COLOMBIA: REPORTS SHOW QUADRUPLING OF DISPLACED PERSONS IN PAST DECADE.

Colombia's continuing conflicts have created a displaced population of three million to four million people, according to reports from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), the Catholic Church, and other groups. The displacement crisis has seen geometric growth under Plan Colombia, the US-funding program for military activities, and President Alvaro Uribe's "democratic security" and "Plan Patriota" policies of hard-line military action against rebel groups, according to statistical surveys.

Growing conflict makes millions refugees

The number of people displaced from their communities because of the armed conflict quadrupled in the past decade, leading the Catholic Church and humanitarian organizations to estimate in February that almost three million Colombians lived in poverty-level conditions. The first report by the Catholic Church on displaced people in 1995 spoke of some 586,000 refugees. By 2005 the church had counted 2.9 million in a report titled Challenges For Constructing the Nation: The Country Facing Displacement, Armed Conflict, and Humanitarian Crisis.

The nongovernmental organization Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos (CODHES) contributed data to the report, which concluded that "there is an expansion of displacement associated with the intensification of the conflict."

Maurizio Pontini, a Catholic priest and one of the study's authors, told The Associated Press that "displacement continues to be produced, it has not ended as people want it to be understood so much of the time."

Harvey Suarez, CODHES researcher and coauthor of the study, said, "In the 2005 map, there is a greater impact in the southern part of the country where there was a flare-up in confrontations caused by policies of territorial recuperation under Plan Patriota."

Suarez said the military activity had strong repercussions because in those forested areas with low population density, a few families represented whole populations that, once they fled, left the areas vacant.