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In 1999, after death threats linked to paramilitary accusations, Alfredo Molano left Colombia for Spain. From exile he assembled first-person accounts of peasants, teachers, and community leaders driven off their land, from the Magdalena Medio to the Chocó, published in 2001 as Desterrados. The collector's own uprooting is part of the evidence: the violence that displaced his subjects also reached the person documenting it.
The testimonies show forced displacement working as a way to take land, not as collateral damage of war. Massacres, threats, and selective killings empty a region of its smallholders. The abandoned plots are then bought cheaply or seized and consolidated into ranches, agribusiness, or strategic corridors. The pattern of who is expelled, and who ends up owning the land, reveals the economic logic behind what looks like chaotic violence.
Where several armed groups compete for territory, each treats ordinary acts of survival as proof of collaboration with the enemy. Selling food, giving directions, or paying an extortion demand can all count. Neutrality becomes impossible because the other side reads any contact as allegiance. The danger comes less from being in the crossfire than from being classified by whoever controls the area next.