By Irene Escudero |
Bogotá (EFE).- A concrete wall separates the room; just as it separates borders. A wall like the one that hundreds of people seeking a better future have to jump over or dodge every day and which is the center of the photographic exhibition “On the Other Side” in Bogotá, with which Doctors Without Borders (MSF) seeks to show the experience to migrate.
“A wall in the center of the room is an impeded step, it means having to find a new path to follow”, reads the text on the concrete wall of the room. About him, a hundred photographs that have been selected from a public call on what “the other side” means for people.
“Our intention is to have a point of connection with this problem of migration, from everyday life, from the human side, from the day to day of how we connect with migration,” the head of the MSF institutional office explains to EFE. in Colombia, Nancy Guerrero.
A look at migration
A cat clinging to a terrace fence, looking at the city and trying to get out of it, people jumping into a river or children jumping over walls, but above all many closed but also open windows are the views that the call brings about how to see the migration, the other side.
Perspectives that speak of “the policies that exist on migration issues”, of the “containment of people who migrate” and try to reach the other side, explains the MSF spokesperson, but there are also “hopeful visions”: fields greens, flowers…
As a way of staging that despite the fact that 108 million people around the world have been forced to leave their homes to flee violence or poverty, “in the midst of so much suffering, sometimes the light is also seen when end of the tunnel”.
The exhibition, which will be held at the Espacio El Dorado in Bogotá until July 16, brings together professional photographs taken on the Latin American migratory route, in the areas where the medical-humanitarian organization works, and drawings made by children crossing the Darién jungle.
The Darien Pass
“Our work in the Darién reveals the suffering, the consequences that restrictive immigration policies sometimes have on people, on the population we serve,” says Guerrero.
The photographs combine the visual with testimonials; “The Darién continues to be a ruthless journey. And that is why we are asking for safe routes for these people… Migration is not a crime”, picks up one of the posters that gives voice to the MSF medical coordinator in Panama, Guillermo Girones.
The number of people who crossed the Darién, one of the most dangerous borders in the world, has already exceeded 200,000 people this year, more than half of whom are Venezuelans.
They are four times more than the previous year; a new record number, after the record of almost 250,000 registered in 2022 and the record of 133,000 registered the previous one. One sad record after another.
A journey that does not discriminate against nationalities or ages
Migrants who enter the mountainous and inhospitable jungle that separates Colombia and Panama face several days of a route with natural dangers such as sudden flooding of rivers, muddy cliffs or vertical rises of mud, but also people traffickers , robberies, sexual violence, attacks… There are a number of those who leave the jungle, which the Panamanian authorities count, but not of those who stay.
The route is also carried out by hundreds of children, including babies in the arms of their relatives. The children who have made the tour talk about the longing for their places of origin, about how their mothers protect them on the road “from all the bad things”, about how they would like to fly, to go by plane.
And that is what the documentary projected in the photographic exhibition shows, which with a vivid animation of colors, collects the testimonies of these minors: “I want to go to the United States, there is work there and there are no bad people. I can study”, say one with an innocent tone giving voice to the dream of everyone who undertakes the route to the north.