Pubdate: Tue, 14 Nov 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Steven Dudley, Special to The Washington Post

COLOMBIA'S WAR GOES DOWNTOWN

BARRANCABERMEJA, Colombia - It was about 1 p.m. on a typically sweltering 
day in this city when two men entered the Rosita superstore to shoot two 
relatives of the store's owner. The men walked past the multicolored 
fabrics lining the walls, up the winding marble staircase, then through the 
men's clothing section, where they found their targets. After they emptied 
several rounds into their victims, the men calmly walked out of the store, 
got on their motorcycle and sped off.

This type of mafia-style hit in Barrancabermeja is becoming commonplace 
throughout the country as Colombia's 40-year-old civil war spills from the 
rural areas into the biggest cities. From Medellin to Cali, leftist rebels 
and right-wing paramilitaries are waging urban war upon one another in 
public venues.

Rosita is in the heart of Barrancabermeja's commercial district, along a 
main thoroughfare lined with street vendors and filled with a constant flow 
of motorcycles, buses and taxis. At any one time, 15 people are selling 
towels, sheets and clothes in the store; countless others stroll along the 
street window-shopping.

Yet the police say no one will testify about the brutal murder of the two 
men. "Everyone knows who it was," a Rosita employee said. "But no one dares 
be a witness."

The businessmen slain at Rosita were only two of the more than 400 murder 
victims this year that made Barrancabermeja Colombia's most dangerous city.

Although it has been a guerrilla stronghold for years, paramilitaries have 
begun to challenge the supremacy of the rebels. In addition, the two groups 
are fighting over the lucrative illicit drug and gasoline trade that 
thrives here.

The political and economic incentives in this war often make it difficult 
to fully clarify the killers' motives; determining their sympathies is not 
so difficult. Authorities acknowledge it was the paramilitaries who killed 
the two men at Rosita.

Alleged paramilitary gunmen killed another man 200 feet down the road from 
Rosita in front of the city's main telephone office. A suspected 
paramilitary riding on a bicycle shot yet another man as he walked past him 
near the city center.

The guerrillas are not far behind, killing suspected paramilitary 
collaborators at an equally startling rate in the areas they control, and 
planting bombs in heavily traveled commercial districts.

Earlier this month, suspected urban militias from the country's largest 
guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), set off 
a car bomb in front of a bank just across the street from the telephone 
company office, killing two people and injuring several others. The police 
have deactivated 20 other explosive devises this year, including a bicycle 
bomb and a canoe bomb.

Barrancabermeja's war is part of a larger territorial dispute in this 
region, known as the Middle Magdalena Valley. The city is home to the 
country's largest refinery and the region has several important oil fields. 
Just west of Barrancabermeja, there are large gold and mineral deposits as 
well as vast coca fields, the raw material for cocaine.

Both guerrillas and paramilitaries finance much of their war by taxing coca 
growers and traffickers and in some cases trafficking the drugs themselves.

Earlier this year, as many as 1,000 right-wing militiamen moved into the 
area with sophisticated weaponry, killing hundreds of suspected rebel 
collaborators and ripping into the traditional support base of the 
country's second-largest rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The paramilitary offensive coincided with the government's preliminary 
agreement with the ELN to remove the armed forces from three municipalities 
in the area in preparation for peace talks.

The government is holding a similar process with the FARC in a 16,000 
square-mile area in the south of the country that the guerrillas formally 
control. But the paramilitaries' offensive has put the viability of the 
ELN's "demilitarized zone" in doubt.

The battle between the armed factions in the countryside has seeped onto 
the streets of Barrancabermeja. Locals say that many guerrillas have 
switched sides to the paramilitaries and now single out their former 
colleagues in the city for execution.

Police and military personnel routinely set up checkpoints on the streets 
to search for guns and explosives. They also round up masses of young men 
age 15 to 35, looking for urban guerrillas in Barrancabermeja's infamous 
northwest neighborhoods, which are the guerrillas' home base in the city. 
Murals of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born Latin American 
revolutionary icon, line the streets. The former neighborhood police 
station lies in rubble covered in rebel graffiti. The police abandoned it 
several years ago after repeated guerrilla attacks.

Police have scoured the northwest for suspects, but local authorities are 
troubled by the seemingly inadequate response to the paramilitaries' 
activities in the city center.

"They [the police] say they're investigating, but the results are few and 
far between," said the Rev. Jose Figueroa from Barrancabermeja's archdiocese.

The military arrested five suspected paramilitary leaders in July, but the 
men are being held only for carrying weapons illegally. In Colombia, an 
estimated 97 percent of all crimes go unpunished.

The police say said the murder rate has dropped substantially since the 
July arrests and a series of raids in the northwest neighborhoods. Still, 
victims keep filling the morgues at alarming rates, particularly on weekends.

In separate incidents on a Friday in mid-October, for example, two 
unidentified men were killed, as was Claudia Bernal, 16. Bernal was shot in 
the head as she drove on her moped from her older sister Angelica's house 
in Provivienda in the northwest.

At the morgue, with her sister's blood still on her shirt, Angelica writhed 
in pain and tears, then screamed, "Why her? She didn't do anything!"
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