A toddler died sleeping outside in a months-long housing protest. Now his brother is sick.

The Emberá Indigenous family arrived in Colombia’s capital in 2020 in search of refuge from a conflict with no end. Forced off their land by armed groups in the western department of Chocó, they fled to a city that has long struggled to find homes for families such as theirs. They cycled in and out of government-subsidized housing: a few months in an apartment, a few months on the streets. Back to an apartment. Back to the streets.

Desperate to break this cycle, Indigenous leaders tried once more to demand a solution from the government. In late September, hundreds of evicted families marched through Bogotá for 14 hours before camping out in National Park in the heart of the capital. They set up hundreds of plastic tarps between the park’s monuments, fountains and trees. Perhaps here, in one of the city’s most prominent parks, they thought, their cries for help would be impossible to ignore.

Their fight would come at a steep cost.

After two months living in the open air in this high-altitude city, amid smoke from cooking fires, Queracama’s 21-month-old son, Yonquin, fell ill. First came the diarrhea and the vomiting. Then he became drowsy and struggled to breathe.

An ambulance rushed him to a hospital just blocks away. By the time Yonquin arrived it was too late. The toddler had suffered a cardiorespiratory arrest. Before his death, doctors said, he had a stomach flu, severe malnutrition and severe dehydration.

“The death of Yonquin can be explained with one word: arrogance,” said Jairo Montañez, a leader representing the Indigenous communities occupying the park. “Arrogance on behalf of a government that has wanted to ignore the problem and make it invisible.”

To Indigenous leaders, the toddler’s death underscores the government’s neglect of the displaced victims it has promised to support. To local health officials, it was the result of the community’s refusal to accept the city’s offers to move them to safer living conditions. In the 10 days before Yonquin died, city officials say, Indigenous leaders refused to let public health teams into the park. The leaders deny the allegation.

Yonquin’s death — from what health workers say were preventable causes, just steps from one of Colombia’s premier hospitals — has become the latest symbol of the struggle to resolve a displacement crisis that, five years after the country’s peace accords, is only getting worse.

Hundreds of families are still living in the park. Indigenous leaders have turned down the city’s offer to transfer the families to an indoor shelter on the outskirts of Bogotá. They’re demanding permanent, collective accommodations and government support for their safe return to their land.

But as the sides try to reach an agreement, children are falling ill. The park’s leaders have been transporting about three to four children to the hospital each day, almost all of them under the age of 2, Montañez said. And many of their parents, who are used to relying on traditional healers, are reluctant to send their children away to medical professionals they don’t trust.

Colombia has nearly 5 million internally displaced people, a number surpassed only by Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That includes at least 82,846 who were forcibly displaced between January and November 2021, a 169 percent increase from 2020 and the largest number in the five years since the government signed the historic peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, according to the Bogotá-based Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement, also known as CODHES. Nearly 23 percent of those victims were Indigenous, and at least 9,857 were forced from Chocó, home to many of the Emberá families in the park campsite.

Indigenous groups such as the Emberá have long distrusted Colombia’s institutions, a result of the country’s failure to follow through on promises to provide these communities with health services, food security or safe territories.

Families displaced by Colombia’s decades-long conflict have a right to reparations and restitution through a comprehensive victims’ law, which provides state support toward education, health, housing, employment and more. But for many families, government aid has fallen short.

Eight of 10 households of victims of forced displacement in Colombia say they are living in poverty, according to the Commission for Monitoring Public Policy on Forced Displacement, a Colombian group. Four of 10 stopped eating three times a day during the pandemic.

One of those families was Queracama’s. Living in the park, they have depended on donations for food. And in the days leading up to Yonquin’s death, the parents and children would often eat only one meal — usually some rice, potatoes and plantains.

Public health workers who have been monitoring children in the park last saw Yonquin on Nov. 17, according to a city report. He showed no signs of illness, according to a health worker who has followed the family’s case. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the matter.

For the next 10 days, she said, Indigenous leaders did not permit health workers to enter the park. The next time she heard about Yonquin was in a call from someone in the park on Nov. 28. “The boy is dying,” the person told her. “Run,” she replied.

“It was a tragedy that we warned could happen, and that could have been avoided if they had allowed us to enter, if we would’ve known about the situation a day earlier or days earlier,” said Daniel Camacho, Bogotá's undersecretary for governance and the guarantee of rights. “The children there are exposed to conditions that aren’t dignified, that aren’t favorable to their health.”

A day after the death of Yonquin, the public health worker noticed the boy’s younger brother, a 3-month-old named Mesi, also having trouble breathing. He had been hospitalized before for respiratory problems, and his health was quickly deteriorating. But the parents didn’t want to go back to the hospital they didn’t trust, the place where their other son had been pronounced dead a day earlier.

But the health worker insisted: “The child is going to the hospital. We’re not going to lose another one,” she said. “Even if I lose my job.”

An Indigenous leader took the baby from Queracama’s arms and rushed him to the ambulance. He would remain hospitalized for weeks.

One recent afternoon, Queracama stood in National Park with tears in her eyes and a piece of paper in her hand.

It was a message from the hospital. Mesi would soon be ready to leave the hospital but would be temporarily handed over to Colombia’s child welfare agency.

Queracama had already lost one child to illness. Now she worried she would lose another to the state.

She rushed over to leaders overseeing a park that was now home to 15 Indigenous groups, many speaking different languages. They assured her she wouldn’t lose her baby. The government wasn’t allowed to take custody of Indigenous children as long as their rights weren’t being violated. But Queracama wasn’t convinced.

Days later, rush-hour traffic whizzed by along the Carrera Séptima, one of the most important thoroughfares in Bogotá, just feet from Queracama’s bed. Queracama, wearing a floral short-sleeve dress, squatted to build a fire and boil water.

Smoke filled the air. Steps away, about two dozen people showed up at the park’s entrance, part of a new group that had arrived the night before. Among them were her husband’s relatives, including a sister-in-law with a newborn baby.

Queracama nestled her face into the little girl’s fuzzy pink onesie, the baby reminding her of her own, still in the hospital. Today Mesi was to be released.

Queracama took her niece and walked over to a group giving out clothes. A woman, another resident of the park, walked up to her and smiled. “Is that your baby?”

“No,” Queracama responded quietly.

A group of leaders gathered in a circle to explain to Queracama what she had to do to get her son back. Local officials had decided it was not safe to let the infant return to the park. They offered to arrange a hotel room for the mother and her children, where the baby could recover while continuing to receive oxygen.

“That’s the only way, or else they won’t give you the baby,” Montañez said.

Queracama didn’t want to go to the hotel. She didn’t trust that the oxygen was helping. Her son had been sent back to the hospital three times since he was born.

“Yesterday they wanted to take him to child welfare. They wanted to take him away from me and I wouldn’t let them,” she said.

But she agreed to go as soon as the hospital called to let her know the baby’s oxygen was ready.

A few hours later she received another call: Her son’s breathing had gotten worse.

She rushed across the park, fast-walking uphill to a medical center blocks away, where her husband was waiting. She arrived to find two health workers standing outside.

“They’re going to have to transfer the baby,” a health worker told her. To another hospital, another doctor the mother didn’t trust.

With panic in her eyes, the mother leaned against the side of the building and waited.

Diana Durán contributed to this report.

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