Plan For Colombia: Day 1b

FAMILY SPENDS YEAR SEARCHING FOR MOTHER

PUERTO VEGA, Colombia - Among the people brought to the southern village of
Puerto Vega by Colombia's civil war is Ada Duque, a bronze-skinned student
who attends college in the city of Cali, about 300 miles northwest.

Duque, 20, comes to Puerto Vega to seek information about the fate of her
mother, Miriam Llanos. She operated a restaurant, a bakery and a china shop
in Puerto Asis, Duque's hometown, a city of 40,000 across the Putumayo
River from Puerto Vega.

Duque's search has yielded only heartbreak and disappointment in the year
since her mother disappeared in this cocaine-producing region.

Llanos, 43, vanished under circumstances that, her daughter is sure,
implicate the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC.

Puerto Vega is now under the control of the FARC, and Duque wants its
commanders to provide her with an artifact common in Colombian kidnappings:
a "proof of survival," a photo or videotape attesting that her mother has
not been killed.

"If I knew where the end of the world was, I'd go there to find my mother,"
she explains.

But FARC commanders in Puerto Vega said they don't know what she is talking
about.

Like thousands of other Colombians - nobody knows how many - Duque is on
the trail of a missing person who may never be found. Precise figures are
not available because of the clandestine nature of most ransom
transactions, but Colombia, which suffers more than 3,000 kidnappings a
year - or at least nine each day - is presumed to hold the world's record
for that crime. Last year, some 200 hostages were killed in kidnappings
gone bad.

Duque's story began in mid-December 1999, when her older brother, Anibel,
26, and his wife, Iliana, joined Ada in Cali, to await the birth of their
child, Juan Camilo. Llanos decided to send a car to Cali, in case Ada and
Anibel should need it to attend to the expectant mother's needs, or those
of the soon-to-be-born grandchild.

An old friend of the family, Fabio Bolivar, 48, volunteered to drive the
car, a 1993 Toyota Hi-Lux, to Cali. He left Puerto Asis on Dec. 14. On his
way north, some 45 minutes away just outside of the town of Mocoa, he was
halted at a roadblock operated by theFARC.

The insurgent group is divided into some 60 groups of about 300 guerrillas
each, called frentes (fronts). The guerrillas who manned the checkpoint,
held by the FARC's Frente 13, demanded to see the car's ownership papers.

Noticing that the vehicle belonged to Llanos, they demanded a copy of her
identity papers.

In Colombia, guerrillas and common criminals alike frequently use such
documents in data searches whose object is to determine whether or not a
prospective victim is worth kidnapping.

Bolivar relayed the demand by telephone, and Llanos, though she knew of the
danger, decided to send a photostat of her papers by fax. When the
guerrillas inspected the photostat, they demanded to see Llanos in person
and said they were impounding the car until she appeared.

Bolivar returned by bus to Puerto Asis, where, after a family debate by
telephone, Llanos decided to reclaim the car from the FARC.

"We told her not to go," Duque recalls, "but she said, 'I don't owe much or
have much, so I'm going.'"

"We told her that we wanted her to someday see the baby, who had been born
the day before," Duque adds. "But nothing we said would convince her."

Her mother, she said, was an outspoken woman - the kind who might have
scolded the guerrillas for what they had done.

On the morning of Dec. 15, 1999, Llanos and Bolivar set off by bus for
Mocoa to reclaim the car.

They were last seen at the FARC checkpoint, arguing with the guerrillas.

When Llanos didn't arrive in Cali, her children, suspecting that the FARC
had kidnapped her, at first decided that the best course of action was to wait.

"We did nothing for five days, but no ransom demand was made," Duque said.
"We checked, and no police report was filed, either. There has been no
record of what may have happened."

Her mother and Bolivar, it seemed, had simply vanished.

In the months between January and September - when the FARC closed the road
- - Duque visited the checkpoint several times, asking for the release of her
mother, a proof of survival, or a ransom demand. Two months after the
disappearance, the FARC returned to her the missing Toyota. "It was beat
up, all over," Duque said. "Only the motor was good."

But the commanders at the roadblock claimed to know nothing about her
mother's whereabouts or fate.

"Several people who live in the area said that they had seen my mother and
Fabio at the roadblock, but that's all," she reports.

Duque suspects that some of them may know more, but no one speaks freely,
she complains.

"People invent all kinds of stories, too," she said. "One person told me
that my mother had been sent to the Frente 48, but that may be just a tale,
too."

In desperation, Duque went to Los Pozos, a remote southeastern village
where government and FARC negotiators were holding peace talks.

"I got up to the level of Joaquin Gomez, the FARC commander for the
southern region," she said, "and he promised to find out something for me.
But then he got called away from Los Pozos, and I've never heard anything."

Just to expand her contacts with the FARC, she began visiting Puerto Vega
as well.

Puerto Vega is in the hands of Frente 48 of the FARC. "But all they've been
able to tell me is that the matter is something for disposition by Frente
13," Duque said. "The people in Frente 48 say that they don't know anything."

The worst of her situation, Duque said, is the reaction of the family's
friends.

"My mother was very amigera (friendly)," she said. "If there was a wake, or
a funeral, or a novena, or someone was ill, my mother was always there."

"But now that she is gone, her old friends don't drop by to see how we are.
It's as if they're afraid to come near people who are in trouble with the
FARC."

In a country where kidnappings are conducted by criminals and warriors as
well, almost no one feels safe.

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n145/a06.html