DRUG WAR IN COLOMBIAN PORT LEAVES 305 DEAD THIS YEAR

Six people were shot to death and six others were injured by a
roadside bomb this weekend in Buenaventura, where the soaring murder
rate this year is making the port city one of Colombia's top killing
fields, officials said Sunday.

The execution-style murders that included a six-year-old child on
Saturday and the bomb on Sunday that injured four soldiers, a police
officer and a civilian were blamed by police on drug traffickers, who
have turned Buenaventura into a major shipping point for cocaine.

The killings bring the death toll this year to 305, said Mayor Saulo
Quinones, giving Buenaventura the chilling murder rate of 100 per
100,000 inhabitants, ranking alongside Medellin (160 per 100,000) and
Cali (90 per 100,000).

Other Buenaventura officials said the city's real murder rate is much
higher but impossible to determine because many of the killings are
carried out by drug traffickers who instill fear and silence on the
local population.

"They take the young people out to sea and they are made to
disappear. Their families know nothing and don't report it to the
police because they are afraid," said an official who asked not to be
identified.

The violence, experts said, has soared since right-wing paramilitary
groups (paras) recently disbanded, making leftist guerrillas like the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) believe they could
corner the drug market.

"The FARC thought they could control the neighborhoods where the drug
is hidden and the mangroves from where it is smuggled onto awaiting
freighters in open waters. However, the paras may have dropped their
ideology but not their (drug) business," said a local leader who
identified himself simply as Batista.

Most of the murder victims are poor, black and under 30, who make up
60 percent of the city's unemployed.