Colombia's displaced community, los desplazados, are the collateral damage of more than 40 years of armed conflict, the repressed guilt of a nation whose collective unconscious burns with a history of violence and bloodshed.
Caught in the middle of a war between left-wing guerillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the Colombian army, los desplazados have found themselves to be nothing more than a political inconvenience in a geopolitical quagmire the world has grown weary of.
These photos show the struggle of more than 3000 internally displaced people who occupied the park of Tercer Milenio, in central Bogotá, between April and August 2009. They were there to protest an uncaring government and to claim the rights that they are entitled to under Colombian law but that in practice very few receive.
The protest of Parque Tercer Milenio shows a mere snapshot of a displacement problem that gives Colombia the second largest internally displaced population in the world, numbering between three and five million people.
The events that took place in the park offer a microcosmic view of what happens in various forms to displaced people all over Colombia. The movement symbolises the struggle for a population, who, after having lost everything to a brutal war, must then continue to fight just to receive the rights most others take for granted.
Of the 1300 families that lived in the park for more than four months. some walked away with meagre compensation - a lot less than what the were legally entitled to but something nonetheless - while many received nothing at all, and left empty-handed and with no homes to go to.
And so cut down, dispersed, and ultimately sent back into the fire, the seeds of poverty and desperation were once more sowed deep into Colombia's fertile tierra and los desolazados were sent back to take their place existing in the void where violence, corruption, and consequence meet.
- 2009
