You find them at every traffic light in the city, sometimes even multitudes of them, cleaning car windows, fire twirling, performing circus tricks, or just waiting for an alimony.

They're not junkies. Ironically, Colombia hardly has a drug addicts problem in the streets of its cities. Here, the problem is the amount of 'desplazados', the displaced people that crowd the streets. Bogota alone has some 3 MILLION of them, and every year another 400.000 are added. Homeless families coming from the Colombian countryside. Driven away by the continuing violence. Violence that is often not even caused by the confrontations between guerillas, paramilitaries and army. These are relatively rare as all of them do have their own territories. But the groups have their ways of exercising their power over the people in their regions. One of them is intimidation of the population and an effective way is the killing of supposed opponents.

Especially the paramilitaries are experts in the eradication of whoever gets in their way. At this moment paramilitary groups seem to have over 40% of the country under control. They do not only hate guerilleros, but also detest homosexuals, subversives, or anybody else that confuses them.

For the victims, driven away from houses and territories which have often been in the family for generations, settling elsewhere in the region is hardly an option as their act of fleeing itself is seen as proof of being guilty. Their only option is to flee to the anonimity of the big city, where the problems of the war are hardly felt. But the city, with an official unemployment rate of close to 20%, has very little to offer for the 3 million people that are not even included in these statistics.

Merry Christmas,