Armed Conflicts, Children on the Frontline, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: “I Was Ready for Anything – Except for Mourning a Daughter”

Constanza Vieira

EL CREDO, Colombia, Oct 17 2011 (IPS) - In the wooden, sheet-metal roofed house, the exact spot where Vanesa Coicué, an 11-year-old Nasa Indian girl, fell is marked by white and yellow chrysanthemums in a plastic soda bottle, along with a lit candle and an orange tree seedling.

Vanesa Coicué's desk is empty. Her friends don't want to sit in that classroom anymore.  Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

Vanesa Coicué's desk is empty. Her friends don't want to sit in that classroom anymore. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

At the foot of the improvised altar, next to a plastic jar with a pink lid, is a biscuit – Vanesa’s favourite kind. It was put there by her mother, Miriam Coicué: “I think about her as if she were still here.”

Miriam’s husband Abel Coicué is a journalist with the Payúmat indigenous radio station that broadcasts from the city of Santander de Quilichao in the southwest Colombian province of Cauca.

In his line of work, he has seen many families cry. “I saw many compañeros killed, so I was more or less prepared for that. I started working with the community when I was really young. I was ready for anything – except for mourning a son or daughter,” he says.

Vanesa was killed in her own home on Sep. 16 when an improvised explosive device containing shrapnel designed to cause the greatest possible damage exploded two metres from the three-room house where the family lives and operates a small neighbourhood shop.

That day they had eaten breakfast early. If the fighting that broke out the day before continued, the plan was to go down the mountain to the school that was designated as a shelter in the area, where skirmishes between the government forces and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been escalating.


But they kept putting off the departure.

“Miriam, are you going down?” four different people had already asked her. The fifth was her mother. But just the thought of the 40-minute hike to the school made her cringe.

“I kept looking out at the road, with the idea of going. But my body, I don’t know, it felt so weak. I just couldn’t brave the walk. My feet were shaking,” said Miriam, describing her fear. “I couldn’t shake off the stupor, or the sadness I was feeling. My eyes kept welling up, but I didn’t know why.”

She took a nap. When she opened her eyes, Vanesa smiled at her from the doorway, standing next to her brother – her only sibling – while playfully waving a red flower.

A few minutes later, as she headed into the kitchen, Miriam heard “when they launched the explosive,” and she and a neighbour wondered together where it would fall. It was 3:50 PM.

“Right then we heard something, I don’t know, an explosion. When I opened my eyes it was dark, there was dust, leaves falling. I didn’t know what had happened. We were trembling, because everything had been shaken. Then I heard the screams.”

The explosive device hit a tree on the left side of the front yard. Eight people were injured, mainly children from the extended Coicué family. “Everyone was bleeding. I didn’t know who to pick up.” Miriam used her cell-phone to call for help.

Suddenly she saw her daughter Vanesa lying in the small hallway between the bedrooms, bleeding profusely. She took her in her arms. People were coming and carrying away the injured. The mother gradually found herself alone with her daughter, desperately calling out to her, but “she didn’t respond.”

A member of the local Indigenous Guard – an unarmed civil resistance force that protects the culture in the native territory – who was passing by on a motorcycle took Vanesa with him. “I picked up the girl; she was pale, with blood on her chest. She sighed and squeezed my hand tightly, and then let go. That’s when I knew there was nothing I could do for her. After that, everything was quiet,” he said.

Today, the Coicué’s house looks like an infirmary. Two women wearing casts still can’t walk; one of them gets around by hopping. Eight-year-old Jonathan lifts up his shirt and shows the wound where a piece of rebar – of the kind used in the construction industry – as long as his hand buried itself in his body. Seven-year-old Kelly, her face crisscrossed with scars, just smiles and says nothing.

They are all back from the hospital, which is even more painful for Miriam, because her daughter Vanesa did not come home with them. “If she had just been injured, I would have brought her home to take care of her,” she said.

The army arrived on Sep. 15 at 4:40 AM and camped out at the foot of the school in El Credo, a village of 136 houses on a hill between Santander de Quilichao and Toribío, the main city of the Nasa people in the northern part of Cauca province.

When the leftwing guerrillas showed up at 8:30 AM, the fighting broke out.

Vanesa wanted to be a secretary or a nurse, and loved to play football. She said: “I want to participate, I want to know things, I want to be like my daddy.” She listened, entranced, to his programme every day. “You have to study first,” Miriam would tell her.

“She would ask me, ‘Mommy, am I pretty?’ and I would tell her yes. She started fixing her own hair when she was eight. She washed her own clothes when she got home from school, and she knew how to cook rice. She was tidy, and argued with her 13-year-old brother John Alexander because he left his shoes lying around.

Now he can hardly cope with the emptiness left by Vanesa’s death.

Miriam only asks “to see my son grow up.” She wants the government “to invest money so that children can study, get job training. Not to train them for war.”

And she wants the FARC “not to take in any more kids, any more youngsters; to let them live with their families in their communities, in peace. People with weapons steal the lives of others.”

“Vanesa was well-behaved. She would come home directly from school, she wouldn’t linger to play along the way. I never had any complaints about her.” Miriam seems to find some consolation in remembering. “Her friends miss her so much. They ask me ‘why?’ And I don’t have any answers for them.”

Vanesa’s classroom has a dirt floor and green plastic sheeting instead of walls. Her empty desk holds a purple ribbon, two withered roses, a prayer card with the image of Jesus, a rosary and candy that the children share with Vanesa to cheer up her spirit, in keeping with Nasa beliefs.

She was in sixth grade, and was doing well in all subjects. She was part of the Student Guard, but she wanted to be “in the grown-up Guard,” who travel and hold gatherings.

“It hurts, maybe because her life was cut short, that she had so many dreams about what she was going to be, what she would study,” says her father.

“The war in Colombia, here in the territories of campesinos (peasants), blacks and indigenous people, isn’t because of the guerrillas or the drug trade. That is the justification given by the government to wage war here. That’s what they say in the big media.

“But the reality we experience here is different,” he says. “Mining companies are seeking concessions to operate in all of these territories. In some indigenous reserves, they are already coming in. This war is to force us out.

“Both sides benefit from the war. Why?” Because the insurgents “know that if the multinationals come in, they will have a source of income. The same goes for the army and the police. Everyone will be making money. That’s why the war is happening here.”

Abel Coicué had not received his salary as a journalist for five months, and all extra purchases had been postponed. On Tuesday Sep. 13 he called Miriam and told her to make a list of things the children wanted, because he had been paid.

The four of them planned to go shopping the following Saturday. But that day they held a wake instead, for Vanesa.

 
Republish | | Print |


fundamentals of industrial hygiene