Photographs and Notes from Colombia and the Americas

photography · environment · social issues · politics

Paul Mark Smith ~ photographer

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Red, Blue, Yellow

Medellín and the National Strike

Looking back on the 2021 National Strike and Protests in Medellín, and elsewhere in Colombia.

Viene pronto – analysis; opinion; fotografías.

“Eternamente Medellín” · Colombia 1995 ~ present
Community leaders and activists under threat · Colombia
2016 ~ present
“Fragments from a Perennial War” · Colombia 1995 ~ 2017
Clippings · Published Work
Photos from elsewhere · Europe, Africa, and India
Under Grey Skies · 1980s 1990s Britain
Examining roots, memory and place ~ somewhere & nowhere

Anecdotes from Colombia’s Armed Conflict:

Fragments from a Perennial Conflict · 1994-2016

Massacre in Granada · 3 November 2000

At around midday on the 3rd November 2000 the Bloque Metro of the AUC entered the small town of Granada in Eastern Antioquia province and began shooting, massacring 17 townsfolk and injuring four others. The town counted with heavily fortified police station, but the police (a military rather than judicial force in Colombia) did not confront the paramilitaries who left the town without having been engaged by the security forces. Two days after the massacre, as the hundreds accompanied a dozen coffins to the cemetery overlooking the town, shots from automatic weapons rang out from the mountains to the south. Five weeks later, on the 6th December the FARC guerrilla detonated a car-bomb close to the police station and attacked the police. A large part of the town centre was destroyed and 19 people were killed, police and civilians, and 21 injured.

The following day the FARC announced that they were to release some 500 captured soldiers and police.