Pubdate: Sun, 10 Sep 2000
Source: Arizona Daily Star (AZ)
Copyright: 2000 Pulitzer Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.azstarnet.com/
Author: Clifford Krauss, The New York Times

DISPLACED MILLIONS BURDENING COLOMBIA

Left And Right Both Besieging Populace

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

Barona left her village, Chicorodo, one morning in June to cut sugar 
cane, and when she returned she said 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 partially crushed, probably 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 
that had been roaming the northern province of Antioquia.  

So Barona, 28, immediately packed up her belongings and headed to 
Cartagena, with her bleeding daughter bundled in her arms, only for 
Judith to die 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 Barona, one of an 
estimated 150,000 Colombians driven from their homes this year alone as 
they have been squeezed between leftist guerrillas and rightist 
paramilitaries loosely linked to local military units.  

In all, an estimated 2 million Colombians have been uprooted in recent 
years, according to the Consultancy for Human Rights and the Displaced, 
a private research group based in Colombia.  

That is more than the number that fled 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, Colombia's residents and 
officials fear that the war will intensify and that the number of 
people displaced will increase.  

Those being displaced live mostly in rural areas, 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 the people displaced are the victims of the 
paramilitaries, which seek to drain towns of suspected guerrilla 
sympathizers, but which 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 - 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 
for Human Rights. "It's central."  

The displaced are part of an even larger phenomenon that includes about 
800,000 Colombians who have fled the country of 40 million in the last 
four years.  

Many of those 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 to the 
United States.  
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MAP posted-by: John Chase