Displacement report.

The Colombian group, Codhes, recently released a report on the displacement situation in Colombia and it is staggering. The website for the organization is here: www.codhes.org. You can check out the report on displacement by Clicking Here!

Here are some of the staggering information:

* In 2009, there were around 286, 389 people displaced in Colombia because of the conflict and/or other types of violence. The departments where CPT work, Bolivar had 9, 529 , Santander had 11, 442

* there are around a total of 4,915, 579 displaced people in Colombia in the last 25 years. 49% of those displacements happened under president Uribe.

* In 2009 there were 77 massive displacements. 83% of these massive displacements were of Afro-Colombians and indigenous

* Since 2002, Through systematic displacement, 5.5 million hectares of land have been opened for mono cropping and multinational use and reducing the campesino population by 1 million people.

When we talked about displacement, we have to begin to talk about who is benefiting from the violence and displacement in Colombia and/or the reason behind the displacements. Clearly, the reasons are economical and have served the purpose of allowing Multinational corporations access to the land to mono-crop palm oil, sugar cane to produce bio diesel. Or in the case of the communities in Sur de Bolivar, multinational mining corporation's search for Gold.