The Association for Social Research and Action (Nomadesc) also accompanies urban communities who have been persecuted and been the victims of displacement by large-scale projects.

After the city of Cali was flooded in 2010, the Valle del Cauca Governor’s Office and the Regional Autonomous Corporation Valle del Cauca (CVC), planned to build the Jarillon Plan for the River Cauca and Complementary Works, whose objective was to reduce the risk of flooding from the River Cauca.[1] Of the 2,394,870 people who live in Cali (according to estimates by the National Administrative Department of Statistics – DANE – for 2016), 8,777 families live in the outcrops of the River Cauca. One of the places where it was decided to prioritise the project’s implementation is at Kilometre 14, in the sectors known as Venecia, Las Vegas and Cinta Larga, where 745 families live.[2]

Since the 1960s, families fleeing from the armed conflict in Cauca, Nariño and the Pacific have settled there.

In October 2016, Juan Diego Saa, the manager of the Jarillon Plan, declared that “the River Cauca flood defences will definitely be reinforced”[3]; this means that the families living there will have to evacuate by 2018. The people there do not oppose the project on principle, because the risk of flooding is real, but they do claim the right to be resettled and rehoused with dignity.

Nomadesc accompanies these families because instead of dignified resettlement, which asspecified in the Adaptation Fund project,[4] there have been episodes of unlawful evictions, abuse of authority, inequality and humanitarian crises which have breached international standards for human rights and dignified housing during 2016.[5]

Footnotes:

[1] El País, Jarillón, la amenaza silenciona de Cali, 2016.
[2] Ibíd.
[3] Tobón L.J.A., Sí o sí, vamos a liberar el jarillón del Río Cauca, October 2016.
[4] Fondo Adaptación, Proyecto Jarillón de Cali,
[5] Nomadesc, Despojo, abuso de autoridad, inequidad y crisis humanitaria en el Jarillón del Río Cauca, November 2016.