CIVIL WAR DISPLACING COLOMBIANS TO SHANTYTOWNS

CARTAGENA, Colombia -- Something terrible happened to Venecia Barona
Mosquera, something senseless but horribly common among the people who have
been displaced from the parts of Colombia brutalized by war and who have
sought uncertain refuge in Cartagena, in the squalor of a shantytown named
Nelson Mandela.

Barona left her village, Chicorodo, one morning in June to cut sugar cane,
and when she returned, she said, she found her father and two brothers shot
to death.

Her 10-year-old daughter, Judith, was lying half-conscious under a mango
tree, her skull partially crushed, probably by a rifle butt.

Ultra-right paramilitaries had killed more than 20 people, punishing the
villagers for giving food to an insistent Marxist guerrilla band that had
been roaming the northern province of Antioquia.

So the 28-year-old Barona immediately packed up her belongings and headed to
Cartagena, with her bleeding daughter bundled in her arms. Judith died a few
days later.

``I could never go back,'' she said, a tear tracing her cheek. ``But at
least I can calm down here. Now I'm looking for a good man to help me.''

Nelson Mandela, where 45,000 people live under rusty corrugated roofs and
sheets of plastic, may seem an unlikely place to seek calm. But it is
growing every day with people like Barona, one of an estimated 150,000
Colombians driven from their homes this year alone as they have been
squeezed between leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries loosely
linked to local military units.

In all, an estimated 2 million Colombians have been uprooted in recent
years, according to the Consultancy for Human Rights and the Displaced, a
private research group based in Colombia. That is more than the number that
fled the war in Kosovo last year. Of all the countries of the world
suffering from the miseries of war, only Sudan and Angola have more
displaced people.

And now, with the United States poised to deliver a new $1.3 billion aid
package, most of it for the military, Colombia's residents and officials
fear that the war will intensify, and that the number of people displaced
will increase.

Those being displaced live mostly in rural areas, though some are middle
class, who want only to live and work in peace and do not care to choose a
side in a war in which not choosing a side has become an impossible luxury.

More than half of people displaced are the victims of the paramilitaries,
which seek to drain towns of suspected guerrilla sympathizers, but which
sometimes simply do the dirty work for large landowners who want to expand
their holdings for cattle raising, coca growing or mining.

Those displaced bring few usable skills for surviving in the already
overburdened cities to which they have flocked -- places such as Cartagena,
Bogota, Medell(acu)n and Cali. The urban squalor that is gathering in these
cities breeds despair, family violence and crime, and the shantytowns
increasingly serve as recruitment centers for guerrilla and paramilitary
groups, flush with drug money to provide decent food and clothes to their
fighters.

``You can't settle the war in Colombia without dealing with the problem of
the displaced,'' said Jorge Rojas, the director of the Consultancy for Human
Rights: ``It's central.''

The displaced are part of an even larger phenomenon that includes about
800,000 Colombians who have fled the country of 40 million people in the
past four years. Many of those have sheltered themselves across the borders
with Panama and Venezuela, becoming international refugees and an increasing
burden for Colombia's neighbors. Thousands more middle-class and wealthy
Colombians have fled to the United States.

U.S. and Colombian officials acknowledge the problem of the displaced, but
say they must focus more effort on finding new homes, jobs and alternative
crops for coca growers and other people who will see their livelihoods and
homes affected by the fighting.

Of the $7.5 billion in the new ``Plan Colombia'' that was kicked off when
President Clinton visited Colombian President Andres Pastrana in Cartagena
recently, $500 million is allotted directly to helping people displaced by
the fighting and $1 billion to develop crop alternatives to coca, from which
cocaine is processed.

The primary aim of the plan is to reduce coca cultivation by 50 percent in
five years and to extend the reach of the government.

In Nelson Mandela, where displaced people have squatted on tiny plots of
land without ownership titles, few have running water and most steal their
electricity from a public utility company.

Cartagena's mayor, Gina Benedetti de Velez, said she needs $50 million a
year to take care of the housing, education and health needs of the
displaced population growing in shantytowns, but that would be nearly
one-third of her entire city budget.

We don't have the capacity to take care of these people,'' she said.

The first displaced people who came here six years ago were apparently full
of faith in the future. The mostly black and mulatto Colombians in Nelson
Mandela named their new community after the South Africa leader out of black
pride, and they named their streets Hope, Bethlehem and Victory.

But today there is misery everywhere in Nelson Mandela: Barefoot children go
to schools without notebooks, fathers bore holes in industrial water pipes
to give their families contaminated water, mothers poke through garbage to
salvage refuse to sell. But what stands out most are the harrowing stories
of brutality that forced these people to leave their homes in the first
place.

Barona, whose family was killed, is determined to go on. With wood donated
by the Catholic Church, she is building a new shack for herself. She
borrowed 50 cents from a neighbor to start a business selling bags of fresh
water, and now she makes a dollar a day.