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

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

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."

                                               © 2001