COLOMBIA'S POOR CAUGHT IN CROSS HAIRS OF COCA WAR

Puerto Asis, Colombia --- The highways into the countryside close at 6 p.m.
sharp. Drivers caught out after curfew risk being fined by the military ---
or facing a confrontation with guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary squads.

At dawn, trucks and taxis line up at the military roadblock at the edge of
town, waiting in the half-light while soldiers with automatic rifles slung
over their shoulders peer under hoods and pat down drivers and passengers.

Colombia is at war, and the evidence is nowhere more striking than in its
far southern provinces, where the army, Marxist guerrillas and paramilitary
squads are locked in battle over the world's most prolific coca-growing region.

At the airport here, the tiny terminal sits beside a fortified redoubt,
black sandbags piled head-high, with gun slits and a couple of covered
pillboxes. The police station looks the same.

On the 40 miles of rutted, bone-jarring highway to nearby La Hormiga, an
oil pipeline that snakes alongside the road has been blasted apart by
guerrilla bombers too many times to count, leaving black charred circles in
the dirt and twisted metal as evidence of their handiwork.

Army patrols string out along the highway daily, shoulders criss-crossed
with ammunition belts, plodding along as the early morning mist rises over
the brilliant green landscape.

This is a land of constantly shifting power and control. One force sweeps
into a town, demanding loyalty, only to be pushed out a few months later by
opponents who single out and murder suspected supporters of the other side.

It's a vicious, endless cycle that has waxed and waned for four decades.

Caught in the middle are ordinary people trying to raise children, run
businesses or just enjoy a normal life. Caught worst of all are the rural
peasants. Their children conscripted by the various military forces, they
grow coca because there are no other viable crops, and they sell their
product under the watchful eye of a guerrilla one season, a paramilitary
the next.

"The peasants want to leave, but most don't have the money," said Sister
Irene Sarai, who works at a Catholic mission here. "They are caught between
the paramilitaries and the guerrillas. So many have been killed. It's
dangerous for them even to come into town."

Both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries force farmers to pay "taxes" on
their coca. They also take tribute from the traffickers who process the
leaves and smuggle cocaine out of the country.

Three years ago, Puerto Asis was dominated by the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the oldest and most powerful guerrilla force
in the nation's 37-year-old civil war.

Then the paramilitary groups moved in, murdering dozens of suspected
guerrilla sympathizers. Now the "paras," as they are called, rule like a
silent force. Ask quietly about them, and heads will nod toward muscular
young men riding motorcycles. The shadowy group is headquartered at a
sprawling, prosperous farm compound just outside of town.

"We had 150 murders last year," said German Martinez, the town's ombudsman,
a sort of government complaint taker. "That's out of 35,000 residents."

But the guerrillas aren't far away. Take a boat across the muddy Putumayo
River to the town of Puerto Vega, five miles away, and you're back in FARC
territory.

The story is much the same in La Hormiga, a farm town at the heart of the
Guamuez River Valley where the Colombian military, bolstered by millions in
U.S. aid, has recently fumigated thousands of acres of coca.

"It was a campaign of terror," said Cayo Miranda Montenegro, the municipal
ombudsman, referring to the arrival of the paramilitaries. "They cut off
heads and slit bellies. They killed a police officer in this building.

In January 1999, there was a massacre of 25 people in El Tigre, a nearby
town. Now the paras control the towns, while the guerrillas control the
countryside."

Out in that countryside, poor peasants want mostly to be left alone. Most
admit they grow coca --- it's useless to deny it, since it often surrounds
their homes. But many say they grow it only because there is no alternative
crop that earns anything close to the $1,000 or more they can make each
year off the bright green leaves.

Most have only a few years of education and profess no political leanings
at all. They say they simply wish the war would end.

"I want to quit growing coca because it's too dangerous," said Rigoberto
Rosero, 36, who watched recently as government planes fumigated his coca
crop --- along with his bananas and corn and his house and family of four
children. "The danger is from all sides --- the government, the
paramilitaries, the guerrillas."

The root of the conflict is the rich land that poor farmers like Rosero
till. An agricultural paradise, Colombia was ruled by rural land barons
throughout the 1800s, with Indians and peasants pushed off their plots.

In the 1950s, the country was convulsed by a 10-year war called "la
Violencia" --- the Violence --- in which the main political parties split
in terrible bloodshed. The conflict was over politics and power but also,
once again, control of the land, which had become even more valuable with
Colombia's coffee boom.

Both the guerrilla and paramilitary forces at work today were born in that
conflict, the guerrillas disciples of Marx, the paras essentially private
armies run by the land barons.

The conflict simmered through the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, Colombia
emerged as the world's coca- and cocaine-producing leader, bringing a new
ruthless element into the picture --- drug traffickers. Suddenly, there
were billions of dollars at stake.

Now both the paramilitaries and the guerrillas skim millions from
drug-runners and coca growers, battling for control over swaths of valuable
countryside.

Both enforce their will through terror and murder. Informers spy for both
sides, reporting on neighbors. Blood-curdling warnings are given. Some
murders seem random, with unconfirmed stories about drunken partisans
killing people in bars for the sheer hell of it.

Last year, more than 5,000 people died in the conflict across Colombia ---
an average of 14 per day. Over the past four decades, more than 35,000 have
been killed.

Most people just try to keep their mouths shut, walking the invisible line
between the terror on both sides, hoping they won't say or do something
that will make them a target.

"People never know which side it may come from," said Carlos Palacios, an
ex-priest who now works with the local government to help peasants who have
lost their coca crops in La Hormiga. "You have to be extremely careful of
what you say and do."

Here in Puerto Asis, ombudsman Martinez works out of an office off the town
square. An outspoken critic of the paramilitaries, he is now accompanied 24
hours a day by three bodyguards toting machine guns.

"I've spoken the truth about the paramilitaries, and so they've issued an
order that I be killed," he said. "I'm leaving Colombia with my wife and my
daughter. This is the price of free expression in Colombia."