Due to the recent judgments in the Mapiripán Massacre and Ituango Massacres, in which the Interamerican Court on Human Rights studied cases where victims were forcefully displaced, the debate concerning whether or not the public assistance policies can influence victims reparations, has been retaken.
In the Ituango case, the Interamerican Court noted that public assistance would be considered in the reparations study. Nevertheless, the Court did not argue the justification of this consideration, nor traduced that argument in to concrete
reductions Judge GUSTAVO ZAFRA ROLDÁN opinion in the Mapirián judgment was clear to note that public assistance should not interfere with reparations, due to the fact that assistance is not equivalent to reparation. 

This article proposes a reformulation of the debate, to approach the problem from the concept of damage and not from the concept of reparations. We conclude that public assistance policies should influence reparations, bearing in mind that (i) public assistance can avoid the emergence of damage, diminish
it or interrupt it, and (ii) the purpose of public assistance is to cease the consequences of forced displacement. This subject can not be ignored by the Interamerican Court. To make possible the analysis, in the first section of the article we present the general criteria of the Interamerican Court in reparations and its relation to damage.