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. - --- MAP posted-by: John Chase