By Karen DeYoung

CARTAGENA, Colombia –– The snapshot tacked on the wall of the one-room shack shows two little boys mugging happily
for the camera. Just looking at her sons, with their dress-up clothes, shiny shoes and slicked-back hair, makes 24-year-old
Selta Machuca smile. "That's a picture of them at home," she says.

Moments later, a group of skinny children sidle into the sweltering enclosure. Filthy and shorn of all but a stubble of hair, most
are barefoot and shirtless, dressed only in ragged shorts. "Who is that on the wall? Does anybody recognize them?" prompts a
visiting priest.

"That's us, that's us in Colorado," say Carlos, 6, and Ruben, 5.

Two years ago, the family was driven off its farm in Colorado, in the southern part of Bolivar state, by fighting between
right-wing paramilitary groups and guerrillas of the leftist National Liberation Army. In the heart of Colombia's lucrative
gold-producing region, the area is coveted by both sides, and life for its rural residents is one of constant fear of being accused
by one armed group of aiding the other. Punishment for suspected sympathies is swift and lethal.

Like other displaced people from their region, Machuca, her husband and three children abandoned their property and headed
north toward the coast, traveling mostly by river to the state capital of Cartagena. Now, with one more child and another on the
way, their home is a muddy, muggy shantytown atop a swamp at the edge of El Pozon, an outlying Cartagena slum.

Within a few miles of the graceful, colonial center of this 16th century city where President Clinton visited Colombian President
Andres Pastrana last week, there are more than 41,000 internal refugees who have fled their rural and village homes in fear of
violence, according to Catholic Church figures. Across the entire country, there are many, many more refugees, congregated
mostly around large cities, especially in the north. Pastrana's government puts the figure at 300,000; the U.S. Committee for
Refugees says there were 1.8 million at the end of 1999, including about 288,000 who became displaced last year. The
Church, which has tried to do a comprehensive census in some areas, estimates the number at 500,000, but says no one really
knows for sure.

"Nobody has the figures," said Nel H. Beltran, the Catholic bishop of Sincelejo, the capital of neighboring Sucre state, who
heads nationwide Church programs for the displaced. The government tends to underestimate the total, while human rights
groups tend to overestimate it, Beltran said. And it is difficult to separate refugees fleeing violence from the migration to cities
that is occurring all over the Third World.

"What we do know is that the problem is very, very bad," Beltran said. "It breaks up the family, causes terrible trauma and
stigmatizes" the refugees. "It is the most difficult human problem that Colombia now has."

In El Pozon, the displaced are at the very bottom of an already low social and economic stratum. "A lot of people here threaten
us," said Elina Vargas, 30, whose family came from their southern Bolivar farm in October 1998. Tainted by the circumstances
of their flight, they are shunned by their neighbors. "They think we are guerrillas," Vargas said.

With Colombia's unemployment rate above 20 percent, there are few jobs for El Pozon's permanent residents, let alone the
refugees. Huddled on the outskirts of the slum, the lucky ones live in shacks like the Machucas', which is constructed of boards
and newspapers with a tin roof over a dirt floor. The rest take shelter beneath cardboard and plastic. The entire encampment is
frequently flooded by rain.

Toilets are holes dug a little way off the muddy paths. Although there is electricity, few have anything to plug in. Water for
drinking, cooking and bathing must be purchased at about 10 cents a gallon from a donkey cart that occasionally wends its way
through the encampment, and food supplies are sporadic donations from the government and the Church.

"The government helps very little," said Vargas. "Once in a while, they bring some rice or oil."

As the men of the camp cluster in groups and stare out over the nearby swamp, the women listlessly watch their malnourished
children. The vast majority of the children do not attend school. Charges for uniforms and books, along with the small
matriculation fee required by public schools, put it far out of reach.

About $22.5 million of the $1.3 billion, two-year aid package that Clinton symbolically presented to Pastrana here last week is
earmarked for internal refugees. Rather than help return them to their homes, however, the U.S. program recognizes that
Colombia's overlapping wars are unlikely to end soon, and their stay in the refugee encampments may last many more years.

The money is to be spread around large concentrations of refugees in 50 municipalities in northern Colombia. It will be
distributed as grants to local and international organizations to build public infrastructure such as schoolrooms, water systems,
markets, roads and bridges.

"We want medium- and long-term solutions for them--jobs, health care, schools--where [the refugees] are now," said an
official from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). "We want to make sure the displaced people are
accepted by their host communities."

But many of the organizations that the United States expects to do the work are not happy about associating with Plan
Colombia, the overarching, $7.5 billion Colombian development program in which Washington is participating.

Eighty percent of the U.S. aid money is to be spent on military equipment and training to help the Colombian army eliminate the
production and traffic of cocaine and heroin. Both the guerrillas and the paramilitary groups derive substantial income from the
traffic, and the guerrillas have said any group receiving U.S. aid will be targeted as the enemy.

"It's better if it's not known that we are financed by U.S. aid," said the head of one Colombian organization receiving USAID
money to work with the refugees. "There is a lot of fear among the nongovernmental organizations. . . . We've decided to
maintain a super-low profile and have instructed our people never to mention Plan Colombia."

According to Beltran and Cartagena Archbishop Carlos Jose Ruiseco, the Catholic Church has refused to participate in Plan
Colombia, objecting to both its military emphasis and use of aerial fumigation to destroy coca and poppy crops. The Church is
not concerned about guerrilla threats, Beltran said, but "our ethical consideration of Plan Colombia is that the ends don't justify
the means."

"Who doubts that Colombia has to get rid of the narco-traffickers and consolidate the structural institutions of the country?" he
said. "And modernizing the armed forces is very important. But it's wrong to believe that narco-traffic is the cause of
Colombia's problems, and that military force and fumigation should be used to solve them."

Instead, the clerics said, wealthy countries should concentrate their efforts on controlling drug imports and use inside their own
borders, halting the shipment of arms to Colombia, and providing better conditions for trade. "Do you know what it means to a
country like Colombia when the price of coffee drops?" Beltran asked. "We need justice, not vengeance."

In the Cartagena shantytown, Vargas said, "We don't know much about Plan Colombia. They say it's a war plan, that it's going
to make things worse. We don't know what it is, where it's coming from, or where it's going."