In Catatumbo, a region on the border with Venezuela, women have been giving birth at home for months. It is not for lack of hospitals but because they are afraid to take the roads and get caught in the crossfire between two guerrilla groups. Babies take months to be registered, farmers fear stepping on mines, and children hide when they see drones flying overhead laden with explosives. Those who stayed do not venture out and live locked up as if during a pandemic. Those who could leave fled, and the region has lost nearly 100,000 residents over the past year. “We are not part of this war, but we are in it,” a community leader told EL PAÍS, fearing he could be killed. This Sunday, Colombia holds the first round of its presidential elections. It does so with that war in the background, and with three other deep wounds that no candidate has fully explained how they intend to heal.

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Renewed violence — a kind that has never been fully extinguished in Colombia — marks the presidential campaign to choose Gustavo Petro’s successor. In many places, the first-round vote this Sunday will take place under crossfire. Nearly 10 years after the signing of the historic peace accord with the now-defunct FARC guerrilla organization, other armed actors threaten communities and the war still burns, albeit in a more fragmented phase. The humanitarian consequences of the armed conflict have reached “the most serious level of the last decade,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned this month. Amid that crisis, public security has become one of the main concerns.

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