This year’s International Landmine Awareness Day was especially significant to Colombians. In 2007, the South American country reported the highest number of mine and explosive remnants of war casualties in the world. On April 4th, Colombia’s major weekly paper, Semana, published part of my documentary web project, Remnants of War. Last year, I produced a series of black and white photo-slideshows, interactive graphics and timelines to help understand how the country’s rapidly increasing landmine problem affects innocent civilians. I traveled all over Colombia with a Human Rights Watch researcher to gather the material for the multimedia presentation, and later produced a bi-lingual version for their website.

That’s Andres, an 18-year-old survivor of an explosive remnant of war. He picked up what looked like a battery attached to a cable, and the device went off in his hand. Now he has difficulty cultivating coffee and hasn’t returned to school.

His story is all too common. The landmine victims I talked to all faced difficulties returning to a normal life after their accident. Many of them were without adequate medical and financial assistance, unable to continue agricultural work, or were forced to flee from the countryside. Take Manuel, for instance, in this picture to the right. He has to take an all night bus to see his doctor in Medellin, and agricultural work now gives him pain.

Here are the 2006 statistics from the Landmine Monitor report on Colombia:

Mine/ERW casualties in 2006	Total: 1,106 (2005: 1,112)
Casualty analysis	Killed: 226 (169 military, 44 civilians, 12 children, 1 civilian age-unknown) (2005: 282) Injured: 880 (623 military, 198 civilians, 54 children; 5 civilians age-unknown) (2005: 830)
Estimated mine/ERW survivors	4,681
Availability of services in 2006	Unchanged-inadequate
Progress towards survivor assistance aims	Slow (VA24)

Let’s just hope next year’s numbers will be different.