![\"\"](\"https:\/\/patriciadeviaangarita.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Patrimonio-Historico-de-la-nacion-Ley-1435-de-2011-1024x509.png\")
<\/p>\n[vc_row type=”full_width_content” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” equal_height=”yes” content_placement=”middle” column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” bg_color=”#ffffff” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” row_border_radius=”none” row_border_radius_applies=”bg” overlay_strength=”0.3″ gradient_direction=”left_to_right” shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”zoom-out” parallax_bg=”true” parallax_bg_speed=”slow” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”padding-10-percent” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”all” background_color=”#f4f4f4″ background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1\/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_row_inner column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” text_align=”left” column_margin=”default”][vc_column_inner column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”top” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1\/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none” enable_animation=”true” animation=”fade-in-from-bottom”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n
Historical heritage of the nation, law 1435 of 2011<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
CONTRACTING: Name originated due to the existence in the area, of a CONTRACT (contract) or purchase of cinchona, very abundant in the region, one of the main export products in the 20th century. Still in 1975 some trees were found in the Western Cordillera. The above mentioned subject matter was used as a drug to combat malaria. The shell dealers traded it directly to their extractors on this site. Hence the word or word, between contractors, CONTRACT, name by many still pronounced due to custom or tradition. Later they added the other syllable and the original name was changed into the current one. So we have the true origin of the name, born of the cinchona drug lingo.<\/p>\n
In the Real Villa de Socorro, apparently from the time of Viceroy Ezpeletas or more before, a hospital was used for the confinement of Hansenians from the Comunera province and surrounding areas, called El Regadillo. Many cabals, contradictions and more cabals, assure that leprosy came to the city, thanks to the bringing, by a merchant from Momp\u00f3s, of a black Hansenian slave for the service of the Dom\u00ednguez family, who struck a daughter with the disease of that bourgeois home. The first leper, it is said, was also a man named C\u00e1rdenas. Others, under oath, declare that from that city, Don F\u00e9lix Ram\u00f3n de Arellano brought a stung daughter, thus spreading the ailment throughout the region, due to the trafficking of cotton goods and similar merchandise. In the seventeenth century, according to the archives, leprosy settled there.<\/p>\n
The Socorrana population, exasperated, frequently protested the danger to neighborhood health that the aforementioned establishment implied. This reasoning, judicious and obvious beyond the power, if the collective fear of contagion at those ages is taken into account, forces the government of the nascent Republic – in 1822 – to choose a SUITABLE and distant place to transfer the group of unhappy glasses commoners.<\/p>\n
Thus, EL CURO arises, a gloomy, brutal, desolate leper …!<\/p>\n
This lazaretto was located on the western bank of the Su\u00e1rez River, two hundred meters below the G\u00f3mez Plata bridge, a block and a half from the riverbank. It comprised a few wattle and daub houses for inmates, public offices and a never-inhabited priest’s house, since in those gloomy calends the prejudice regarding Lazaro’s disease was general and the morbid fear of it gave goose bumps even in priests and priests. beings destined to the service of God and their fellow men.<\/p>\n
The religious services, not very frequent, on the opposite bank of the mentioned river, were carried out by the priest of Guadalupe or another benevolent compatriot priest. Near the place there was a rustic raft made of bambas wood to cross the impetuous flow, a vehicle also at the service of the buyers of cinchona. The “health center” of El Curo subsisted for a period of 35 years. The Hansenian, under the immense weight of loneliness, abandonment and his cruel ailment, on many occasions threw himself into the torrential rampart and ended his insufferable fate-!<\/p>\n
Tropical diseases, the ferocity of the bush infested with poisonous snakes and anopheles, also decimated the population considerably.<\/p>\n
Croniquilla of Contrataci\u00f3n, \u00c1lvaro Ruiz Arenas (1979)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/patriciadeviaangarita.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Autor-del-libro-Croniquilla-de-Contratacion-1024x581.png\")
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Since the time of the Lazarets, the words SICK AND HEALTHY have been used, the first to designate the Hansenian and the second the cohabiting individual exempt from evil, even if he suffers from other diseases, a custom that still persists. A sick there; Secluded, he told us that while still young, one fine day behind the quineros he climbed the mountain range along almost inaccessible paths to reach the site of La Contrata. Seduced and pleasantly impressed by the magnificence of the area, the abundance of its waters and the varied richness of the fauna, he brought the news to the brothers in exile, good news that spurred the progressive exodus of the inhabitants of El Curo to the land of Promise, Benigno, the oral chronicler, died at the age of 110.<\/p>\n
In view of the accomplished fact, the Sovereign State of Santander resolved to legitimize the new settlement, thus legally creating Contracting. On September 14, 1861, the government transferred here the last reluctant group of Hansen’s disease victims, unwilling to leave the harsh coastal climate.<\/p>\n
At the dawn of the 20th century, in the midst of the civil war. Hiring consisted of a tiny village of very elementary straw houses, placed or nailed in the most salient parts of its swampy and swampy geography, bathed by sparkling and singing streams detached from the nearby mountains. Its primitive houses were built capriciously, disorderly, at odds with the indications of urbanism and aesthetics. Those mother huts, after a while, gave way to more comfortable little houses that at the same time constituted the genesis of the present; city \u200b\u200bof tortuous, blind, blocked streets, of chaotic houses, disposition, without a doubt the external, mental and emotional reflection of those first lazarines, trajinantes in the painful way of the cross of seclusion. This is how our little town was formed at the initiative and will of the patient and his family, without indications or government regulations, quietly, patiently, orphaned of the provident help of the State and, many times, in tenacious struggle against the unpleasant hostility of its administrators.<\/p>\n
The Bishop of Tunja, founded the Parish of Contracting in 1868. Baptized “San L\u00e1zaro”.<\/p>\n
With the first Salesians who came to the place between 1897 and 1898, four worthy sons of Don Bosco established their pastoral and humanitarian royals: Evasio Ravagliatti, Alejandro Garbari. Clelia Testa and Mar\u00eda Amable Medicina, first director of the daughters of Mar\u00eda Auxiliadora in the locality, heroes and heroines sublime in love of neighbor.<\/p>\n
Starting in 1904, patients began to receive a more humane treatment. The following year the national government, through pertinent provisions, assumed the leadership of the Lazaret, ordered the isolation of the sick, decreed the obligation of the State regarding medical services, drugs, rations and other measures of a social nature. Ascribes to the Ministry of Government the management of the leprosariums, formerly run, if it can be said so, in a disorderly and chaotic manner by different administrative entities.<\/p>\n
In obedience to the compulsory confinement, people of greater economic solvency, intellectual capacity and social prestige, began exile, bringing with them better methods of life and the desire to improve to the place. Following these guidelines, existence became less sordid. The huts, little by little, were succeeded by less primary dwellings. Houses were built in all directions, some made of stepped wall or adobe, clay tiles with wooden doors and windows,<\/p>\n
The sugar mills, in urban or rural areas, smoked the sweet smell of honey.<\/p>\n
Firmly, then, agriculture began; sugarcane, yucca, banana, vegetables and pasture fields. Without exception, the houses with adjoining lots wore the opulent green garment of bread. Fruit trees, especially citrus, were planted with a lavish hand.<\/p>\n
The legislation implemented relative to leprosy and its patients, wrong or correct, had the virtue of taking the lazaret out of legal limbo, to administratively improve the insignificant village that was wandering adrift in the anguished sea of \u200b\u200bimprovisation and misrule. For this purpose, the law that creates Courts, Notary, Office of Registry of Public and Private Instruments, Personer\u00eda, etc. Likewise, the minting of special currency is decreed (Decree No. 1452) and other enacted provisions aimed at the orderly community march.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/patriciadeviaangarita.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Monument-of-Lazaretto-coin.png\")
<\/p>\n
In reference to the contagiousness or non-contagiousness of Lazaro’s disease, no one has said with sufficient elements of judgment the last, irrefutable word that manages to end the controversy. The disease is still an unfathomable enigma in its causes. Sick couples, in an advanced stage, with five or more children, perfectly healthy until death, never registered traces of the scourge. Hundreds of priests and nuns, in contact with leprosy for short or long periods, moved to other parishes or will pass into eternity unscathed, clean of body …!<\/p>\n
Towards the end of the 1920s, the “anti-leprosy campaign” became a matter of public hygiene and social security. Since 1930, in a policy of modernization and economic rationality, an attempt was made to reduce the high cost of maintaining the lazarettos, promoting the departure of non-contagious patients or “social cured” to be treated in regional dermatological dispensaries.<\/p>\n
From Lazaret to Municipality<\/p>\n
The improvement in the living conditions in the lazaretto and the care practices generated expressions of acceptance or complacency on the part of the patients. But in general, isolationist policies faced direct or underground social resistance practices on the part of the population settled in the lazaretto. For this reason, the regulatory provisions could never be fully complied with and some were not actually applied. The State made significant efforts and invested considerable financial resources until 1961, when the dissolution of the Lazarets was ordered. It never achieved its goal of medicalizing, controlling, and eradicating leprosy through isolation. Instead, preventive measures were gaining ground in the epidemiological and therapeutic management of the disease.<\/p>\n
During the last two decades of the existence of lazaret, the introduction of an effective drug to inactivate the leprosy bacillus based on sulfates determined a disease control policy focused on the administration of chemotherapy treatment, the follow-up of the socially cured and the search for new infectious cases. However, it was only until 1961 when the full enjoyment of their civil rights and guarantees was restored to the sick, isolation in Lazarets was abolished and asylums or preventives for the separation of healthy children of leprosy patients were eliminated. . After this collapse, the Contrataci\u00f3n population was limited to the municipal order and shelters were established there and what is now the E.S.E.Hiring Sanatorium, as an entity specialized in the care of the disease.<\/p>\n
Contracting is now better known for being a municipality in the department of Santander, in the Comunera Province.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.turisco.com.co\/images\/municipios\/principal\/contratacion.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The population bases its economy on the subsidies that leprosy patients receive as well as on the income of public employees (municipal administration, employees of the leprosarium, and teachers of state educational institutions). To these incomes are added those of the scarce agricultural products that are grown in the municipality, corn, coffee and cocoa stand out. The rest of the production is destined for self-consumption (banana, cassava, vegetables and fruits). Another economic line is bovine, equine, ovine, swine and goat production.<\/p>\n
The Municipal Administration in conjunction with the State Social Enterprise, Sanatorio de Contrataci\u00f3n, are planning activities aimed at the conservation of historical heritage (Law 1435 of 2011) and are structuring policies that allow the Municipality to project itself as a cultural tourist destination. and natural that increases the development and standard of living of its inhabitants.<\/p>\n
Fountain:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/leprosyhistory.org[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n