Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your question.
Evidently, it is one of the programs that the Office of the President of the Republic has initiated, and as you aptly mentioned, a senior advisor to the president in matters of reinsertion and reconciliation has been appointed. The senior advisor happened to be in Ottawa last month and had the opportunity to converse with some representatives of the media and civil society to introduce the program. It is a program that is moving forward with much enthusiasm and with great opportunities, but obviously with major challenges.
Regarding what the program attempts to do, there are actually two frameworks with respect to reinsertion. In one, through agencies such as UNICEF and the IOM--the International Organization for Migration--the Government of Colombia is receiving assistance for the reinsertion and recovery of children under 18 who have been rescued from illegal armed groups in Colombia. It is a program that is being tended through the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare, and that essentially pursues the presidential advisor's goals for reintegration.
What does the reintegration program in Colombia do? The program seeks to tend to the population that has left the ranks of the unlawful groups. I am referring to a group, as you said, of 50,000 people with an average age of 25. These are individuals who are already past childhood and adolescence.
The program has two goals: first to provide these individuals with psychological and physical care to help them recover and to prepare them for the second stage, which has to do with the acquisition of skills so that they can work at lawful activities. It is a program that has two targets: on the one hand are the reintegrated individuals, so that they can find a way to keep themselves busy with decent jobs; and on the other hand are the families of the actual reintegrated individuals.
Why do we target the families? We have found in this program that many of the people who joined the ranks of the illegal groups did so because their family environments were not environments that encouraged them to stay home. Sometimes they joined because of imitation or because of the need to find work and a lifestyle.
So the process targets two groups: the reintegrated person and his or her family, so that reintegrated individuals can, once the program has been completed, return to their families and be welcomed. However, at the same time, the program works on what we might call the education of Colombian society, and in particular the education of business owners. The objective is to get rid of the feeling of fear that has been and is being generated, the fear that a person feels about linking his business to a person who has previously taken up arms, and to provide spaces to people who have left the program so that they can become useful members of society.
What is the problem? The problem is that the program is currently covering 31,000 of the 50,000 people who have been demobilized. What is happening, evidently, is that there are many desertions. There are people who start with the program, but who do not feel motivated and abandon it. There is reason for concern there, because the question then is, where do they go? Often they return to the illegal groups or form gangs of common criminals.
However, the program addresses this. It has the support of the international community. And on the subject of disarmament, demobilization and reinsertion, or DDR, it so happens that Colombia is hosting the first conference on this topic next month in the city of Cartagena. The objective of the conference is an exchange of opinions between DDR experts from all the world’s countries that have been affected by conflict, so that best practices can be identified, frankly and not necessarily with governmental commitments, and so that the Colombian experience can also be conveyed for the benefit of populations that have been affected by conflicts in other countries