COLOMBIA'S FUGITIVES FROM WOE

Millions In Recent Years Have Fled The Violence In Their War-Torn Nation.
The Rich Relocate To Places Like Miami And Madrid. For The Poor, Internal
Exile And Misery Are The Norm.

CAZUCA, Colombia--In this slum outside Bogota, Jose Donato lives in a tin
shack overlooking a quarry that spews dust on his home all day like a
light, poisonous rain.

Fifteen hundred miles away, Fernando Gonzalez Pacheco, one of Colombia's
most beloved talk show hosts, sleeps safe at night in a Miami condo complex
with a pool and tennis courts.

These men are the two faces of Colombia's growing refugee crisis, a
national disaster that has forced millions from their homes as violence
escalates with the infusion of U.S. aid to the drug war.

For the rural poor, flight means a squalid respite in the shantytowns that
ring the cities of this nation already torn apart by guerrilla war. For the
rich and the middle class, it is a plane trip to Miami or Madrid, where
growing numbers of Colombians have created a community in exile populated
by industrialists and politicians, actors and businesspeople.

The exodus, the hemisphere's largest, has rent the country in many ways.
But perhaps most destructive is this: Rather than creating a shared feeling
of loss among a far-flung people, Colombia's crisis has instead deepened
the divisions in an already divided country.

In doing so, this flight of more than 2 million people since 1995--a figure
that amounts to one of every 20 Colombians--has intensified the sense of a
society without common ground. And it has worsened the chances for peace,
with the country's best and brightest abroad and its poorest and most
miserable remaining as recruitment fodder for gangs, guerrillas and death
squads.

"It's one of the greatest tragedies of the current Colombian situation.
Nobody is in the boat rowing together," said Bruce Bagley, a University of
Miami professor who is an expert on Colombia. "There is no solidarity in
Colombia."

The massive dislocation has also had a devastating effect on the economy.
Unemployment has soared to almost 20% as the rural poor cram into already
crowded cities in search of nonexistent jobs amid a severe economic
downturn. Meanwhile, the rich and the middle class flee with their
bankbooks, resulting in the loss of more than $2 billion a year in capital,
according to some estimates.

The dislocation is worst in the countryside, where entire villages have
fled the violence of Colombia's mind-boggling array of armed groups.
Leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups and narco-traffickers
routinely attack civilians, either to seize territory or to clear more land
to grow coca plants, according to human rights organizations.

Donato and his family of five are a case in point.

Three years ago, Donato got word that his name was on a list of men slated
for execution. He was targeted, he thinks--by either narco-traffickers or
local rebels who tax cocaine production--because he quit his job as a
fumigator at a cocaine plantation to participate in a government program
designed to encourage legal farming. The same day, he packed up his family
and headed for Bogota, the capital.

Like thousands of other refugees, the family ended up in Cazuca, a
ramshackle collection of tin shacks and dirt roads slouching toward Bogota.
Poverty, crime and despair have made the slum an urban wasteland.

The hills of Cazuca are barren, speckled only with the blue plastic sheets
that serve as shelter for thousands. Through the middle runs a dirty
stream, the runoff from the quarry that belches dust all day. For the
women, the stream serves as a laundermat. For the children, it is the
community pool.

Once in Cazuca, Donato pieced together a house of corrugated tin and
plastic sheets. A government official visited him once, he says, and
offered to help the family out. He never saw the man again.

Now, Donato spends his days worrying about how to feed his family. He looks
for work but hasn't been able to find any. He reads the Bible and has faith
in God. But not the government.

"They promised to help us, but they didn't," he said. "Everything we have,
someone else has given to us."

Paramilitaries, Rebels Troll For Fighters

The violence in the countryside has created hundreds of thousands of people
like Donato with little sense that the government can protect them from
violence or help once they have escaped it.

As a consequence, they become disconnected and disgruntled, turning into
candidates for the paramilitary groups and guerrillas who troll such slums,
according to refugee experts.

"There is no concept now of one country, of a united nation," said Libardo
Sarmiento, a political scientist affiliated with the National University.
"There is a real Balkanization."

Worse, the government seems to return the apathy of the displaced with
indifference of its own. Even now, a debate rages between President Andres
Pastrana's office, which estimates that last year there were no more than
180,000 internal refugees, and local churches and charities, which put the
figure at more than 317,000.

Government aid programs exist to help retrain and reeducate refugees. But
they are too filled with red tape and too short on resources to do much
good, critics say.

"The government buries its head like an ostrich," said Jorge Rojas,
director of the Consultancy for Human Rights and the Displaced, one of the
country's most respected nongovernmental organizations. "This is a country
where insecurity, fear and the absence of opportunity are determining our
pace of development."

A refugee crisis is nothing new for Colombia. For a country that has
suffered more than 50 years of on-and-off conflict, people fleeing their
homes is standard.

In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, when the country was convulsed by a
civil war in which victorious soldiers played soccer with the decapitated
heads of slain opponents, more than 12% of the population is estimated to
have been displaced.

What makes this particular exodus so much more damaging to the body politic
is that is comes during the middle of the worst economic slump Colombia has
suffered in decades. With no jobs, many of the displaced resort to common
crime--further increasing insecurity.

"You're talking about a total break in the fabric of society," Rojas said.
"The displaced have lost their ability to participate in political life,
they have lost their homes, they have lost their culture, their social
standing, everything."

With the rich and the middle class, Colombia confronts a different problem,
but one just as damaging to the country's social fabric. Although solid
numbers are difficult to come by, some observers estimate that as many as
200,000 people--in a nation of 40 million--leave the country each year and
don't return, with the vast majority headed for the United States.

One of those was Pacheco, who appeared on the first talk show in Colombia
nearly 40 years ago and has reigned as king of Colombian television ever
since. His Bogota office is plastered with photos of the VIPS he has
interviewed over the years, a pictographic record of Colombia's sad and
violent past.

One portrait shows Pacheco with a well-known political satirist who was
later gunned down in a Bogota street. Another shows a news anchor who fled
the country after death threats. Still another features Pacheco with a
former president subsequently accused of running a political campaign
financed by narco-traffickers.

Pacheco decided to leave after one of his cousins was kidnapped. Like
hundreds of thousands of other Colombians, he moved to Miami, where he
rented a small house in a neighborhood filled with his countrymen.

There, in one of America's most dangerous cities, Pacheco felt safe at
last. But he realized that he was missing out on the daily rub and grind of
life in Bogota.

Country Hurt In Numerous Ways

"This is my home. This is my country. I want to die here," Pacheco said
during one of his frequent visits to his office in Bogota. "I just hope
it's a natural death."

The absence of hundreds of thousand of people like Pacheco hurts the
country in numerous ways, according to economists and political experts.

First, there is the flight of capital, when those who leave take money and
reinvest it in newfound homelands. The economy loses a potential employer
or consumer. And the government loses tax revenue that could go to social
investment.

Then there is the perception of insecurity. If the government can't protect
its top citizens, whom can it protect. After his retirement, the head of
the national police force had to move his family to the United States to
seek protection from the hundreds of drug dealers he had helped to put in
prison.

But most serious is the departure of so-called human capital--the loss of
intellectuals who could work toward solving the country's numerous
economic, social and political problems. Death threats have resulted in the
evacuation of academic departments at top universities. The opinion pages
of leading newspapers are filled with columns from journalists and
politicians who now live abroad.

"With this exodus, you have a diaspora of the intelligentsia that loses
contact with the situation," said Francisco Santos, one of the nation's top
journalists, who himself had to flee after receiving threats. "You're
losing people who might provide different ideas, different types of
solutions in the peace process."

For many Colombians, the departure of the middle class is one of the most
worrisome features of the current crisis. Colombia has long had a large
middle class, which is part of the reason the country's political and
economic history is more stable than that of most other countries in the
region.

Guerrillas Kept Asking For More

One of those who has fled is Maria Nelly Valencia, who ran a small shop in
the western city of Cali that sold supplies for photocopying machines.
Guerrillas forced her to pay extortion money but repeatedly asked for more.
One day, a group of them tried to kidnap her as she left her store. She
escaped in her car but decided it was time to leave. She left behind her
grown children, who couldn't afford to leave.

Now running a flower shop in Miami, Valencia says she doesn't have much
desire to go back. During an interview in Miami at the Colombian American
Service Assn., a center for Colombian immigrants, she spoke carefully about
her new home and the country she left behind.

"It's safe here. I can walk in the streets. There is a lot of opportunity,"
Valencia said. "It's not like Colombia."

The departure of the middle class only exacerbates a growing gap between
the rich and the poor, experts say. And that presages further trouble.

"If the middle class leave the country at the rate they are now, you might
as well turn out the light in Colombia," said Michael Shifter, a Colombia
expert with Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

For Maria Dilia Obando, the light has already gone out. Another resident of
the Cazuca slum, Obando washes clothes in a 55-gallon drum for a living.
Her husband scavenges for lemons in dumpsters behind markets in Bogota,
hoping to sell them in the streets.

The family members fled their home after a band of masked men came to the
door and told them to leave. They thought that maybe Cazuca would provide
more opportunity, a safer place to live. Instead, things have only gotten
worse. And there is no end in sight.

"Our life was much better before," Obando said. "Now, it's so hard. And
there is nobody to help."