Lost (22 images)
Photos from the abandoned and semi-abandoned villages and hamlets from where the local communities have been forced to flee by armed groups. Accompanied with testimonies and histories of displacement and human rights violations. Lost was taken on a 6x6 cm negative medium format camera (Mamiya C33 TLR).
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![A bullet impact in the wall of the now derelict home of Hernán Arias Restrepo. Hernán was the first victim of a massacre of 11 villagers by right-wing paramilitaries of the self-named Farmers' Self-defences of Cordoba and Urabá (known by their Spanish acronym - ACCU)...At daybreak on the 10 of July 1996 a heavily-armed group of men dressed in combats arrived, waking villagers and taking several of them from their homes. First they killed Hernán Arias Restrepo, and then they woke Miguel Gonzalez and Piedad Carmona, taking them from their home and walking them back and forth along the main Medellín-Urabá highway. Then they returned them to where their three children waited and gunned the couple down...Eleven villagers were massacred by paramilitaries that morning. Minutes after the armed men left, the survivors began gathering what little they could and they fled. Within hours the village was empty and over the years that followed it fell into decay. One day, years later a bulldozer contracted by a large landowner arrived and flattened the homes on the western side of the highway and now cows graze where the homes once stood..."On the day of the massacre everyone took their bags - and ciao... the most terrifying thing was [that they killed] Don Miguel and Doña Piedad. They were a Christian couple; a good example; industrious. How could it be? If it happened to them, then what would they do to us?" A villager speaking about the massacre of Villa Arteaga...In the last 25 years 4.9 million persons have been forcibly displaced in Colombia's civil conflict, bringing it alongside Sudan as one of the two largest internal displacement situations in the world...At the root of the violence and displacement in Colombia is control: control of the local population, control of territory, control of natural resources, and control of the local economies...It is the rural civilian population has lost most in Colombia's civil conflict - not only seeing their family and neighbours kille](http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000tDZXy14rVXI/t/200/I0000tDZXy14rVXI.jpg)
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![The abandoned rubber plant in the village of Caucheras which was gradually deserted as the violence took hold during the "Pacification of Urabá". Before the violence, the locals cultivated and made their livelihoods from their rubber smallholdings, which provided for more than 500 people. A US company even had a rubber research laboratory in the village, which once boasted its own airstrip. Now the installations used for processing the natural rubber are overgrown and unused and the few locals who have returned to the area struggle to make a living from subsistence crops and the remaining rubber trees... "We all had a little bit of land & lived from the rubber crop. We all lived very well until the violence began & the displacements. To go from here to there [Medellín] was the most difficult for us. It all began to get very difficult, we had to leave for the city that we had never known and we had to live there... We had everything we needed and then we lost everything. I had a plot of land and... Because of the violence I had to abandon it and later, when I was displaced, I had to sell it for less than it was worth. I gave it away: in the city we were living hand to mouth and the little money that remained, that went paying the rent in the city until we ended up wandering from place to place." Bernadino Torres Güisao, a farmer who fled with his family during the paramilitary violence and went to live in a slum in the city of Medellín...In the last 25 years 4.9 million persons have been forcibly displaced in Colombia's civil conflict, bringing it alongside Sudan as one of the two largest internal displacement situations in the world...At the root of the violence and displacement in Colombia is control: control of the local population, control of territory, control of natural resources, and control of the local economies...It is the rural civilian population has lost most in Colombia's civil conflict - not only seeing their family and neighbours killed, but also losi](http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000cPkFB1C_Pxg/t/200/I0000cPkFB1C_Pxg.jpg)
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