Peace Day: Colombia

In 1999, the province of Caqueta, in the South of Colombia, was declared a "peace laboratory" and became the epicentre of a neutral zone.

MEET THE BLOGGERS Name: Alirio González Lives: Belen de los Andaquíes, Caqueta, southern Colombia

Five towns were demilitarised to become the stage of a peace process between the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the government.

They all came to visit us: journalists, ambassadors, ministers, mothers of the kidnapped, people who dreamt of another country - and even people who didn't.

But then the armed groups turned even more aggressive. At first, we knew the names of all the victims; then, they became numbers.

At the end, we didn't know how many.

PEACE BLOGGERS Mona in Gaza Alirio in Colombia Indi in Sri Lanka Samira in Chechnya Anon in Balochistan Haron in Darfur Ali in Iran Amila in Iraq

We couldn't travel by road by night. Truck drivers lost their income because their vehicles were burned by armed groups.

Paradox

In February 2002, the government put an end to this neutral zone. There were explosions on bridges, energy towers and antennas.

The army and the leftist guerrilla groups fought intense battles, and the right-wing paramilitary groups started a peace process with the government.

The word "compromise" has never reached the war world, no matter how much people implore for peace.

In 2003, arms gained even more space. We became experts. When guns were fired, we could distinguish if it was a rifle, a machine gun, or a 9mm.

The paradox is that living in Caqueta is wonderful.

Living here makes you proud of the enormous biodiversity of the Amazonic region, where the great rivers are born.

It means being surrounded by women who are both father and mother to their children, who play football in the streets, ride their bikes, work in the fields or search for a living.

You can be a carpenter, a taxi driver, a seller in the market, or a chicken breeder. But our life, which oscillates between the rural and the urban, is cut in half by the mourning of the war.

Utopia of peace

When you chat with the women who have lost their sons because of violence, you don't hear rancour in their voices.

You can feel their joy of living, the will to change their lives, even though they are tired of tears and fears. Death has made their skins thick.

You don't hear much about peace on the streets. We don't know anything about the World Peace Day, and if we celebrate it, it is because the local government or a human rights organisation promotes it.

When you ask about peace, it is seen as something impossible, something that belongs to the government, or that will only be achieved with the legalisation of drugs - the region is full of coca fields.

What best sums it up are a number of phrases heard on the street. "This peace thing is an invention of the war actors - ceasefires and agreements never contemplate a fulfilled life," is one.

"You can only achieve a full life when you have a full stomach and there is no poverty," runs another.

"If there wasn't any terrorism or armed forces, then we would really have peace."

The thing is, for some, the issue is not peace; the issue is the social structure. A child has no conditions to feel important within society from the time he is born.

The children grow up uprooted from their land, with no sense of affection, under a government that doesn't recognise the thought of people in the region and which appears to only punish it by fumigating it - the coca crops are destroyed by fumigations from the air.

For the combatants, peace will only arrive when one of the sides is defeated.

For an army sergeant, peace will only arrive when the guerrillas have no more money left.

The word 'compromise' has never reached the war world, no matter how much people implore for peace.

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