Pubdate: Sun, 10 Sep 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Author: Clifford Krauss
Bookmark: additional articles on Colombia are available at 
http://www.mapinc.org/latin.htm

AN AIMLESS WAR IN COLOMBIA CREATES A NATION OF VICTIMS

CARTAGENA, Colombia - Something terrible happened to Venecia Barona 
Mosquera, something senseless but horribly common among the people who have 
been displaced from the parts of Colombia brutalized by war and who have 
sought uncertain refuge here in the squalor of a shantytown named Nelson 
Mandela.

Ms. Barona left her village, Chicorodo, one morning in June to cut sugar 
cane, and when she returned she found her father and two brothers shot to 
death. Her 10-year-old daughter, Judith, was lying half-conscious under a 
mango tree, her skull crushed by a rifle butt.

Ultra-right paramilitaries had killed more than 20 people, punishing the 
villagers for giving food to an insistent Marxist guerrilla band who had 
been roaming the northern province of Antioquia.

So the 28-year-old Ms. Barona immediately packed up her things and headed 
here to Cartagena, with her bleeding daughter bundled in her arms. Judith 
died a few days later.

"I could never go back," she said, a tear tracing her cheek. "But at least 
I can calm down here. Now I'm looking for a good man to help me."

Nelson Mandela, where 45,000 people live under rusty corrugated roofs and 
sheets of plastic, may seem an unlikely place to seek calm. But it is 
growing every day with people like Ms. Barona, one of an estimated 150,000 
Colombians driven from their homes this year alone as they have been 
squeezed between leftist guerrillas and paramilitaries loosely linked to 
local military units.

An estimated two million Colombians have been uprooted in recent years, 
according to the Consultancy for Human Rights and the Displaced, a research 
group, more than were sent fleeing by the war in Kosovo last year. Of all 
the countries of the world suffering from the miseries of war, only Sudan 
and Angola have more displaced people.

And now, with the United States poised to deliver a new $1.3 billion aid 
package, most of it for the military, ordinary Colombians and officials 
fear that the war will intensify and that the number of people displaced 
will increase.

Those being displaced are mostly simple rural people, though some are 
middle class, who want only to live and work in peace and do not care to 
choose a side in a war in which not choosing a side has become an 
impossible luxury.

More than half are the victims of the paramilitaries, who seek to drain 
towns of suspected guerrilla sympathizers but sometimes simply do the dirty 
work for large landowners who want to expand their holdings for cattle 
raising, coca growing or mining.

Those displaced bring few usable skills for surviving in the already 
overburdened cities to which they have flocked - places like Cartagena, 
Bogota, Medellin and Cali. The urban squalor that is gathering in these 
cities breeds despair, family violence and crime, and the shantytowns 
increasingly serve as recruitment centers for guerrilla and paramilitary 
groups, flush with drug money to provide decent food and clothes to their 
fighters.

"You can't settle the war in Colombia without dealing with the problem of 
the displaced," said Jorge Rojas, the director of the consultancy. "It's 
central."

The displaced are part of an even larger phenomenon that includes some 
800,000 Colombians who have fled the country of 40 million people over the 
last four years. Many have sheltered themselves across the borders with 
Panama and Venezuela, becoming international refugees and an increasing 
burden for Colombia's neighbors. Thousands more middle class and wealthy 
Colombians have fled the violence for life in the United States.

United States and Colombian officials acknowledge the problem of the 
displaced but say they must focus more effort on finding new homes, jobs 
and alternative crops for coca growers and other people who will see their 
livelihoods and homes affected by the fighting.

Of the $7.5 billion in the new "Plan Colombia" that was kicked off when 
President Clinton visited with President Andres Pastrana in Cartagena 
recently, $500 million is allotted directly to helping the displaced and $1 
billion for alternative crop development. But the primary aim of the plan 
is to reduce coca cultivation by 50 percent in five years and to extend the 
reach of the central government.

In Nelson Mandela, where displaced people have squatted on tiny plots of 
land without titles, few have running water and most steal their 
electricity from a public utility company that looks the other way.

Cartagena's mayor, Gina Benedetti de Velez, said she needs $50 million a 
year to take care of the housing, education and health needs of the 
displaced population growing in shantytowns like Nelson Mandela, but that 
would be nearly one-third of her entire city budget. "We simply don't have 
the capacity to take care of these people," she said.

The first settlers who came here six years ago were apparently full of 
faith in the future. The mostly black and mulatto Colombians here named 
their new community after the South Africa leader out of black pride, and 
they named their streets Hope, Bethlehem and Victory.

But today there is misery everywhere in Nelson Mandela - barefoot children 
go to schools without notebooks, fathers plunge holes in industrial water 
pipes to give their families contaminated water, mothers poke through 
garbage to salvage refuse to sell. But what stands out most are the 
harrowing stories of brutality that forced these people to leave their 
homes in the first place.

One of those stories was that of Ms. Barona, whose family was killed and 
who is now alone but determined to go on. With wood donated by the Catholic 
Church, she is building a new shack for herself. She borrowed 50 cents from 
one of her new neighbors to start a business selling bags of fresh water, 
and now she is making a dollar a day.

Another is that of Eloy Teran, 54, who abandoned the town of San Onofre in 
Sucre Province with his wife and nine children four months ago after life 
simply became intolerable. Guerrillas and paramilitaries, he said, started 
invading the town last December on alternating weeks, killing the corn, 
banana and rice farmers and their families at random.

"I can't tell you why they killed," he said, shrugging and swinging his 
legs nervously from the side of a makeshift table. "They killed our 
friends, our neighbors, and then the point came when we decided we couldn't 
take it anymore, and we just decided to leave."

"The people are stuck like pieces of cheese between slices of bread," said 
the Rev. Rafael Castillo, a priest who works in Nelson Mandela. "In this 
kind of irregular war, you are forced to define yourself on one side or the 
other, and the civilian population suffers atrocities from both sides."

Juan Llorente, a 50-year-old cattle rancher who once lived outside the town 
of Turbo, allowed an army patrol to sleep in his house for two nights last 
September. "I never thought I'd have a problem," he recalled, since it's a 
custom in Colombia to be hospitable."

The very next day after the army unit left, eight guerrillas of Colombia's 
largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, came by 
the house and took away his 20-year-old son, Neilson Jose. A few days 
later, Neilson Jose was found along a road with three bullet holes in his head.

Mr. Llorente immediately left for Cartagena with his wife, four surviving 
children and five grandchildren. They were so scared, they left their 60 
head of cattle behind, which Mr. Llorente said the guerrillas have since 
stolen.

"I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about where I am going to 
find food the next day," said Mr. Llorente, a man whose clothes and 
mannerisms reflect a middle-class background. "I was never a rich man, but 
I wasn't poor, either. But now, I am a hungry man."

Gradually, too, the war is bearing down on Nelson Mandela and other barrios 
full of the displaced. Father Castillo said that, of the 15 people killed 
in the community this year, six were taken from their homes in the middle 
of the night by unidentified men thought to be either guerrillas or 
paramilitaries.

Two months ago a local rebel unit kidnapped an engineer working to build 
two schools in Nelson Mandela and demanded $250,000 in ransom. "They knew 
we had donation money to help the displaced," Father Castillo said, and a 
settlement was eventually worked out for a $10,000 payment.

"We asked them: `Why are you destroying what you say you want to construct 
for the poor,' " he recalled. "A comandante answered, `I know we make 
mistakes, but you have to pay.' " 
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