Fear in the slums of Bogota

A woman shot by rebels lies at a guerrilla road block

The collapse of Colombia's faltering peace talks means the warring factions will continue to drive from their homes any Colombians they feel are not on their side, says the BBC's Jeremy McDermott.

Maria still looks like the farmer's wife she once was, out of place in the urban sprawl of Ciudad Bolivar, one of the Bogota's fastest growing slums.

She still has the proud look of someone who grew up, and fed her family, toiling on the land. Now she toils in a different way, sifting through other people's rubbish to scavenge enough to feed her five children.

Peace talks broke off after FARC hijacked a plane with a senator on board

Maria and her children are among the 300,000 Colombians displaced every year, totalling more than two million people since 1985.

Sitting on an upturned bucket in the shack she shares with her children, she can't contain the tears as she describes how the right-wing paramilitaries knocked on the door in the middle of the night, thrashed her husband in front of the whole family then took him away.

She found his corpse not far from the small farm in the southern province of Meta they worked together.

He had been tortured and then executed. The paramilitaries accused him of being a guerrilla sympathiser.

There was no right of reply or appeal, just the single shot of the executioner. Maria was told to take her family and leave.

In shantytown

She packed up what she could carry and ushered her children onto a bus to Bogota. Home is now a one-room shack, with two rough beds made of planks where the family sleeps.

Colombians hold a vigil urging peace

The walls are of wood, insulated with plastic bags, but Maria has been collecting some bricks and is hoping to build a sturdier structure to offer a bit more protection against the cold climate of this Andean city.

There is no social security net to catch people like Maria. The government agency which deals with the displaced is overworked and underfunded, and can offer little to the thousands that flock to the city every month.

Colombia is crawling out of a deep recession, and the government needs all the money it can get to fight the conflict that rages across the country.

Maria has not given in to despair - the ragged clothes she and her children wear are clean and patched

There are few jobs. The lucky ones scratch together enough money to buy contraband cigarettes to sell at traffic light in the centre of the city, an hour's ride by bus. Almost two-thirds of Colombians live in poverty and a fifth of them are destitute.

Maria is in the lower end of that group, scavenging what she can to keep alive. But she has not given in to despair.

The ragged clothes she and her children wear are clean and patched, a miracle when one considers the floor of her shack is earth, which turns to mud when it rains, and the only water supply is a rack of plastic jerry cans she has to fill up at the house of a sympathetic neighbour. She heats water and cooks food on a wood-burning stove she has built herself from some rocks and an abandoned hob.

Her youngest daughter was born with deformed feet and can hardly walk. Medical treatment to help the child is but a distant dream.

Rebels v paramilitaries

Up the hill from Maria's shack surly young men keep watch on the streets from the bars and billiard halls that dot the muddy lanes. In this case they are guerrillas from the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Soldiers guard their position in a previously rebel held zone

In the neighbouring slum of Bosa Brasilia, the young men belong to the right-wing paramilitaries of the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the guerrillas' sworn enemies.

The peasants may have fled to the cities, but the war that drove them here has followed behind. The illegal armies of the left and right run extortion rackets on the few bars and businesses that operate in the slums. They are always on the lookout for infiltrators from the other side.

If you are not with them, you are against them

Police are a rare sight and when they come they seldom venture out of their armoured cars. Everyone knows who are the real law in these shantytowns and defy them at their peril.

So far Maria has not been bothered by the warring factions. She is too busy fighting for the survival of her family to be worried about politics and the country's 37-year civil conflict.

But she has three sons and when they enter their teens there may be another knock at the door. It might be the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, depending on who controls the slum then.

And her sons will have to make a decision: join them or move on, because if you are not with them, you're against them.