Internal migration pattern at local level in Colombia: an approach from the 1993 and 2005 censuses

Besides the knowledge that Colombia was one of Latin America's countries which fastest concentrated its population in urban areas (Kalmanovitz & Lopez, 2006), it was - until 2005 - one of the countries with most cases of forced displacement in the world (CODHES, 2004), and finally, a country which by 2005 had driven out from its territory almost 3 million people (DANE, 2005), what would it be new to state about the dynamics of population mobility in the area? Which regularities could be identified? What could be told from the census data? To what extent theoretical assumptions on migration and development express migratory dynamics in the Colombian case?

This study aims to add to the discussion about different hypotheses on migration levels and tendencies already proposed in the literature, as well as to the discussion about the nature of population exchanges in space (Zelinsky, 1971; Ravenstein, 1980; Singer, 1980, et al). The scope of this study is also to show that the dynamics of internal migration in a developing country, such as Colombia, although adopting major urbanization tendencies that can be identified in other Latin American countries, has particularities which define a distinctive pattern of migration in its territory.