A child dies, far from medical assistance

6.06.09

By Eva Lewis



José Albeiro Cruz was only 17 months old when his short life ended, victim of a tragic car accident on May 25th in the small village of Caño Tomás Teorama in the department of Northern Santander. It was a loss that quite possibly could have been prevented, one that drives home all too terribly the meaning of government abandonment.

José’s parents had brought him to Caño Tomás to participate in the Humanitarian Refugee Camp, a protest action organized by the farmers of the region and the Farmer Association of Catatumbo (ASCAMCAT). The camp was a response by the farmers of the region to a government fumigation campaign that has been causing mass displacement in the region of Catatumbo, Northern Santander, as well as to the neglect of the state. They were among upwards of 200 people who had come to participate in the camp and demand that the Colombian government stop spending money on harmful fumigations and human rights violations and rather invest it in social programs such as schools, hospitals and fixing the roads.

Tragically these demands could not have been met soon enough for the small José Albeiro, who was struck by a car just as it was slowly pulling out of the camp. He sustained a severe head injury, but was still alive as he was rushed from the camp at 2:30 in the afternoon. Antonio Fernandez, the man who drove the small José and his grieving parents in search of medical assistance, recounts how they drove an hour to the Venezuelan border where they had been told that a health center existed, only to find that there was nothing. They went from town to town searching for any sort of medical facility or health professional. They had gone to Venezuela because they already knew that the nearest health facility in Colombia was in the department’s capital Cúcuta, more then 10 hours away. Also, the road from Caño Tomás back towards Cúcuta was in terrible condition. In the end, though, even Venezuelan health facilities proved too far.

It was already nine o’clock at night when they finally arrived at the Venezuelan city El Machiques and the hospital Virgen del Carmen. José Albeiro had already been dead almost two and a half hours. The doctors in the hospital examined him, confirming that he had died of cranioencephalic trauma and loss of blood. Antonio Fernandez says they asked why he was not given first aid treatment when the accident happened.

The next day the grieving family returned to Colombia passing back through Caño Tomás and the Humanitarian Refugee Camp, José’s bloated body laid out on a collapsed cardboard box in the back of a jeep. Money was collected in the camp to help with the funeral costs. It was a shared communal grief, not just for the death of José Albeiro, but for all the residents of the Catatumbo countryside, isolated and abandoned by the Colombian State.

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