Through a co-financing project, victim families improve agricultural crops and benefit from psychosocial care in three Antioquia municipalities.

The farms of 100 peasant families in La Unión are today more productive thanks to the improvement and expansion of their potato crops, the most traditional product of this municipality in Antioquia.

Many of these farmers suffered in the past the murder or disappearance of relatives and forced displacements due to the dispute between guerrillas and paramilitary groups in the region.

To improve their living conditions, with the generation of family income and to strengthen the agricultural vocation and to remain in the rural areas they inhabit, farmers received inputs (tools, seeds, fertilizers, fumigation pumps), technical assistance and cash to pay the wages necessary to strengthen or start their sowing.

The strengthening of production was achieved thanks to an agreement between the Victims Unit and the local City Hall, which favored families such as Gilma Giraldo's.

“This project helped us a lot because it was very complete and helped many families in the village of San Juan, where I live, who was very beaten by violence, like my family who stole the cattle for two years, but now is in calm”, said the woman.

She feels motivated with the benefits, since "with the inputs, the economic incentives and the technical help we sow in a lot and with the profits of that first harvest it allowed us to cultivate again".

Psychosocial care

Apart from income generation, psychosocial attention by the Victims Unit facilitated the social reunion of families and communities with each other and regained the trust that was broken by violence.

Gilma points out that “in the meetings with psychologists, people talked about how everything had happened and that there were things they would not forget, but people also understood that there were reasons to move forward and that they are recovering that social network that had been lost even among neighbors and now you feel a calmer environement”.

In total, 300 families made up of some 1,500 victims of armed conflict benefit in the municipalities of La Unión, Sopetrán and Ituango, where mango and coffee were also grown.

The director of the Victims Unit in Antioquia, Wilson Córdoba Mena, said that “this project of cofinancing with the municipalities for 2,685,214 million pesos has a transformative impact because it strengthens the agricultural vocation of the area and points to the recovery of social fabric and also to overcome the welfare of the State”.

In this department, the entity has invested a total of 2.6 billion pesos since 2012 for individual reparation, humanitarian and emergency aid, subsidiary support to municipalities, agricultural and social and community infrastructure projects.

(End/JCM/CMC/LMY)