TENTACLES OF COLOMBIA'S DIRTY WAR REACH INTO SLUMS

Fugitives From Rural Slaughter Are Caught Up In Urban Political Feuds

The hills that surround Bogota were wrapped with low strands of cloud. The
sky was a greasy grey. Beyond the huge municipal dump the sprawling city
ended abruptly. After the maze of corrugated-iron roofs, wires and TV
aerials of the squatter camps, the hillsides were an abrupt green.

Oscar Ruiz, his wife Martha, and their four children can just see the hills
if they walk to the highest point of their barrio (neighbourhood). But they
haven't been out of Bogota since they arrived.

Fifteen months ago the family were forced to flee the farm in the jungles
of the far south of Colombia that had been their home for 15 years. Oscar
says that to walk among hills above his slum neighbourhood would make him
homesick. Anyway, he adds, wounds he received from right-wing
paramilitaries who evicted him make exercise difficult.

Oscar is a desplazado - one of 35,000 "displaced" by the filthy,
decade-long war that blights Colombia. Many flee rural areas for the
relative safety of the cities, particularly Bogota. Oscar's home is close
to Bolívar, the biggest of the squatter camps that ring the city
like a skin disease. We skirted its edges on our way to meet him. Jesus, my
taxi driver, said it would be too dangerous to take a gringo into its
rubbish-strewn lanes. As we drove through the barrio's outer streets,
Jesus, who himself lives on squatted land, spoke of gang fights, drugs wars
and 10-year-olds addicted to glue. Few can afford cocaine, even at $10 a
gram. Crime in Bolivar is so bad that shopkeepers and residents have
whip-rounds to hire assassins to kill suspected wrongdoers.

Many of the inhabitants of Bolivar and other barrios are desplazados who,
like Oscar, have fled from one battlefield only to end up trapped in
another. There are bitter turf wars between rightwing paramilitary groups
and the leftwing Farc (Armed Revolutionary Front of Colombia) over homes.
Currently, in Bolivar at least, the Farc is the de facto local authority,
Jesus said.

A battle between the Farc and the rightwing paramilitaries (who share
responsibility for the massacres, gang-rapes, kidnappings and
disappearances that scar Colombia's recent history) forced Oscar off his
coffee, banana and dairy farm in the southern Putumayo district last year.

Putumayo is the hottest combat zone in the country, close to some of the
biggest coca-growing areas. In many ways the battle there is over cocaine.
Both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, who are funded by landowners
and have strong links to the Colombian military, try to control the
population through intimidation.

In the past year, to pre-empt Plan Colombia - the massive military aid
package put together by the United States to win the war for the government
- - the guerrillas launched new offensives. And the paramilitaries responded.

In September last year 40 heavily armed paramilitaries walked on to Oscar's
farm. "You have been collaborating with the guerrillas," they told him.
"You must leave your land." There was little that Oscar could say in
defence. When, on several occasions, the Farc arrived at the farm wanting
breakfast, he had fed them. "What else was I to do?" he asked me.

The paras gave him a week to leave. He refused to go. After eight days,
they smashed his door, took his eldest son hostage and then shot Oscar when
he tried to stop them. Two bullets hit his arm, two his belly and one his shin.

He managed to run away and hurl himself into the river nearby, which marks
the border with Ecuador. Fished out by an Indian in a canoe, he spent the
next six months convalesc ing across the border before returning to find
his family in Bogota. Or some of his family. His eldest son had remained a
prisoner of the paramilitaries. After eight months in captiv ity, he had
escaped and, amazingly, found his family in Bogota. But he had changed. The
paras made him kill a man, and he had been splattered with his victim's
blood and brains. They injected him with drugs. He had been driven insane.
He died in Oscar's arms in a Bogota hospital, only 11 years old. "My last
memory of him", says Oscar, "is of his eyes staring out of his skull. He
had seen things no one should see."

Now life is a struggle for food and warmth. The six of them live in a small
room. Oscar, who is 34, occasionally gets some work as a labourer.
Otherwise they live on handouts.

The government has aid programmes for the desplazados, but corruption and
inefficiency mean most is siphoned off into the rich elite's offshore bank
accounts. Oscar has been arrested for protesting over this "robbery" of the
aid that his family needs.

He is not afraid to be named, though he does not want to be photographed.
He plans to organise more demonstrations. "Tell the world about these
bastards who are taking the bread from our mouths," he says.

Jesus shakes his head as he turns the taxi back towards the centre of town,
the good hotels and expensive restaurants and the shopping malls where you
can buy $150 handbags. "Someone will kill him soon," he says sadly. "He is
making too much noise."