LAURA GOES TO WAR (Swiss Stories 2015, by Luca Zanetti) - Swiss Press Award
Unpublished
Luca Zanetti
LAURA GOES TO WAR
Follows Laura Thomi a 24-year-old social services student that signed up with the NGO “Peace Watch Switzerland” for a three-month mission in Colombia as a human rights observer. The story begins in a youth hostel in the town of Zofingen where she is given a training course that consisted in an introduction to the history of Colombia its current affairs and conflicts. Potential real situations where rehearsed, the principles of non-intervention discussed. Former volunteers came to tell their stories. It continues with Laura’s arrival in Colombia’s hot middle Magdalena valley where she begins her work as a human rights observer in farmer’s communities that are fighting for the recognition of the land that they have been farming for decades but for which they have no paper titles. In Colombia the unequal distribution of land where 50% of the belongs to 1.1% is considered one of the major reasons for the over four decades old civil war between leftist guerrillas, rightwing paramilitary militias and the U.S-backed Colombian military, engendering the worst human rights crisis in the Western Hemisphere. Systematic human rights violations have forced over 4 million people to flee their homes since 1997, giving Colombia the second-highest population of internally displaced persons in the world after Syria.
