Pubdate: Fri, 03 Aug 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

WAR WITH AN ABSENT ARMY

In Contested Region, Colombian Government Finds Some Towns Too 
Dangerous to Protect

COLOMBIA -- Along the Medellin-Turbo Highway, the road curves through 
terraced coffee crops and dips into deep valleys where wisps of 
clouds blow through like smoke, hiding rebel camps and daytime troop 
movement through thick jungle.

In the villages around Peque, a town at the bitter end of a dirt 
track that branches off from this highway as it runs north to the 
sea, the number of dead from a massacre by paramilitary forces last 
month is still being determined. Waiting a week for the army to 
arrive, frightened villagers were told by the paramilitary troops not 
to bury family members. They had to kill more than a dozen of the 
town dogs to keep them away from the corpses.

The young men and women of Colombia's guerrilla armies and rival 
paramilitary force are present here in greater numbers than in any 
other part of the country, strung out along a highway as old as the 
four-decade war itself. Twice as many kidnappings occur in this part 
of Colombia -- more than 500 last year -- than in any other. Tens of 
thousands of refugees walk out of these towns, seeking safety in the 
cities of Medellin and Bogota.

Even more telling is what is not here: the Colombian government. A 
defining feature of the war, the absence of government has left a 
vacuum in which armed groups flourish across the country. The state's 
abiding weakness is an element of Colombia's war often overlooked in 
Washington, where the focus on eradicating drug trafficking has been 
dominant.

Although less than 150 miles away in Bogota, the central government 
exerts the slimmest influence in these heartland towns of red-tile 
roofs and broad plazas, leaving the coffee and bean farmers to 
improvise survival in a war zone where neither side represents the 
legitimate state. As the war has intensified, the central government 
has hastened its own disappearance, withdrawing permanent security 
forces from dozens of towns it has declared simply too dangerous to 
protect.

In its place, irregular armies impose arbitrary rule. They control 
towns, keep a chokehold on food supplies and the sale of everyday 
items like batteries and boots, kill people at roadblocks based on 
where they live, and "cleanse" villages of drug users. Only a few 
towns here have police or courts. Village priests are frequently more 
powerful than the few remaining elected mayors, who, lacking 
protection from the central government, serve at the whim of the 
armed groups. Miracles substitute for health clinics: Signs on 
roadside waterfalls declare the cascading waters medicinal.

"The peasant has been abandoned by the government," said a priest in 
the town of El Santuario, where paramilitary troops have killed 
hundreds of presumed guerrilla sympathizers and drug users in the 
past year. "They want us all to leave the country for the cities to 
make their job easier. But I tell my congregation to stay, stay and 
remain impartial in this conflict. And so their lives become a game 
of Ping- Pong as one group enters, replaced by another. Where is the 
state?"

In attempting to negotiate a peace accord with guerrilla forces, 
President Andres Pastrana has singled out the drug trade as the 
primary source of Colombia's civil conflict. The country's various 
armed groups profit enormously from protecting and controlling the 
drug trade in some regions, a source of financing that Pastrana wants 
stopped to strengthen his hand at the negotiating table.

Based on that premise, the United States is sending $1.3 billion in 
aid, mostly in the form of military hardware designed to give the 
Colombian armed forces more offensive capability. Less than a tenth 
of the U.S. aid package is earmarked for programs designed to 
"strengthen the rule of law."

There are no coca crops or poppy fields along this stretch of 
highway, which begins in the capital, Bogota, and runs more than 350 
miles through the country's mountainous northwest to the lush banana 
zone of Turbo on the Caribbean Sea. For almost four decades it has 
been the most consistently contested region of Colombia for its value 
as an arms-transport corridor used by a strengthening guerrilla 
insurgency.

According to religious, municipal and paramilitary leaders 
interviewed over a three-day trip along a 100-mile stretch of this 
highway, first east and then west from Medellin, eliminating the drug 
trade will do nothing to lessen the conflict in these towns, which 
have provided fertile ground for Colombia's armed groups since long 
before drug trafficking began.

San Luis: Deadly Reprisals

The road climbs east out of Medellin through cool mountains, then 
dips sharply into a valley of bean fields and banana orchards. 
Arriving in San Luis, a chipped and worn town sloping along a 
hillside, traffic is stopped at an army checkpoint.

It is a rare glimpse of the Colombian state. Four soldiers read 
newspapers while one frisks passengers and peers into car trunks. 
Following a guerrilla siege that killed half of San Luis's 16 police 
officers in December 1999, the army arrived and stayed four months. 
Then the soldiers left, along with the police, and now return only 
sporadically in small patrols.

The constant ebb and flow of security forces along the highway and 
the roads that feed it exacerbates violence in these communities. 
When the army withdraws, as it always does in a war of many battles 
but no front, residents suffer reprisals by the armed groups that 
move quickly to retake towns in the military's wake.

"I have seen many die -- some for a reason, some for nothing," said 
Eugenio Cano, a 55-year-old farmer wearing the white-straw hat of 
peasants from Antioquia province.

Cano has been displaced by the war. His brother-in-law was killed two 
months ago by guerrilla troops, who arrived on his farm and accused 
him of supporting the army and its paramilitary collaborators. "The 
army comes, the army goes," Cano said. "The [armed] groups remain to 
tell us what to do."

Two bridges spanning deep canyons to the west lie in pieces, 
destroyed by guerrilla bombs. A dozen displaced men, women and 
children gather at the bottleneck to collect coins from passing cars. 
Farther along, a bombed brick tollbooth has been replaced by a tin 
shack, a white flag fluttering above it in a hopeful plea to the 
guerrillas to be left alone.

Graffiti mark the shifting line of control between the guerrillas and 
the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the 8,000-member 
paramilitary army known as the AUC that fights the insurgency on the 
same side as the Colombian military. Not a soldier is in sight.

San Carlos: A Way of Life

The road bends into San Carlos, where three years ago a guerrilla 
siege killed half a dozen soldiers. Ever since, the army and police 
presence has been minimal and temporary. In the last three weeks, the 
paramilitary forces and the guerrillas have killed at least six 
people in their seesaw conflict for territory and influence in the 
vacuum left by the government. Two of those killed were employees of 
the TransOriente bus service, which provided the only public 
transportation into a nearby paramilitary stronghold.

The bus service has ended, thanks to the Revolutionary Armed Forces 
of Colombia, the 18,000-member Marxist insurgency that coalesced from 
a collection of rural armed vigilante groups in 1964. Several 
thousand guerrillas from the FARC, as the insurgent army is known, 
have exercised control in many of these towns for decades.

The conflict in San Carlos dictates life in large and small ways. 
Last year, the local paramilitary command summoned every business 
owner to a meeting in a nearby village to set the local "vaccine," a 
kind of municipal protection tax shopkeepers are required to pay the 
paramilitary men for their services. "I'd send 40,000 pesos [$17] 
every month by messenger," said the owner of a dry goods store. "But 
business has died and I stopped sending it a few months ago. So far 
no one has said anything, but I'm waiting."

The paramilitary army prohibits the sale of propane gas canisters in 
town because the guerrillas pack the empty ones with glass, nails and 
other objects for use as bombs. But the canisters provide the only 
cooking fuel for most of the population, leaving many without any way 
to make hot meals. A canister on the black market now goes for $35, 
twice the going rate in Medellin.

In the past 18 months, Lucia Cardona's fish-farmer husband and 
unemployed daughter have been murdered. Cardona, a woman with pudgy 
arms and sad, watery eyes, hasn't been given her husband's body and 
so must wait two years before receiving a widow's stipend from the 
government. Her daughter left behind a 5-year-old girl.

To provide for three children and a grandchild, Cardona recently 
joined 29 other new widows participating in a program sponsored by 
nonprofit agencies and the town government to train them on a variety 
of production-line machines. "Ask anyone who has had a husband 
killed: Who has come to investigate?" Cardona said. "The answer is 
the same for all of us: no one."

El Jordan: Peaceful Facade

As a rule, Colombia's most dangerous places are those being contested 
by one group or another. At sundown, doors are closed, windows are 
shut and curtained, and the streets are as dark as the jungle 
creeping up the mountain behind. But those in which the contest has 
been settled are relatively safe, and El Jordan has clearly been 
settled over the past year in favor of the paramilitary forces.

Commander Johnny, the No. 2 paramilitary official in the region, 
strolls through El Jordan with the swagger of a sheriff, a 
khaki-green holster and handgun on his waist, wearing a floppy jungle 
hat snapped up on the sides.

The streets are filled with the noise of television sets and children 
playing in the light of open doors late into the night. A crew-cut 
teenager approaches, stops and salutes: "Good evening, my commander." 
Johnny's own paramilitary boss huffs his way through a soccer game 
under the lights of the town field.

"When we arrived here, there was no police, no mayor, no nothing," 
said Johnny, his wispy mustache and smooth skin making him appear 
younger than his 32 years. "The people asked us to be here."

Johnny said El Jordan, population 2,000, is a model for what's in 
store for the rest of eastern Antioquia province. There are no police 
here or government services -- conditions that have helped this 
paramilitary force evolve since the 1980s, from a collection of small 
armed groups that protected drug lords and remote towns preyed on by 
guerrillas into an anti-communist populist movement with national 
reach.

The army concentrates most of its local forces at an important 
hydroelectric plant 15 minutes away, leaving Johnny and his young men 
with automatic rifles, ammunition vests and walkie-talkies to arrange 
the rules. They are not the government, but they govern.

"We tell the public when we arrive, 'Look, if you collaborate with 
the guerrillas, leave [this place] or stop [providing support].' If 
they don't, they face the consequences," Johnny said, sipping coffee 
at an open-air restaurant. "We have an intelligence network in each 
town -- including guerrilla informants. We know what we are doing."

Peque: In the Middle

Passing back to the west through Medellin, Colombia's commercial 
center, the road skirts vast shantytowns of war refugees whose flight 
has shifted 10 percent of the population from rural to urban centers 
over the past two decades. Cresting over hillsides that slope like 
giant green waves, the highway plunges through ferns, banana fields 
and dangling wild orchids into a hot, dry valley.

Off this highway, sitting in a deep valley formed by mountain cliffs, 
lies the town of Peque. Here also lies a tale of how Colombia's armed 
groups carry out their deadly fight to control the landscape, and the 
government's inability to stop it.

The guerrilla army uses remote towns like Peque as large grocery 
stores and supply stops, passing through on a nightly basis. To dry 
up these resources, the rival paramilitary forces have used brutal 
methods to empty rural villages, where 12 million Colombians live.

Last year, the town was forced to make a deal with local paramilitary 
commanders. The paramilitary forces had sealed off the only road into 
Peque, population 11,000, in an attempt to starve residents out of 
the area -- again without any attempt by the Colombian government to 
intervene. The town, desperate to end the blockade, agreed to 
restrict the products storekeepers could sell. No batteries. No 
canned foods. No rubber boots, among other supplies the guerrillas 
use in their war effort.

But the deal fell apart as guerrillas demanded the supplies at 
gunpoint, prompting a paramilitary reprisal that was carried out last 
month. "Storekeepers can't say no when armed men arrive and ask for 
these things," said Jesus Amado Sierra Montoya, the town priest who 
in the absence of a protected municipal government has become Peque's 
de facto leader.

On July 3, more than 50 paramilitary troops entered from the east, 
arriving at 6 a.m. on a square dominated by a yellow church and the 
shell of a police station abandoned three years ago. Residents were 
separated by sex in front of parish offices, now bearing the painted 
scrawls, "AUC Forever, Special Forces Northern Bloc."

The paramilitary troops then carried out a massacre that claimed at 
least seven victims, conducting their business patiently, unmolested 
by any local police force or other government presence. They sacked 
local stores, robbed the Agrarian Bank and scared off half the 
population. The square filled with farmers from nearby villages, 
fearing that because of where they lived, the paramilitary forces 
would take revenge on them, too.

"If they took a look at our lives, they would see we don't have even 
an egg to spare for anyone but ourselves," said Bernardo Antonio 
Sepulveda, who fled on arthritis-crippled legs from the village of El 
Agrio with his wife and three young children.

News of the paramilitary occupation reached Colombian officials 
within hours, after the one bus into Peque was prohibited from 
entering. But it would be three days before paramilitary troops 
departed, with Colombian security forces still nowhere in sight.

The guerrillas reached Peque before the Colombian military. Commander 
Tomas of the FARC's Jose Maria Cordoba Bloc summoned Amado, the 
priest, and several other town leaders to a meeting in the mountains 
above the town. Although denied permission to enter the town, the 
guerrillas arrived soon afterward to address Peque's residents.

"He told them not to give up on the guerrillas, not to abandon them," 
Amado recalled.

The Colombian army arrived two days after the guerrillas departed -- 
a full week after paramilitary troops had first appeared on the 
square. Recently arrived police officials say they have received 
reports of dozens more massacre victims near Peque.

Many bodies have not been recovered because much of the thickly 
forested region is in the hands of guerrillas, and even some of those 
that have been recovered remain unburied because the armed groups 
have prohibited it. The residents of nearby Los Llanos and other 
villages have killed their dogs to prevent them from eating the 
exposed corpses.

Roberto Mira, Peque's 28-year-old public ombudsman, said the 
government should consider several steps to bring the town back into 
the state's fold. First, he said, the government should legalize 
plots of land now being farmed illegally by villagers. Eighty percent 
of the farmland around Peque has no legal title, making it impossible 
for farmers to secure vital credit at local agrarian banks.

"The poor are with the guerrillas here, but not out of conviction," 
Mira said. "Simply because of the circumstances of their lives."
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe