COLOMBIA'S WAR GOES DOWNTOWN

BARRANCABERMEJA, Colombia - It was about 1 p.m. on a typically sweltering
day in this city when two men entered the Rosita superstore to shoot two
relatives of the store's owner. The men walked past the multicolored
fabrics lining the walls, up the winding marble staircase, then through the
men's clothing section, where they found their targets. After they emptied
several rounds into their victims, the men calmly walked out of the store,
got on their motorcycle and sped off.

This type of mafia-style hit in Barrancabermeja is becoming commonplace
throughout the country as Colombia's 40-year-old civil war spills from the
rural areas into the biggest cities. From Medellin to Cali, leftist rebels
and right-wing paramilitaries are waging urban war upon one another in
public venues.

Rosita is in the heart of Barrancabermeja's commercial district, along a
main thoroughfare lined with street vendors and filled with a constant flow
of motorcycles, buses and taxis. At any one time, 15 people are selling
towels, sheets and clothes in the store; countless others stroll along the
street window-shopping.

Yet the police say no one will testify about the brutal murder of the two
men. "Everyone knows who it was," a Rosita employee said. "But no one dares
be a witness."

The businessmen slain at Rosita were only two of the more than 400 murder
victims this year that made Barrancabermeja Colombia's most dangerous city.

Although it has been a guerrilla stronghold for years, paramilitaries have
begun to challenge the supremacy of the rebels. In addition, the two groups
are fighting over the lucrative illicit drug and gasoline trade that
thrives here.

The political and economic incentives in this war often make it difficult
to fully clarify the killers' motives; determining their sympathies is not
so difficult. Authorities acknowledge it was the paramilitaries who killed
the two men at Rosita.

Alleged paramilitary gunmen killed another man 200 feet down the road from
Rosita in front of the city's main telephone office. A suspected
paramilitary riding on a bicycle shot yet another man as he walked past him
near the city center.

The guerrillas are not far behind, killing suspected paramilitary
collaborators at an equally startling rate in the areas they control, and
planting bombs in heavily traveled commercial districts.

Earlier this month, suspected urban militias from the country's largest
guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), set off
a car bomb in front of a bank just across the street from the telephone
company office, killing two people and injuring several others. The police
have deactivated 20 other explosive devises this year, including a bicycle
bomb and a canoe bomb.

Barrancabermeja's war is part of a larger territorial dispute in this
region, known as the Middle Magdalena Valley. The city is home to the
country's largest refinery and the region has several important oil fields.
Just west of Barrancabermeja, there are large gold and mineral deposits as
well as vast coca fields, the raw material for cocaine.

Both guerrillas and paramilitaries finance much of their war by taxing coca
growers and traffickers and in some cases trafficking the drugs themselves.

Earlier this year, as many as 1,000 right-wing militiamen moved into the
area with sophisticated weaponry, killing hundreds of suspected rebel
collaborators and ripping into the traditional support base of the
country's second-largest rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The paramilitary offensive coincided with the government's preliminary
agreement with the ELN to remove the armed forces from three municipalities
in the area in preparation for peace talks.

The government is holding a similar process with the FARC in a 16,000
square-mile area in the south of the country that the guerrillas formally
control. But the paramilitaries' offensive has put the viability of the
ELN's "demilitarized zone" in doubt.

The battle between the armed factions in the countryside has seeped onto
the streets of Barrancabermeja. Locals say that many guerrillas have
switched sides to the paramilitaries and now single out their former
colleagues in the city for execution.

Police and military personnel routinely set up checkpoints on the streets
to search for guns and explosives. They also round up masses of young men
age 15 to 35, looking for urban guerrillas in Barrancabermeja's infamous
northwest neighborhoods, which are the guerrillas' home base in the city.
Murals of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born Latin American
revolutionary icon, line the streets. The former neighborhood police
station lies in rubble covered in rebel graffiti. The police abandoned it
several years ago after repeated guerrilla attacks.

Police have scoured the northwest for suspects, but local authorities are
troubled by the seemingly inadequate response to the paramilitaries'
activities in the city center.

"They [the police] say they're investigating, but the results are few and
far between," said the Rev. Jose Figueroa from Barrancabermeja's archdiocese.

The military arrested five suspected paramilitary leaders in July, but the
men are being held only for carrying weapons illegally. In Colombia, an
estimated 97 percent of all crimes go unpunished.

The police say said the murder rate has dropped substantially since the
July arrests and a series of raids in the northwest neighborhoods. Still,
victims keep filling the morgues at alarming rates, particularly on weekends.

In separate incidents on a Friday in mid-October, for example, two
unidentified men were killed, as was Claudia Bernal, 16. Bernal was shot in
the head as she drove on her moped from her older sister Angelica's house
in Provivienda in the northwest.

At the morgue, with her sister's blood still on her shirt, Angelica writhed
in pain and tears, then screamed, "Why her? She didn't do anything!"