In July 1988, my brother was killed (by paramilitaries) in a massacre in Carmen de Bolívar. Then, in August 2000, the FARC-EP guerrilla exploded a bomb at precisely the moment my niece was on her way home from school on a motorbike with three other school friends. As they were passing the hardware store, the bomb went off, and they were burnt alive … the bomb was enormous, and the flames went up higher than the town church. A man managed to get my niece out, he was also burnt, but they couldn't do anything for her. What she suffered was very hard. I can still remember the sound of the ambulance, and when I hear ambulances today it's terrible, and smell burning; you would think that these things don't leave scars, but they do.

On 26 August, it was our turn; seven killed, three our own, and four others in our village. It was there they killed my husband. They left their letters painted on the walls, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia [AUC, paramilitaries], and they wrote ‘death to rats, guerrillas and informers’, in large letters. On the wall on the other side of the building they wrote ‘AUC is present here’. From that moment, everyone felt scared. Many massacres followed, week after week. That's when I was displaced.