Lino Hurtado is the local police post construction promoter, he also promotes rural roads construction and the Coffee Growers Committee.

In San Adolfo, a settlement in the Acevedo municipality, which is in Huila’s southeast, the violence left harsh marks that people like Lino Antonio Hurtado still have recent memories of.

Despite this, this man of medium height, deep gaze and calloused hands from his work as a coffee grower, strives to build a new horizon of calm and well-being for the new generations of people in his town.

He spends his time entirely to coffee growing in the vast mountains of the Eastern Cordillera and to be a part of the “sabedores” group promoted by the Unit for the Victims that promotes San Adolfo’s collective reparation. This fills him with pride and allows him to smile calmly at 78 years old, an age he considers the final stretch of his life.

He married his first and only love at 27 when the bride was 20. They fought side by side together for 28 years until one day she fell ill, “she had an acute liver crisis, and her life was gradually turned off. Specialists from Bogota couldn´t save her, and she died there on a cold morning that I rather not remember.”

From the union there were 10 male children, and today all of them have been displaced by the war, he comments in disillusion with tears in his gray eyes. Afterwards, he recalls that at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new century “one didn’t know who came to the house to take the boys". He stayed while they fled to avoid being recruited by the armed groups.

A stand-up man

He was born in 1944 in Restrepo (Valle del Cauca), but has been living in Huila for 60 years, its lands amazed him from the beginning. In fact, he remembers that he worked tirelessly up in the mountains for several years, "only with God and the Virgin.". At that time, his skin was sun-burned as a result of the long hours and his hair turned completely white.

He devoted himself to clear the land where he would settle with his family, and everything was going well in the midst of the sacrifices and loneliness, until the day some armed men scolded him because they said he was "carrying war gossip." With courage he replied: "Shot me twice then, get rid of the problem.", and perhaps it was this kind of character what stopped a fatal outcome.

But he couldn’t have the calm he hoped for his family. "At the end I lost my temper, I got bored, and I abandoned the little farm.” He left it to a man he knew, who later wanted to take away his property but couldn’t, because it was pledged to the Caja Agraria. "Then that man wanted to kill me, but a good friend told him to be careful, to not to mess up with the town.

His work

These and other troubles haven’t separated him from San Adolfo; on the contrary, he clings more to the place, and he boasts the feats achieved thanks to his charisma, such as managing the process to have a police post in San Adolfo, achieving the creation of the local Coffee Growers Committee, the main economic development base in the municipality, and bringing a bulldozer that opened the country roads, which today allows land communication in the area.

 “I have always been a coffee lover, since a pound was worth 5 cents, 12 pounds five pesos. Everything was on the back of a mule and with the little roads the carts entered; the one who could, bought his car. The one who didn't, paid his friend to move the load.”

At 78 years old, Don Lino, as those who appreciate him call him, still waits for his children, since the years “go by and by without knowing about them. I want them to come so that we can build an emporium, plant good quality coffee, arracacha, cassava and as much as possible, because it is useless to have money if there is nothing to eat,” he expresses in discomfort because few people like to work in the fields nowadays.

The victims

Today, Lino focuses his life and his reason for living working with the conflict victims, which is a passion for him: “our hope is the Unit for the Victims in this peace process that is being built in the country,” he says gratefully on behalf of the communities.

He spends a great deal of his time in that mission, promoting agriculture among young people as the first source of wealth and making sure the roads, the aqueduct and the sewer system improve, so many needs together whose solution would be faster and more effective, he warns, if San Adolfo would become a municipality.

“I have sought this at the national level, but I have been left alone. They pay attention to those who have money rather than a poor community leader, but I don't lose hope,” he concludes.

Although the years’ weight and the soul’s scars have taken their toll, Lino lives in a small house with a grandson, and he is in good health. “Today I feel steadier than an oak, and the oaks die standing up, waiting for my last will: to see my children gathered with their wives and my grandchildren playing around me. Also, that the conflict victims may get glorious justice for all the pain suffered," he says this with a serene look, petting Cafe, the dog that has being by him for 15 years.

(FIN/NIL/COG/RAM)