"I want to provide a house for my children because we live with my parents. I will do this with the reparation money that I am receiving from the Government," explains Antonio José Pinzón during a recent ceremony in Montería, Colombia.

In 2002, Antonio José was seriously injured by an anti-personnel mine.

The Bang

Seven years ago, on 20 July, the life of this man was changed forever. He does not know which armed group planted the mine. "At that time no one dared to ask, the entire village was terrified; we all basically did what we were told," recalls Antonio José.

On that fateful day, Antonio José had gotten up early and had headed out on his donkey in search of yam and cassava seeds.

At about midday, as he was returning home with a bag of seeds and very hungry: "I had left home without any breakfast so I was in a hurry to get back and decided to take shortcuts to save time. I was crisscrossing from farm to farm."

He came upon a closed gate and so he had to get off his donkey to open it. And, as if the donkey knew what was about to happen, "The donkey did not want to go through the gate," Antonio José recalls and says he had to force the donkey forward while he closed the gate. "I ran to catch up with the donkey in order to remount it. I had advanced about three to four metres when I felt the bang."

He lost consciousness and when he came round, two people had come to his aid. Two metres away lay the remains of the donkey. It appeared that the donkey had stepped on the land mine.

When his parents reached him, it was late and it was raining. They decided to take him to hospital the following day. There was no medical facility in the village and the nearest one was several hours away.

Antonio José remembers that night some men arrived at the house. They had come to bring some medications and to warn his parents not to move him from the village. "They told them not to take me anywhere, that I wasn't going to die and that if they took me away they would pay the consequences."

In the coming days, Antonio José extracted one by one all the shrapnel pieces from his body.

It would be several months before he visited a doctor. When he did, he was too scared to tell him the truth about what had happened. "The doctors gave me some vitamins and medications but nothing helped and I got increasingly worse. Eventually I lost sight in one eye and more than 50 per cent of my hearing. It was only then that I had the courage to speak," he recalls sadly.

"One day I heard my neighbor talking about a similar case and I told her what had happened to me," he explains. "It was she who encouraged me to talk, not only to the doctor but also to Acción Social. I went to see them two years ago and they took up my case. They gave me advice and put me in contact with organizations that gave provided psychological help and gave me a hearing aid."

Rediscovering Life

With the help of his parents, his health improved and he was able to leave his village. He says he left because he was afraid, but also because he wanted a chance to start his life somewhere else.

Using sedatives and painkillers Antonio José managed to go back to work in the fields. But news that his wife had left him, forced him to return to his parents' home to care for his four children. "I returned to be with them and I am looking for work to give them the best life I can. It is very difficult; at times when I am up in the hills, I suffer from dizzy spells and I get severe headaches. I get tired easily, but then I look at my children and that helps me forge ahead because they need me; they love me so much," concludes Antonio José with satisfaction.

In July 2009, the Colombian Government held three ceremonies, with technical support from IOM and financial support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to hand over compensation money to the first 2,000 victims from all over the country.

The compensation fund is allowing Antonio José and many other victims to rebuild their lives.

Violence generated by armed groups in Colombia can be traced back to the 1950s. According to information published by the Presidential Agency for Social Action and Cooperation (ACCION SOCIAL) there are 3.1 million Colombians internally displaced because of violence. The agency has received 255,000 applications for financial compensation from victims of illegal armed groups in the past year alone.

Although there are no figures on the number of persons actively engaged in illegal armed groups, in the past six years some 51,000 men, women and minors have demobilized from these groups as a result of peace accords brokered by the Colombian government or as individuals wishing to put down their weapons and return to civilian life. An estimated 35,000 of them were former paramilitaries.

Since 2006, IOM's Community Oriented Reintegration Programme supports the Government of Colombia in the development of its Justice and Peace Law aimed at promoting national reconciliation and symbolic and collective reparations for victims of the violence. Working with the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation (NCRR), IOM implements information campaigns to inform victims of their rights; supports the formulation of the National Plan for Collective Reparations, which includes collective reparations and the restitution of goods and land; supports the institutional strengthening of NCRR; and provides assistance for victims; amongst other activities.