To mark Christian Aid week, Graeme Hetherington spent a week in Colombia where he saw the work the charity is doing and spoke to Yomaira Mendoza, whose life was torn apart by her husband’s murder

Sometimes when the text message alert goes off on my mobile phone, I have a sense of trepidation, but the sheer look of horror on Yomaira’s face when she hears a text message has arrived on her phone, is a startling glimpse into the level of intimidation that she lives with on a daily basis.

When I first met her in the Cano Manso humanitarian zone in the Choco region of Colombia, I could sense an inner sadness and saw a face etched with horror and pain.

After speaking to her for a while, it became clear why she looks so haunted.

Her life was turned upside down on January 7, 2007, when her husband Jose Eustoquio Rojas was shot in the head in a dispute after her family were displaced from their farm.

And since that day she has lived in fear for her own life, while since January she has received numerous death threats on her mobile phone.

Even while I was in the humanitarian zone with members of Christian Aid, Father Alberto France of the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace (CIJP), and members of Peace Brigade International, who were there to ensure our safe passage through the war-ravaged region, she received several threatening and intimidating messages on her phone.

DURING our time at the camp, she received one message which read ‘fighting for land, there will be more than enough on top of you’ and in the wake of two murders in the region another message read ‘do you want the same thing to happen to you?’.

“There was a meeting with the Attorney General to see what was happening in the investigation into my husband’s murder and that was when I started to receive the messages,” she says, speaking through an interpreter.

“That was when I decided to come here (to Cano Manso). Since then I have received many messages saying they are watching me and they are going to kill me.

“In January they sent me a message saying ‘they knew what I was doing and they knew where I was.”

The day before I interviewed Yomaira, we had a tour of the camp and were shown where another woman had nearly been drowned by people loyal to a man called Luis Felipe Molano Diaz, who had taken over the area and forced the landowners to flee.

Just after breakfast the following day a very nervous Yomaira joined us to speak about her experience. Clearly fearful of the consequences, she had plucked up enough courage to open her heart about the horrors she had experienced. Even as she was talking to us, she received a message warning her that she had been seen walking through the camp with us.

“They said they had been watching us and said they saw us go around the farm and down by the river,” she says. The frightening message finished with, ‘Do you think they can save you from your destination?’ Although she knows the perimeter of the protected area is patrolled by the Colombian Army, she lives in continual fear for her life.

And the mother-of-two is too scared to have her children with her, so they are living with her mother in Medellin. She says: “I received a message on January 28 saying if I didn’t go where I was told to, they would take it out on my son. I continue to receive these messages even though I am here (in the humanitarian zone).”

If anyone ever doubted her fear is genuine, all they would have to do is listen to her tell the story of how her husband was murdered in cold blood in a dispute over a fine after he cut down a tree on his own land to sell for lumber.

“My husband didn’t pay the fine,” she says.

“There was an argument and they gave him a few days to pay it but he didn’t pay it.

When they came across us they tried to kill us by running us down. They were saying to him, ‘You are going to pay us or you are going to pay with your life,’ and he did when they shot him in the head.”

Within days of our visit Yomaira had been forced to flee from the humanitarian zone when she was followed as she travelled from the region to Colombia’s capital, Bogota.

She was due to have a meeting with The National Protection Unit about her safety but it was cancelled as they said it was too dangerous for them to meet at Cano Manso.

Since our visit Yomaira has been forced to move to another humanitarian zone at Las Camellias while her fight for justice continues.

Christian Aid Week runs from May 11-17.

To make a donation call 08080 006 006 or donate at www.caweek.org