DISPLACED MILLIONS BURDENING COLOMBIA

Left And Right Both Besieging Populace

CARTAGENA, Colombia - Something terrible happened to Venecia Barona
Mosquera. It was senseless but horribly common among the people who
have been displaced by war and have sought uncertain refuge 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 Barona, 28, immediately packed up her belongings and headed to
Cartagena, with her bleeding daughter bundled in her arms, only for
Judith to die 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 the 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 - Cartagena, Bogota,
Medellin 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 in the last
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.