BOGOTA, Colombia — Juan Camilo Pinilla was out on patrol with the army when he heard the explosion. His rapid response unit had been hunting down members of Colombia’s major guerrilla group in the hot, war-torn province of Meta, but that day he was the one who was caught. He looked down and saw that a land mine had taken off most of his foot — an injury so severe doctors would later have to amputate half his leg.
Eight years later and he is back in Meta, only today he is working side-by-side with his former enemies as part of a land mine clearance project. Although they make unlikely allies, he says he has one thing in common with the ex-guerrilla fighters on his team: None of them want to hear the sound of gunfire or the explosion of a land mine again.
The 52-year conflict between the government and the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has left this country one of the most heavily mined in the world.
Following congressional approval this week of a peace deal between the government and rebels, attention now turns to clearing the country of these deadly explosives. Experts say clearing the land mines — one of the key pledges of the peace agreement — will be a tedious, expensive task that will take years.
“There’s a very real problem here,” says Chris Ince, the country manager for the HALO Trust, a British demining organization. “Sixty-five percent of all Colombia’s municipalities have some kind of mine threat. While some are in the middle of nowhere protecting former FARC positions where in reality no one goes, some are in high-impact areas, placed around schools or roads to market.”
Although no one is quite sure how many mines lie buried under Colombia’s fields and on its jungle passes, the country has the unenviable title of being the most heavily mined after Afghanistan.
Since 1990, land mines have claimed more than 2,000 lives and have injured or maimed more than 8,800. Although there has been a reduction in the number of victims since the de-facto ceasefire came into effect, already in 2016, 74 people have been injured or killed in land mine accidents. In 2015, almost half of civilian casualties were children.
Even as the peace talks reached their final stages, a 6-year-old boy was killed and another injured when they detonated a land mine searching for their football around the back of their home.
Clearing the mines was one of the key pledges of the peace deal agreed between the government and the rebels this summer. Although the first version of the agreement was rejected in a popular plebiscite on Oct. 2, a final deal was signed last week and approved by congress on Wednesday.
For demining organizations that have been in limbo — not sure whether to start new operations or whether this country might be going back to war — the deal is a welcome step. It still needs to be ratified by congress, but the FARC have now promised to hand over all their weapons, including their land mines, and to provide information on where the mines have been planted.
Demining organizations, which have only been able to use demobilized guerrilla soldiers in their programs, are hopeful that fighters currently in the rebel ranks will soon be able to join their teams, bringing fresh knowledge of FARC tactics and land mine locations.
Camilo Serna, deputy director of the Colombian Campaign to Ban Landmines, a pressure group that also carries out humanitarian demining, says that although the peace talks have been going on for four years, organizations like his have been unable to hire active fighters because until the deal is signed off, they are still considered “criminals.”
In addition to tapping into FARC knowledge about land mine placement, Serna says the agreement will allow demining workers to gain access to territories once controlled by the guerrillas.
“The government’s plan is to start demining in certain priority zones where the FARC have been the dominant actor in the conflict,” he says. “The biggest problem is in those areas.”
Colombia has promised its international partners that it will be free of land mines by 2021, but this will be a mammoth task. Even before the first deal was rejected, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos said reaching that goal would require the country to work ” 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” A report by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines says the country is currently “not on track” to meet the deadline.
Declaring a territory mine-free is a painstaking process: In a square kilometer, there might only be three or four mines — or none — but each area has to be mapped and then meticulously examined before it can be declared safe.
It can also be expensive. And while some experts, like Ince, question how reliable the information from the rebels will be, others think what they hand over will be a huge help.
“I believe they have significant information,” says Jorge Restrepo, the director of the conflict analysis center CERAC. “It may not be perfect military grade information, but what they know will significantly reduce the cost of demining.”
Gustavo Becerra, an orthopedic surgeon at the CIREC Foundation in Bogotá, where hundreds of land mine victims have been treated during the war, hopes that he will soon start seeing a reduction in patients. But he does not expect things to change overnight.
“Everybody knows that getting rid of the mines is going to take a lot longer than it takes to sign a piece of paper,” he says. “In other parts of the world where they have done this it has taken a long time.”
But at least today there is hope.
“What does it mean for these communities to be free of mines?” asks Pinilla, the former soldier wounded by a land mine. “It means development, that displaced people can return and get their land back. No one wants peace more than those that have lived the war — that have seen conflict.”
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After the Peace Agreement, Colombia Turns to Demining originally appeared on usnews.com
