This is a composite image of several official maps published by the office in charge of mine action in Colombia. Due to significant changes in the administrative structure of the government and public policies around the "mine problem" in the country, this agency has changed its name many times in the last ten years.
Produced in 2007 for an official report on the progress Colombia has made to comply with ratified agreements of the Ottawa convention (the treaty that bans the use, storage, and production of antipersonnel mines), the first map shows "a country in red." The small red dots represent mine-related "accidents" and "incidents. Several national and international demining experts I interviewed in 2015-2016 believed that this visual representation said less about the ‘real’ problem of landmines, and more about the “retrograde” systems of registration, counting, and monitoring used by the state to account for mines and their afectaciones [effects/impacts].
The second and third maps are more recent. Constantly updated, one can find them on the main website of the Colombian mine action office, currently known as Descontamina Colombia. The map in the middle (the second one) illustrates the number of landmine victims of the country and organizes this data by political spatial divisions—there are 11,801 victims and survivors of improvised explosive devices and other remnants of war, Antioquia is the most affected department, and Vistahermosa, in Meta, the most affected municipality. The last map (the third one) visualizes the advances of land release, the mainstream clearance methodology currently deployed in the humanitarian demining world. Only four of the thirty-two departments are “free of the suspicion of landmines.”
This is a composite image of several official maps published by the office in charge of mine action in Colombia. Due to significant changes in the administrative structure of the government and public policies around the "mine problem" in the country, this agency has changed its name many times in the last ten years.
Produced in 2007 for an official report on the progress Colombia has made to comply with ratified agreements of the Ottawa convention (the treaty that bans the use, storage, and production of antipersonnel mines), the first map shows "a country in red." The small red dots represent mine-related "accidents" and "incidents. Several national and international demining experts I interviewed in 2015-2016 believed that this visual representation said less about the ‘real’ problem of landmines, and more about the “retrograde” systems of registration, counting, and monitoring used by the state to account for mines and their afectaciones [effects/impacts].
The second and third maps are more recent. Constantly updated, one can find them on the main website of the Colombian mine action office, currently known as Descontamina Colombia. The map in the middle (the second one) illustrates the number of landmine victims of the country and organizes this data by political spatial divisions—there are 11,801 victims and survivors of improvised explosive devices and other remnants of war, Antioquia is the most affected department, and Vistahermosa, in Meta, the most affected municipality. The last map (the third one) visualizes the advances of land release, the mainstream clearance methodology currently deployed in the humanitarian demining world. Only four of the thirty-two departments are “free of the suspicion of landmines.”