Pubdate: Thu,  5 Jan 2006
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
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Copyright: 2006 San Jose Mercury News
Author: Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

DRUG CONFLICT DISPLACES EVER MORE COLOMBIANS

PEREIRA, Colombia - Armando Garces was reluctant to leave his 
mountain village even after right-wing militia members had gone door 
to door telling residents they had 48 hours to evacuate, or else. He 
didn't like being ordered to abandon the only home he had ever known.

Then a daylong gun battle erupted between the paramilitary fighters 
and leftist guerrillas over control of nearby coca crops and transit 
routes. Garces' town -- Bajo Calima, nestled in Colombia's Pacific 
coast rain forest -- was caught in the cross fire between the rebels 
above the town and militia members below it.

"We hid under our beds all day, and the next morning we were gone," 
said Garces, recalling the terrifying day in June when his township 
became a battleground in the nation's long-running drug wars. 
"Everyone agreed it was time to look for some other future."

So the 25-year-old woodcutter, his wife, two children and 500 other 
residents joined Colombia's swelling ranks of the internally 
displaced. More than 3 million people have been driven from their 
homes by the longstanding civil conflict between Colombian armed 
groups vying for political dominance and control of crops related to 
the nation's drug trade as well as of other agricultural products.

Only Sudan has more internally displaced citizens than Colombia, 
according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, a human rights group that 
has tracked the displaced around the globe for the Office of the U.N. 
High Commissioner for Refugees.

Although Colombia has had a large displaced population for two 
decades, the numbers have accelerated in recent months, experts say, 
and a disproportionate number are, like Garces, Afro-Colombians. They 
are targeted because they lack political clout and sophistication at 
a time when their rural homes have become economically attractive.

Ricardo Esquivia, general coordinator of Arvidas, an advocacy group 
for the displaced in Sucre state, said most Afro-Colombians who own 
such lands lack either full knowledge of their rights or the 
political power to impose them. One factor working against 
Afro-Colombians is the 80 percent illiteracy rate in the rural areas 
where many of them live, said Esquivia, himself an Afro-Colombian.

"They are historically vulnerable and relegated because they have 
never fully exercised their economic, social and cultural rights," 
said Jorge Rojas, a leading advocate for human rights and the 
displaced in Bogota.

Those rights include a constitutional provision that guarantees land 
title to Afro-Colombian rural communities that have organized loosely 
as a group and have occupied their property for 10 years or more, 
said Luis Murillo, a former governor of Colombia's Choco state. 
Murillo, also an Afro-Colombian, estimates that 1 million 
Afro-Colombians, or one-third of those living in rural areas, have 
been forced from their lands.

The growing number of displaced has much to do with the changing 
logistics of Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade. The 
success of spraying programs sponsored by the U.S. government to 
eradicate coca leaf production in Colombia's Amazon basin has caused 
a shift in coca farming to more remote areas, including the Pacific 
coastal zone surrounding Bajo Calima, where Afro-Colombians are concentrated.

The port city of Buenaventura near Garces' hometown and the estuaries 
that drain into it have become the most important cocaine processing 
and transshipment centers in Colombia, according to recent interviews 
with U.S. law enforcement officials.

Garces and fellow residents were lucky to escape with their lives. In 
past years, both paramilitary and guerrilla groups in towns such as 
Bajo Calima have massacred thousands of people whom they suspected of 
helping the other side, or just for being in the way. Since July, 
Garces has lived in a shantytown here called Plumon. It is on the 
outskirts of Pereira, built into the side of a river canyon, and has 
no running water or electricity.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota say they fear that the 
problem of Colombia's displaced is a humanitarian time bomb, adding 
that the U.S. Agency for International Development's $30 million 
annual aid package is being redesigned to focus more on the needs of 
Afro-Colombians.

"It's a huge crisis for a country already dealing with a lot of other 
crises at the same time," said a U.S. Embassy official who asked not 
to be identified.

Control of the drug trade isn't the only motive causing armed groups 
to push rural Afro-Americans off their land. In Sucre state, about 
60,000 have fled the countryside for the state capital, Sincelejo, to 
escape bloody fights over control of avocado and palm plantations or 
simply for territorial dominance.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman