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Background: The Colombian armed conflict has left millions of victims and has restricted access to different services provided by the government, especially for people with disabilities. This article studies the barriers faced by the victim population with disabilities when they want to access the health system in the department of Meta, Colombia, and offers a perspective from the experiences of people with disabilities who have been victims of the armed conflict in the country., Methods: To carry out this qualitative study, focus groups were conducted to capture the experiences and feelings of this population in the context of violence and high conflict., Results: The results show the barriers encountered by the victim population with disabilities, their families, and their caregivers when they want to access medical or health services., Conclusions: Many problems affect the population with disabilities and the victim population in Colombia today. The Colombian government has not been able to establish adequate policies to eliminate or even reduce access to services such as health, education, housing, and social protection., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Objective: To identify surveys that included questions about disability during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the period 2020-2021; and based on this, to determine what actions the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean implemented in the areas of education, health, and social protection that explicitly included the population with disabilities., Methods: Documents from the national statistics institutes of the countries of the region were reviewed, as well as the Socioeconomic Impact Assessment platform and webpages of international institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, seeking to identify national or regional surveys implemented during 2020 and the first half of 2021. Additionally, a documentary analysis was conducted of the measures implemented in the health, education, and social protection sectors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These documents were studied to determine whether the population with disabilities was explicitly mentioned., Results: Twenty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean collected information from statistical surveys during 2020-2021. Of these, only four (Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru) included questions on disability in their national surveys and although some specific surveys were conducted for the population with disabilities, in the region there is a general lack of associated data on this population during the pandemic. Only 10 countries explicitly included the population with disabilities in health measures, 12 in education, and 13 in social protection., Conclusions: The lack of data on the population with disabilities in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that this population remains invisible in information collection processes. This is associated with the low number of countries that explicitly included the population with disabilities in policies implemented to mitigate the impact of the pandemic.

Although the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities guarantees the right to employment and most countries in Latin America have signed and ratified the Convention, a large proportion of the population with disabilities still does not participate in the labour market. (1) Objective: The objective of this research was to understand how legislation in seven Latin American countries (Bolivia, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru) has defined and enabled the inclusion of people with disabilities in the labour market. (2) Methods: We conducted a thematic analysis of the content of 34 documents and generated two thematic networks that summarise the results of the thematic analysis and represent the general relationships between the categories of analysis in each country. Using this information, we analysed the differences between countries and the advance in their legislation to fulfil the recommendations made by the Convention. (3) Results: Although all countries have enacted legislation promoting the employment rights of persons with disabilities, six of the seven countries (except Chile) have applied a medical perspective to the definition of disability in their labour legislation, thus imposing a barrier to the labour-market inclusion of this population and perpetuating the association of disability with lack of capacity to work.

This document presents the development of the concept of disability in Colombia, specifically within the framework of the armed conflict and the different negotiation attempts. The article analyses the inclusion of people with disabilities in the Colombian peace processes of the XXI century. Despite the numerous peace processes Colombia has had, people with disabilities are still being excluded from the peace agendas and negotiation phases. The analysis of the last peace process of Havana, will provide an opportunity to truly include people with disabilities in future negotiations.