Plan For Colombia: Day 5b

A SOLDIER'S STORY: ARMY CORPORAL HAS SEEN WHAT FARC CAN DO, THINKS HE'LL
JOIN RIGHT-WING MILITIA

PUERTO ASIS, Colombia - At the moment, army Cpl. David Arizpe is on easy
duty patrolling the streets of this town.

His chief activity, other than standing on a corner with a rifle over his
shoulder, is keeping an eye out for young women.

They stop when Arizpe calls to them, because he is armed and uniformed.
When he asks them questions - name, age, marital status, that sort of thing
- - they answer, as they would for any authority. And because he is handsome,
polite and personable, they sometimes respond to his flirting with coquetry
of their own.

Army life pays off, says Arizpe, 26, whose name has been changed in this
story to protect his identity.

When he is hungry at lunchtime, he doesn't have to accept the army fare
that arrives in big steel tubs, nearly always cold. Anytime he wants,
Arizpe can hail one of his girlfriends to bring him a plate of food. As
often as not, they do.

His carefree life is deceptively mundane, particularly in this Putumayo
market town where soldiers, drug traffickers, paramilitaries and guerrillas
compete, sometimes openly, sometimes clandestinely, for public support.

When Plan Colombia comes calling with its U.S.-trained troops, the relative
peace in Puerto Asis is expected to vanish as the drug war engulfs this
volatile mix of combatants.

Colombia requires 18-year-old males to serve at least 18 months in the
armed services. Arizpe joined the army to fulfill his duty, then
re-enlisted twice because civilian jobs were not easy to come by. He serves
as an infantryman in a counter-insurgency unit.

Military life, Arizpe says, hasn't always been a walk in the park, as it is
today in Puerto Asis. He has experienced the terror of battle before.

"We were in Antioquia province," he recalls about an incident four years
ago in Colombia's central region. "I had to take a patrol of 15 men out to
hunt for the guerrillas in the countryside, and unfortunately, we found too
many of them, maybe 150 in all."

The guerrillas, from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
were having an afternoon meal at an encampment that Arizpe and his men
stumbled onto.

"They were in a clearing in the jungle, up on the top of a hill. When we
saw them, we moved back," he recounts.

In Colombia, most householders, like the owners of mobile homes and
recreational vehicles in the United States, operate stoves and water
heaters fueled by small propane cylinders.

Guerrillas discharge the cylinders, insert fuses, and fill them with
gunpowder and scrap metal to make crude fragmentation bombs. Colombians
call these devices tanquebombas, or tank bombs.

"When the FARC saw us, they opened fire and then started rolling tank bombs
downhill onto us," Arizpe says.

"Their rifles didn't have much effect, because we were at a good angle. But
the tank bombs," he stops for a moment, as if remembering the faces of lost
comrades.

"The tank bombs," he resumes, "killed two of our guys and wounded four
others. We returned fire, but it wasn't much use. All we could really do
was split up into little groups and hunker down."

Three of the wounded were able to walk. The unit quartered the fourth in
the home of a peasant family that lived nearby.

As the sun set, the unit got a surprise: one of its soldiers on the flank
of the area where the group had taken cover held up his hands and
surrendered to the FARC.

That night, guerrillas from the FARC came looking for the troops. One of
the guerrillas carried a loudspeaker.

"He kept saying that we'd never get away, that we should surrender," Arizpe
says. "And he kept calling on me by name, telling me to tell my troops to
give up. He called my name, he told where I came from, he knew everything
about me."

Arizpe assumed that the guerillas knew the particulars of his life because
the captured soldier had told them.

"It scared me," he confesses, "because this guy who surrendered, he knew
where my parents live. I was afraid that the guerrillas would go there and
kill them."

At daybreak and under clear skies, a raft of helicopters arrived. The
gunships drove the guerrillas out of their camp and down the hillside, away
from Arizpe's men.

But the incident didn't end there.

The unit's search for its crippled member ended at an empty house.

"Our man had dressed in civilian clothes, and the peasants put him on a
buseta" -a small bus, Arizpe recalls. "Then the peasants ran off."

The buseta, it turned out, was headed the wrong way. It was going into FARC
territory.

"It came to a FARC roadblock," Arizpe says, "and the FARC picked out our
guy. 'You're a soldier,' they told him. He said that he wasn't. 'Ah, so,'
they told him, 'then you're a paramilitary, and we have to shoot you right
here.'"

The wounded man then confessed that he was a soldier, and the guerrillas
pulled him off the buseta. Then, according to Arizpe, they sent for the
soldier who had surrendered, who identified the captive for them.

The FARC took the wounded soldier into the square of a village nearby,
called together its inhabitants and brought a doctor from among its ranks.

"They had our guy in the square," Arizpe says, "so that the people could
see the doctor treat his wound. They made a big deal of it. They said to
the people, 'You see, the FARC does things according to the rules of war.
We don't kill captured soldiers, we cure them.'"

After the captive was treated, Arizpe says, the FARC hired a cab to drive
the soldier back to the army's lines.

In the four years since, times have changed for soldiers, maybe for the
worse, Arizpe says. Today the FARC doesn't release captives with a public
show or scolding: it holds them. According to both official and FARC
sources, more than 500 soldiers and policemen are now prisoners at a camp
in the southeastern jungles. Authorities have tried to negotiate for their
release, but no deal has been struck.

Times have changed for Arizpe, too. This spring, his term of duty will be
over. He may re-enlist, he says, but right now, he's considering other
plans. Puerto Asis has opened a new opportunity.

"You see," he explains, raising his hands to the shoulder strap by which
his M-16 hangs, "I like guns. I like this business of guns. I like what I
do, and I'm not bad at doing it."

But Colombian soldiers are poorly paid - Arizpe makes less than $300 a
month - and other parties pay more to infantry veterans.

"I might become, maybe a bodyguard, back in Medellin," he says. "But if I
want to be a bodyguard, I'll have to look for a job, and I don't have those
kinds of connections.

"So I'm thinking I'll become a paramilitary," he confesses.

The "Paras," as right-wing militiamen are known, are spread across the
Colombian map. In some places they wear uniforms and guard ranches, roads
and farms. In others, they wear street clothes and serve as bodyguards to
well-heeled businessmen.

Their presence is especially strong in Puerto Asis, where they sit in
plainclothes outside businesses, protecting their patrons - and cruising
for recruits all the while.

They call soldiers to halts, ask them for their names and ages and martial
states, such things as that. They court the soldiers, very much as Arizpe
courts the town's girls. And they've already picked out Arizpe as a man
with a future in their ranks.

Today, if Cpl. Arizpe doesn't want to eat the army fare that comes at
lunch, he has two options: young women will bring him a plate, or in any of
a hundred restaurants, the Paras will pay his bill.

Arizpe isn't fazed by the Paras' reputation for murder, or by the prospect
of working outside the law, and he is impressed by the Para pay scale,
nearly double what he earns today.

"The war is going to go on forever," he reasons, "and with one outfit or
another, I'll probably make a living with a gun for the rest my life."