Plan For Colombia: Day 5a

RESIDENTS FLEEING BEFORE THE STORM

PUERTO ASIS, Colombia - The lights went out one autumn night this rural
market town of some 40,000 people in Putumayo province.

The outage was nothing unique, but it continued into the next morning. By
mid-afternoon the rumors were spreading, and they turned out to be true:
the Revolutionary Army Forces or Colombia - or FARC - had brought down the
power lines north of town in an area that guerrillas had controlled for
more than a decade.

Utility linemen were afraid to attempt a repair, and the army said it had
battles to fight elsewhere.

Puerto Asis was in darkness, with no prospect of restoring electric power
anytime soon.

Hospitals and hotels, casinos and cantinas unshelved their generators, and
householders got by as best as they could: Refrigerators and television
sets became luxuries of the past.

The blackout, imposed shortly after guerrillas cut off almost all local
trade with an armed blockade, was an early salvo in the city that many
believe will become ground zero when Plan Colombia brings troops to the
jungles to launch the latest battle of the drug war.

Puerto Asis lies deep in Putumayo, a remote, lightly populated province on
the border with Ecuador that has become a source of much of the world's
cocaine production.

Plan Colombia's looming military invasion to destroy coca fields and labs
will target the provinces of Putumayo and neighboring Caqueta.

"Puerto Asis was first a 'crystal' town, or a place where coca base was
processed into cocaine," says the local mayor, Manuel Alzate, 63, a retired
priest. "But then, in the '90s, this area became a place where coca leaf
was grown, harvested, and processed into coca base, too."

"I'd say that 70 percent of the farmers here grow coca, and, in town, 80
percent of the businesses profit from the trade."

But the lucrative trade that developed in this forgotten region after a
crackdown on coca crops in Bolivia and Peru could be short-lived - and
ultimately may bring more hardship to Putumayo.

Fearing a deadly confrontation, hundreds of refugees have fled the region
on army cargo planes that provided a fragile lifeline to Puerto Asis after
guerrillas shut down road and river traffic.

Entire families left remote enclaves on foot and caught rides with military
convoys to Puerto Asis to await the transports. Some slept on sidewalks
outside the airport gate; others were taken in by families through a
shelter set up by local officials.

The government's Solidarity Network offered meals - mostly rice and beans -
in a cafeteria it opened in an abandoned building across from the airport.

Some 150 refugees - men, women and children - one evening pressed against
the barred gate at the airport, hoping to be spirited away.

Among them were Omar, a tall, skinny and white-skinned young man, and
Maria, his wife, a short woman with the dark brown complexion that, in
Colombia, indicates African and Indian ancestry.

The couple, both about 30, were accompanied by their three boys and two
girls, all of school age.

The family had walked for four hours to the military base at Santa Ana,
only a half-hour away from Puerto Asis. From Santa Ana they had caught a
ride into Puerto Asis with a military convoy.

Omar said he could not find work in the countryside. Crops, if they could
be harvested, couldn't be brought to market. Omar - and all of the farm
workers he knew - had been laid off about two weeks before they had
evacuated to Puerto Asis.

Now the family members were waiting for a C-130 Hercules - a huge, military
cargo plane - to take them anywhere else: Cali, Medellin, Bogota, it didn't
matter to him, Omar said.

Wherever he landed, he said, he would seize on the first opportunity that
arose.

"If I have to sell eggs in the street, I'll sell eggs," he vowed. "anything
to keep my family alive."

Also in the press of desperate people were Hernando, 26, his wife, Fany,
30, and their three children, with suitcases and bags full of possessions.

The family had been in Puerto Asis for years, Hernando said, peddling combs
and barrettes and costume jewelry, while Fany worked as a maid. But when
the guerrilla blockade began, Hernando explained, his sales had declined:
The farm workers coming into town were arriving in army trucks and
helicopters, as refugees, not to stock up on staples and trinkets.

"Domestic work," Fany said, "has gotten so bad with all of the refugees
here, that they've cut wages from 120 to 90 pesos a month. Some employers
say that they won't pay you anything. The work is only for meals."

Like Omar and Maria, Hernando and Fany were hoping to reach one of
Colombia's Andean cities, to escape the conflict of Colombia's jungles and
lowlands.

Black market created

In what it called a paro armado, an "armed stoppage" or "armed strike,"
FARC guerrillas set up the blockade in September and enforced it by burning
trucks, cars and even horse-drawn buggies that tried to get through.

FARC commanders gave two different reasons for the paro: to protest the
military phase of Plan Colombia, and to protest what they allege is a
government failure to rein in paramilitaries.

Putumayo residents tended to think the paro was just a way to show the
FARC's muscle, or to punish them for having tolerated the paramilitaries.

The paro cut off the city's supply of gasoline and left store shelves empty
of heavy goods such as sugar, potatoes and rice. Lightweight goods and
vital supplies - such things as lettuce and hospital supplies - were
arriving by air, at an elevated cost.

After appeals from local authorities, the army began escorting gasoline
tankers to Puerto Asis from a refinery some 40 miles away. But the weekly
military convoys didn't entirely resolve the fuel shortage, even though
Puerto Asis is an energy-efficient town where 95- and 125-cc motorbikes
outnumber cars 10-to-1.

Speculators took advantage and bought most of the supply when tankers
arrived at the city's only gas station. The early birds sold their take,
not at about $1.50 a gallon, the pre-paro rate, but at prices as much as
three times as high.

At Puerto Leguizamo, about 200 miles downstream on the Putumayo, the
municipal gasoline-fueled power plant had to reduce its hours of operation
to a mere seven per day. The naval base at Puerto Leguizamo, whose armed
boats began running the FARC's riparian gantlet, had to adopt a nine-hour
schedule itself.

But gasoline at least still was available in both towns. Potatoes, sugar,
candles and many other products were not. And, sunny-siders said, the FARC
had shown no intent to halt the army's convoys.

"When we go out on the road, they don't stop us," commented Col. Gabriel
Ramon Diaz Ortiz, the region's army commander. "This is a paro against the
people, not against the army."

Patrolling the river

Indeed, that's the way it seemed on the day that middle-aged vendor La
Senora Melania came into Puerto Vega, a village of 120 families and 16
tin-roofed stores, on the south bank of the Rio Putumayo, just across from
Hong Kong beach and Puerto Asis.

As she had done a half-dozen times before, Melania brought with her 500
chickens, in 50 white plastic crates, that she had bought in Quito,
Ecuador, for resale in Puerto Asis.

But on this trip, the FARC was patrolling Puerto Vega, and because of its
blockade of Puerto Asis, wouldn't let the Senora take her birds to market
there.

Melania, like most residents of the region, remembered when Puerto Vega had
been known as a cocaine port. The village had become notorious some six
months before, when the commander of three armed Colombian navy Piranas -
American-made raiding boats from the Vietnam era - had noted an odd scene,
just a few hundred yards from Puerto Vega's beach.

His Piranas that morning had begun stopping all river traffic, searching
boats that went by. A peasant in a canoe had left the checkpoint, going
downstream, then suddenly doubled back, making frantic hand signs to two
men from another canoe who were being halted at the floating roadblock.

Suspecting that the boatmen knew a secret, the commander ordered his
marines to disembark on the Putumayo's south bank.

They soon were shooting their way into a cocaine laboratory built of wooden
planks. The marines set fire to the lab and returned to their blockade, but
not before their gunfight and their discovery became a matter of local and
national news.

FARC guerrillas had taken over Puerto Vega in August, probably to prepare
for the paro. A dozen of them were on duty when Senora Melania arrived to
load her cargo into one of the half-dozen canoes that were ferrying
passengers between Puerto Vega and the Hong Kong beach. But the guerrillas
told her that her chickens had to stay on the river's south bank.

"Nothing is to go into Puerto Asis," they said. People could go, but not
merchandise.

That afternoon, Senora Melania stacked her crates on the south bank of the
river, in Puerto Vega. She took a seat beneath a lean-to porch on a bench
for would-be river crossers - and she slept there with her chickens that night.

Paro chokes drug traffic

By late October, the paro was choking even the drug traffic. Cement, a
heavy good that, like gasoline, is critical to the manufacture of coca
paste, had become too costly to buy and soon disappeared from stores
altogether.

Within days after the paro went into effect, cocaine plants were sitting in
the fields, ripe for harvest, or sitting in the fields, dying under the
assaults from pests and weeds.

The FARC had pledged to protect the fields of peasants against military and
police attacks, but had never promised that it wouldn't declare another paro.

Its first one had come in 1996 and had lasted only a month, because - with
encouragement from the FARC - local officials and notables had persuaded
the government to cancel its fumigation plans.

A similar protest was organized across Putumayo in late November, but it
got only passing results: Army convoys rolled along the unpaved highways
and afterward declared victory against the paro. Motorists and truckers
returned to the roads two days later - and five vehicles were burned.

In December talks with a representative of the United Nations, the FARC's
chieftain, Manuel Marulanda, promised to call off the paro. Army trucks
again rolled across the highways, and for two days, civilian traffic did,
too. But then the FARC burned three vehicles, and transportation stopped again.

By late December, the FARC had made good on Marulanda's promise to lift the
blockage-and the lights came back on again.

But by then, Senora Melania, after days of waiting - and watching her
chickens die - had returned with the survivors to Ecuador. Omar and Maria,
Hernando and Fay had caught planes out of Puerto Asis, adding to Colombia's
flow of refugees, now estimated to number 2 million.

When helicopters and crop-dusters descend on Putumayo in coming weeks, they
are likely to find that the region's coca crop is withered and dead, and
its laboratories forgotten and forlorn.

The FARC, always a hit-and-run bunch, may have decided to make its stand
elsewhere.

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n148/a03.html