A HIGHWAY INTO WARFARE: UNPROTECTED COLOMBIANS SUFFER VIOLENCE FROM BOTH SIDES

ALONG THE MEDELLIN-TURBO HIGHWAY, Colombia - 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 in
July 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.

The young men and women of Colombia's guerrilla armies and rival
paramilitary force are 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. Its
absence has left a vacuum in which armed groups flourish throughout
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, leaving
farmers to improvise survival in a war zone where neither side
represents the legitimate state.

A Government In Hiding

As the war has intensified, the central government has hastened its
own disappearance, withdrawing permanent security forces from dozens
of towns it has declared 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 such as batteries and boots, kill people at roadblocks based on
where they live, and "cleanse" villages of drug users. 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.

"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. "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."

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 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 one-tenth
of the U.S. aid package is earmarked for programs designed to
"strengthen the rule of law."

Guerrilla Lifeline

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 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, 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.

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

After 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; they return
sporadically in small patrols.

The constant ebb and flow of security forces along the highway and
the roads that feed it exacerbate violence in these communities. When
the army withdraws, 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.

Shifting Line Of Control

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 collaborators.

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.

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. But those in which the contest has been
settled are relatively safe, and El Jordan has clearly been settled
in 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.

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. "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
or government services, conditions that have helped this paramilitary
force evolve from a collection of small armed groups that protected
drug lords and remote towns 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.

"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. "We have an
intelligence network in each town, including guerrilla informants."

Trapped In The Middle

Passing back to the west through Medellin, Colombia's commercial
center, the road skirts shantytowns of war refugees whose flight has
shifted 10 percent of the population from rural to urban centers in
the past 20 years.

Off this highway, sitting in a deep valley formed by cliffs, lies the
town of Peque. 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. The town 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 in
July. "Storekeepers can't say no when armed men arrive and ask for
these things," said Jesus Amado Sierra Montoya, the town priest who
has become Peque's de facto leader.

The guerrillas reached Peque before the Colombian military. Commander
Tomas of the FARC's Jose Maria Cordoba Bloc summoned Amado 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 left. 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.

Roberto Mira, Peque's 28-year-old 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
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."

(SIDEBAR)

Colombia's Armed Groups

GUERRILLA FORCES

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia: FARC

Began as rural protection force after an era of political conflict
known as The Violence. The FARC coalesced as a rebel army in 1964,
and several of its oldest fronts operate in Antioquia province. The
group took on a more formalized Marxist ideology years later when
urban intellectuals joined what had been a peasant movement.

Strength: 18,000

National Liberation Army: ELN

Urban guerrilla movement inspired by the Cuban revolution; it began
soon after the FARC. A more rigorously Marxist ideological force than
the FARC, the ELN is shrinking in size and military strength. But
several active fronts operate in Antioquia province, where they
engineer kidnappings and strikes against the electricity grid.

Strength: 5,000

PARAMILITARY FORCE

United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia: AUC

An irregular army that fights on the government side. It emerged in
the mid-1980s as a collection of small regional armed groups to
protect drug lords and remote towns from guerrilla attacks. Since
then, it has evolved into an anti-communist populist movement that
employs savage offensive military tactics to push Colombia's rural
residents into the urban centers it controls.

Strength: 8,000