Reports and presenter:

LL Lucy Lamble

Interviewees and speakers:

EG Eamon Gilmore

GV Gustavo Villegas

PB Pablo Bedoya

BC Benjamin Cabrera

JK Josefina Klinger

AN Andreas

MA Marcela

EG This is an extraordinary peace agreement, it is the most comprehensive peace agreement that the world has ever seen. It’s not just about the laying down of arms, it’s not just about ending the violence, it is about essentially building a new Colombia.

LL The majority of Colombians have not experienced a single day of peace in their lifetimes during a complex war driven by inequality, narco-trafficking and the control of territory. The conflict was between the guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, the government and paramilitaries. Following four years of negotiation between the Colombian government and the Farc, a peace agreement was signed in November 2016.

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It’s estimated that almost a quarter of a million people have been killed, and close to 7 million displaced in the 52-year civil war in Colombia. I’m Lucy Lamble, and in this month’s podcast I visit communities on the rural Pacific coast and the two biggest cities in the interior, Bogotá and Medellín.

EG The design of the peace agreement, the way it was negotiated, the fact that victims were brought into the process and the text and the content of the agreement has so many innovations in it, and therefore the implementation will also have to be innovative.

LL Eamon Gilmore, a former minister for foreign affairs and trade for Ireland and a veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process has been working on the Colombian process since 2015.

EG It is about addressing the causes of the conflict in the first place, the issues around rural development. It is very innovative.

LL It’s not just in rural areas where an innovative approach to the process of peace will be crucial, Medellín, the second largest city in Colombia and the capital of the mountainous Antioquia province, is a city that’s gone through massive change. In the 90s it was known as the drug trafficking centre of the world, largely because of the presence of some of the most infamous characters and cartels, from Pablo Escobar to the Castaño brothers. It’s also gone through radical experiments in urban planning. I met Gustavo Villegas, head of security in Medellín, at the city’s Museum of Memory. The museum is dedicated to the victims of armed conflict and guided by the principle of remembering, not repeating.

GV In the 60s, 70s and 80s Medellín was the most important city for industry in Colombia, but in the 90s the city changed into the centre of narco-trafficking in the world. At that time it was also the most violent city and we also had those that we don’t want to remember but cannot avoid, the big names in narco-trafficking like Pablo Escobar and the brothers Castaño, who also had their operations in Medellín. Day by day Medellín has come out of that ethos, that violence. Today Medellín is a vibrant city, and that’s thanks to the people and especially the organisations and the social entities who stood their ground in those difficult times. It was their communities who went on to rebuild the city. Now we have a city that’s not only innovative, it’s also one in which the people want to talk about what we went through because indisputably we don’t want anyone in the world to go through what we went through here in Medellín.

LL Medellín seems to be divided between the people who live in the city plains and those who live higher up in the surrounding mountains where conditions are very different.

GV The hills of Medellín in the part in the north and the north-west are where I was telling you all the migrants arrived. As you can see, there’s no urban planning there and the public services were hastily built as the displaced people arrived. Initially, the small shacks were just so that people could spend a night but they went on building and they started to inhabit those places permanently. Inequality has definitely been reduced but when it comes to education, access to employment and increasing the standard of living there’s still a lot of work to do. We are not yet in an ideal place, much is missing. There is a lot of inequality but every day this is being reduced.

LL I also met Pablo Bedoya from one of the civil society groups that play an active role at the museum. He spoke to me about how he sees the rebuilding process and the challenges the city still faces.

PB With the narco-traffic, going back to Pablo Escobar, you have to understand that narco-trafficking is a network. It is not one person who managed a group that produced a few things but it’s a network that reached all sections of society, from high society of the city to the masses.

At the moment, Medellín is negotiating a complicated process of untangling themselves with the ownership of territory. The violence is different, the groups are different, the situation of the country is different, but there are still many challenges. I always talk about the miracle of Medellín. In the 80s and 90s there were very high levels of violence and murders in the city. How did Medellín start to recover? The answer is that it was mainly civil society and its own organisations that rebuilt the city, they knew best what was needed. However, there are still criminal groups that want to maintain control of the territory because the land is profitable. They are not violent in the same way as in the 80s and 90s, but it is still necessary to intervene and to control it.

The narco-trafficking left a culture, like a model of violence, that the youth have adopted, so this is another area which is necessary to intervene in. We need to transform and change this culture. The young men must understand that having a gun doesn’t make them more manly, or the women mustn’t think it makes them more womanly to get a man to pay for their expenses, a trend that was prevalent in this city at the time. The community has a responsibility to eradicate this problem and prevent the youth from getting sucked into this culture.

LL After more than 50 years of conflict, all generations of Colombians have been affected, a third of those displaced are young people, very often separated from their families. Some are recruited through threats to their relatives or friends, often they’re offered large sums of money which never materialise and others are caught up in the apparent glamour.

In Bogotá I spoke to Andreas, 17, and Marcela, who’s 15, now safely at an NGO, Benposta, which provides security, support and education. Both have had to flee threats and violence. Andreas is originally from Buenaventura, Colombia’s biggest Pacific port, where the gangs just wouldn’t leave him alone.

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AN My name is Andreas, the reasons I came to Benposta is because in Buenaventura, where I’m from, this is a port by the sea, they would take the children and make them carry drugs, in this case, marijuana and all kinds of drugs. And they also used these children to carry guns, traffic guns, because the authorities in Buenaventura, they don’t prosecute children so they use children for carrying these kinds of things. There are at least 10 armed groups operating there and they recruited some of my friends. Well, it’s not recruiting them, they forced them, and not only did they force them but they told them that they’re going to pay them money – and then they don’t. When they asked me, I said no and so they told me that if I didn’t do it they would do something to me, something bad. They threatened me and so I told them do whatever you want. I kept saying no and finally they grabbed me and beat me up. I had a lot of wounds but they’ve healed now.

LL Marcela’s brother was recruited by guerrillas, in this case the National Liberation Army, or ELN.

MA Well, there was a problem in the family so he ran away from home. That same week they called my mum and they told her that the people from the ELN had taken him away. My mum went out there and she spoke with the leaders and she was trying to find a way to have him released, but they wouldn’t. Then after that they left a letter on our doorstep saying that unless my family sent me away they would recruit me – and that we had a month. My mum spoke with the UNHCR and they did whatever they could to get me out of town very quickly. It took about a week or two weeks for me to get to Benposta. When I got the threats, they had asked me to carry drugs and said they would kill me if I refused – that’s when I was sent here. It’s very hard on many of us but I’m doing my best. When I’m older I’d like to study many things but mainly my wish is to study human rights and be able to help out those people who need help, that is, people who don’t have a home, people who don’t have a place to live and don’t have any hope of making anything for themselves.

LL It’s often been the poorest and most marginalised in society who’ve suffered the most from the conflict. To the north of Buenaventura is Chocó, an area on the Pacific north-west coast of Colombia, known for its large Afro-Colombian population. Its stunning rainforest is also home to half of the population of the Emberá indigenous people. Neither population has had much access to services usually provided by the state. Instead, armed groups have been the major presence in the region. The European Union has just signed a €3m grant agreement with the three mayors in Chocó to tackle inequality, which – along with land issues – is one of the key causes of the conflict. The EU is supporting Colombia’s efforts to build peace from the grassroots up. The focus is on rural development, such as sustainable fishing, access to agriculture and markets, eco-tourism and reforming health and education services. In a village by the Utría national park I met Benjamin Cabrera from the Emberá.

BC I am part of the Emberá, and we live in the Quiperate community. The indigenous community of the Quiperate is made up of 320 people. It belongs to the Nuquí municipality. We’ve been here for many years, we have a local government headed by the local governor of the indigenous community. Our way of living is to grow our own food, and we have a lot of crops. Regarding the problems, there have been a lot of violent episodes but we’ve been resisting, and the authority of our local community, the governor, has supported and helped us to overcome the difficulties with respect to the violence. We’re still here, we’re still resisting.

We have had issues with the Farc and the ELN, also the paramilitary groups and some other groups but we don’t even know who they are. They know that we are a peaceful indigenous people and that we don’t want to get involved in violent actions. We, as a community, had the opportunity to vote yes because we really want peace, so we know that there’s still one more armed group to deal with, the ELN, but we are hopeful that we can gain peace and everything that we can do to reach that we will do it.

LL This particular community of the Emberá is already taking steps to welcome tourists. So far it’s been mostly nature tourism, people interested in seeing how the community lives or bird watching, canoeing through the mangrove swamps or going to local waterfalls. Colombia’s outstanding natural beauty has obvious appeal, but security issues have held back tourism. A little further into the national park there’s a beautiful bay where whales come to give birth each year and visitors can follow trails through the mangroves. There I met Josefina Klinger from the Afro-Colombian community in Nuquí, who works with the park authorities to welcome tourists.

JK We were born in very special surroundings and yet we grew up thinking we were third-rate citizens because as we were very poor we have been excluded. But the problem is not the tale that they told us but the tale that we tell ourselves, and many years ago we decided to welcome visitors to become hosts as a way to address our own fears. We need to show results but we’re not getting the resources, we’re not getting the opportunities that we need. The system itself is not made for us but whenever someone comes here, from an NGO, from international agencies, or whenever President Santos comes here, they’re charmed by the place. If this wasn’t a protected area then investors would have purchased it long ago. Now the ministry of trade wants to step in and wants to bring in private companies but we are not going to let that happen in Utría. To have sustainable development, all the state institutions need to work together.

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LL Following the agreement, Eamon Gilmore believes there are reasons to be optimistic. However, there are other armed groups which are still in operation and this poses a threat to the larger process.

EG President Santos has already committed to sending additional security forces into the areas that have been vacated by Farc to ensure that the state gets control of those areas. In the case of the ELN, of course, the government is negotiating with the ELN to bring about an end to their campaign of violence and to have a peace agreement with them. I hope that that succeeds, the European Union is supporting Colombia in its law enforcement effort and in particular in the whole detection of attacks on social movement leaders, trade union leaders, activists, human rights defenders.

LL I asked the special envoy why the rest of the world should care about what’s happening here in Colombia.

EG Because we all live in the same world. It’s important too because Colombia is a country which is very fertile, has an enormous potential to produce the food that a growing population in the world will need, and they’ve got a problem, they’ve got a problem in getting that food to market and we’ve got a problem in getting access to it. And I think there are practical ways in which we can help to deal with that.

LL This time next year Colombia will be holding a presidential election, by then Eamon Gilmore hopes to see the disarmament process completed.

EG There are millions and millions of victims and it will take time for those wounds to heal, but everywhere I go in Colombia and everybody that I talk to, whether it is people in government, people in the political opposition, people in Farc, and people throughout Colombian society, they all want a peaceful country and they want to build a sustainable peace. And the European Union has committed itself to supporting that effort, supporting it materially through our European Union Trust Fund and through other funds, supporting it politically through the work that I am doing, and being there for Colombia if and when things get difficult – that there are friends in the international community and Europe will stand by Colombia throughout this time.

LL That’s all for this month’s episode of the Global development podcast. You can subscribe via iTunes, SoundCloud or your favourite podcasting app. And you can also listen to other episodes on theguardian.com/global-development. I’m Lucy Lamble and the producer is Kary Stewart. Thanks for listening, goodbye.