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."