Ana*, 38, vividly remembers the black-and-white tennis shoes of one of the men who held her and her family at gun point in their home as they searched for her father to kill him. It was 2001, and she was 18.
It was not the first assassination attempt against him.
For decades, Colombia has been immersed in civil war, with leftist guerilla groups – the largest of which was the FARC – on one side and the state and the AUC (United Self-Defence), an umbrella organisation for different right-wing paramilitary groups, on the other.
As a young man, Ana’s father was a member of the UP (Patriotic Union), a left-wing political party formed in 1985 as part of an attempted peace process between the FARC and the Colombian government. He was also a human rights advocate and an activist for the Afro-Colombian community, of which Ana’s family is a part.
Thousands of members of UP were killed by state and paramilitary forces, including two presidential candidates, in what became known as the “genocide of the UP” between 1985 and 2002, when it ceased to exist as a political party after failing to acquire enough votes to remain in Congress. According to CNMH (the National Centre of Historical Memory), more than 4,000 UP members, elected mayors and town hall representatives were targeted in these killings.
Boats cruise along Tumaco in southern Colombia, the town where Ana lived with her family when armed men invaded their home in 2001, looking to kill her father [File: Fernando Vergara/AP Photo/File]“Many people thought that my father was a guerrilla from FARC, because he was part of the UP, but he never was part of an armed group,” Ana says. When the right-wing paramilitaries began taking control of Tumaco, a small town with a population of 170,000 on the south Pacific coast of Colombia, where the family lived, Ana’s father was asked to join them due to his influence in the community. He refused.
Because the state-armed forces were known to be allied with the far-right paramilitaries in Tumaco, there was no way to ask for protection. Ana and her family had to leave the town in 2000, and she became one of the more than 6 million people in Colombia who have been displaced by the conflict.
Ana’s family moved to a new city where her father continued his activism with another leftist political party, POLO Democrático, as well as working with other human rights advocacy and Afro-Colombian rights organisations. But, fearing the repercussions this might spark from right-wing armed groups, he remained alone in this city while the rest of the family – her sister, mother and brother – lived elsewhere.
Colombia’s decades-old war had finally broken the family apart.
In 2017, after surviving two previous attempts on his life, Ana’s father was killed. A gunman the family believes was from a right-wing paramilitary group from Barranquilla arrived at his home on a motorcycle and shot him several times in the chest.
A month later, a threatening anonymous letter arrived at the family’s home. Soon after, two men arrived on motorcycles and told them to leave or be killed. So, they packed their bags, borrowed some money from friends and relatives, sold many of their belongings and fled. In total, nine members of the family – Ana and her siblings, their partners and their children – arrived in Spain, where they knew no one, in December 2018.
The siblings had considered Canada and Mexico but eventually settled on Spain because there are no visa requirements for Colombians to enter and stay for 90 days.
The family currently lives in Huesca, in the community of Aragón, near the Pyrenees.
They have dire memories of the first shelter for asylum seekers they arrived at – underdressed and under-prepared for the winter weather – in Madrid. They struggled to adjust to sharing a shelter with 100 other people, where they could not cook for themselves and the food was poor.
But soon Ana and her siblings landed their first jobs in Spain, as extras on a TV show. They were paid just 3 euros and a sandwich each for 10 hours of work, but with that money they were able to buy some food outside the shelter. When they were relocated to a new shelter in Huesca, the first thing they asked was if they could cook and, when told yes, they were “screaming and laughing” in joy, Ana says.
In Spain, Colombians can stay for up to 90 days without a visa, but after this they must obtain permission.
The process of applying for asylum, for Ana’s family, has been bittersweet. It does not always make sense. Her sister, Maria*, was denied asylum in June 2020, even though it was granted to Ana and her brother during the same process. The official explanation was that the Colombian government had signed a peace accord with the FARC, and the country was therefore safe for her sister to return to. No explanation was given as to why this had not been applied in the case of Ana and her brother. Her sister is now applying for a “family integration” residence permit, on the basis that she has a child who was born in Spain in 2020 and who has Spanish nationality.
