to mitigate the

hunger, cold and misery.

In some areas these small thieves and their criminal activities drive customers away from

local businesses. The disadvantaged traders created a solution that is almost unbelievable.

They hired “death squads” to clean up the streets, and during the 1990s thousands of street

children were just murdered.

In Bogota, Colombia, a nation of natural beauty and good people…their lies a breaking in the foundation of the country. It’s most valuable asset, children, are being lost at a large rate to crime, drugs, violence and sex trafficking. Some of the most innocent, orphans, are growing up on the street, these children are known as “gamines”, which is a more polite name. More frequently they are referred to as “desechables” or “the disposables”.

There are countless children in orphanages who have lost parents due to civil conflict and HIV/AIDS. While others are abandoned due to extreme poverty, parental drug abuse or arrest. Still others are left without homes and parental care after serving time as child combatants.

Most of these children, sadly, have little hope for adoption because they are “older” (more than 6 years old). Making the problem more difficult is the stigma that Colombian society assigns to these children.

Orphans in Colombia are pushed out of the orphanages at age 18. Most leave without a high school education, unable to support themselves and with no caring adult to guide them.

Over the last fifty years, Colombia has been marked by an intractable and complex internal conflict that has consumed many lives and led to the displacement of millions of Colombians. The recurring patterns of violence include murder, torture, kidnappings of civilians and forced displacement. Unequal land distribution has been one of the root causes of conflict and displacement in Colombia. The country continues to be immersed in an internal conflict that affects all sectors of society.

INEQUALITY BETWEEN RICH AND POOR IN COLOMBIA

The extent to which the phenomenon of internal displacement affects the Colombian people is unmatched in the Americas. Nearly 10 percent of the population has been forced to migrate within their own country. In 2010 alone, 280,000 people were newly displaced.
Internal displacement is one of the main reasons why poverty levels – particularly rural areas – have been consistently high.

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), nearly half the Colombian population lives below the national poverty line. Furthermore, 35% of Colombians are forced to live on less than two US dollars a day and around 16% eke out an existence in shacks. Living conditions in rural and urban areas of the country differ significantly: in rural areas, almost half the people lack access to drinking water and proper sanitation.

There is little access to medical services and education. Nearly one in five Colombians is chronically malnourished. Although Colombia has seen significant economic growth in recent years, the income and wealth distribution remains highly unequal.

COLOMBIAN CHILDREN AT RISK DUE TO VIOLENCE AND POVERTY

Colombia’s 18 million children make up for roughly 40 per cent of the country’s total population. The armed conflict doesn’t exclude Colombia’s most vulnerable sections of society: young children and adolescents. At present, around 11,000 child soldiers are actively involved in Colombia’s internal conflict. After being recruited, they frequently become victims of assassinations, land mines, mutilation, sexual abuse and kidnapping.

In Colombia, around 820,000 children under the age of seventeen are orphaned. Many of them grow up without a family. They are thus vulnerable to recruitment by sex traffickers or street-gangs in which drug abuse and high levels of violence rapidly become part of their everyday lives.

At present, orphans on the streets spend their days washing windshields at traffic lights, selling merchandise or collecting reusable items on waste dumps. Roughly 10% of all children aged 5-14 – particularly young boys – are engaged in different types of labor activities. Many of these young children are forced to work to earn money for an entire family. The majority of them do not go to school.