They also receive guidance and inter-institutional offer for the adequate investment of 5,500 million pesos notified by the Unit for Victims.

With guidance for the adequate investment of economic compensation, 548 victims of the armed conflict in Antioquia will be able to improve their living conditions with the 5.5 billion pesos they receive in September as a measure of their reparation.

The first of 12 days programmed by the Unit for Comprehensive Attention and Reparation to Victims for this month in different municipalities was held in the Belencito care center, in Medellín, complying with the distancing and biosecurity measures ordered by the Government before the pandemic.

One of the 199 people who received their letters of dignity is Javier Zapata. He says that on May 12, 1996, “I moved from a village to Apartadó, leaving my family and losing my little land and everything I had when the paramilitaries arrived with a list in hand to kill the people; we fled at midnight”.

After several years, he settled in Medellín, where he now has plans to improve his quality of life with financial compensation as a remedial measure for his forced displacement. "This government aid is very useful, investing it as savings to buy a house", he says happily after receiving the notification of the bank draft.

On the same day, the beneficiaries were guided by the professionals of the individual repair group on the offer of the entity, the Mayor's Office of Medellín and other institutions such as Colpensiones for the adequate investment of these public monies in housing, higher education, savings, projects productive, pensions, new lines of credit from Finagro and Bancoldex.

The director of the Victims Unit in Antioquia, Wilson Córdoba Mena, reported that these 199 victims “receive 2.000 million pesos that point to the recovery of their life projects that were affected by violence and therefore the accompaniment to the adequate investment of these monies through the inter-institutional offer”.

In addition, it indicated that “these administrative compensations are added to more than 1.130.000 already delivered by the Victims Unit in the last nine years in Colombia in compliance with the Victims Law. Of these, about 270.000 in Antioquia”.

The compensated persons benefited from the priority route of reparation in recognition of the victimizing acts that they suffered, such as homicides and forced disappearance of relatives, kidnappings, forced displacement, dispossession of property and personal injuries.

During the act of reparation, it was reiterated to the population affected by the armed conflict that the procedures, consultations and procedures before the entity are free and that they do not need intermediaries or processors to access the measures of attention and reparation.

In total, the Unit for the Reparation of Victims has invested 13.2 billion pesos in Colombia (2.9 billion in Antioquia) for individual reparation, humanitarian and emergency aid, community infrastructure projects and subsidiary support to entities territorial.

(End/JCM/LMY)