IN COLOMBIAN PORT CITY, CHILDREN ARE BECOMING SOLDIERS

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia In a slum church fortified by steel doors, the Rev.
Ricardo Londono teaches children music, hoping to steer them away from
becoming killers.

"We are convinced that every child that picks up an instrument is less
likely to pick up a gun," he says as children joyfully raise a cacophony
with drums and cellos.

The Catholic priest is well aware of the dangers on the streets of this
impoverished neighborhood called Antonio Lleras: The day before, two men
were shot just blocks from the church. A day later, two more men would be
gunned down nearby.

This is Buenaventura, a city where drug traffickers and demobilized
veterans of Colombia's political violence are warring with a seriously
underpowered police force in a struggle that has killed hundreds in the
streets this year.

"They all are fighting for control of this zone because it's close to the
sea, and that, for them, is strategic," said Londono, who has run this
church for eight years. "The young people look to them for jobs as a narco,
an informer or a hit man."

Some 215 miles southwest of Bogota, the city of 300,000 is the country's
largest port. It's from here that the coffee is exported and the imported
cars roll in.

The port is also a key way station for the world's largest cocaine
industry. Twenty tons have been captured in and around Buenaventura this
year, a third of all the cocaine netted along the Pacific coast.

Being poor and having a port make Buenaventura a tempting place for drug
traffickers, said Roy Barrera, the region's congressman. "This perverse
marriage of these armed groups and drug traffickers has turned the town
into a ghetto in the hands of the mafia."

Lying halfway down Colombia's 815-mile Pacific coast, Buenaventura is its
biggest slum. According to the government, 80 percent of the mostly
Afro-Colombian population survives on less than $3 a day, compared with a
national rate of 50 percent.

Killings have doubled in two years to top 300 in 2006 24 times the
homicide rate of New York City. And that doesn't include the unknown
numbers who have disappeared.

The authorities appear to have little control over the daily slaughter.

Days after publicly denouncing the drug traffickers' infiltration of the
city, Buenaventura's Roman Catholic bishop, Hector Epalza Quintero, began
receiving death threats. He fled the city, returning four weeks later.

The hefty bribes thrown around by drug traffickers put heavy pressure on
city institutions.

During a town-hall meeting Oct. 27 to discuss security, President Alvaro
Uribe dramatically demanded the arrest of the city's top security official,
who sat just feet away and had just been accused by a naval officer of
offering him a bribe to return an intercepted cocaine shipment.

Following a peace deal with Uribe's government, many so-called
paramilitaries from right-wing groups demobilized and returned to lives of
poverty, whereupon some hooked up with drug traffickers.

In Antonio Lleras, where the children are learning to make music, the
battle lines are clearly drawn. The neighborhood is controlled by the
leftists, and the one next door by rightists. No one crosses between the two.

The stench of rubbish hangs in the air of Antonio Lleras and people live in
wooden shacks, some with only black plastic garbage bags for walls.

With no room left on land, newcomers build huts on stilts in the water.
Farther out in the deeper waters, people here whisper, some of those killed
in the conflict are weighed down with concrete.

Emilio Mosquera, as 22-year-old father of three, sits on a plastic chair in
broiling tropical sun.