AN AIMLESS WAR IN COLOMBIA CREATES A NATION OF VICTIMS

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 here in the squalor of a shantytown named Nelson
Mandela.

Ms. Barona left her village, Chicorodo, one morning in June to cut sugar
cane, and when she returned 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 crushed 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 who had
been roaming the northern province of Antioquia.

So the 28-year-old Ms. Barona immediately packed up her things and headed
here 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 Ms. Barona, one of an estimated 150,000
Colombians driven from their homes this year alone as they have been
squeezed between leftist guerrillas and paramilitaries loosely linked to
local military units.

An estimated two million Colombians have been uprooted in recent years,
according to the Consultancy for Human Rights and the Displaced, a research
group, more than were sent fleeing by 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, ordinary Colombians and officials
fear that the war will intensify and that the number of people displaced
will increase.

Those being displaced are mostly simple rural people, 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 are the victims of the paramilitaries, who seek to drain
towns of suspected guerrilla sympathizers but 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 like 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. "It's
central."

The displaced are part of an even larger phenomenon that includes some
800,000 Colombians who have fled the country of 40 million people over the
last four years. Many 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 the violence for life in the United States.

United States 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 with President Andres Pastrana in Cartagena
recently, $500 million is allotted directly to helping the displaced and $1
billion for alternative crop development. But the primary aim of the plan
is to reduce coca cultivation by 50 percent in five years and to extend the
reach of the central government.

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

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 like Nelson Mandela, but that
would be nearly one-third of her entire city budget. "We simply don't have
the capacity to take care of these people," she said.

The first settlers who came here six years ago were apparently full of
faith in the future. The mostly black and mulatto Colombians here 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 plunge 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.

One of those stories was that of Ms. Barona, whose family was killed and
who is now alone but determined to go on. With wood donated by the Catholic
Church, she is building a new shack for herself. She borrowed 50 cents from
one of her new neighbors to start a business selling bags of fresh water,
and now she is making a dollar a day.

Another is that of Eloy Teran, 54, who abandoned the town of San Onofre in
Sucre Province with his wife and nine children four months ago after life
simply became intolerable. Guerrillas and paramilitaries, he said, started
invading the town last December on alternating weeks, killing the corn,
banana and rice farmers and their families at random.

"I can't tell you why they killed," he said, shrugging and swinging his
legs nervously from the side of a makeshift table. "They killed our
friends, our neighbors, and then the point came when we decided we couldn't
take it anymore, and we just decided to leave."

"The people are stuck like pieces of cheese between slices of bread," said
the Rev. Rafael Castillo, a priest who works in Nelson Mandela. "In this
kind of irregular war, you are forced to define yourself on one side or the
other, and the civilian population suffers atrocities from both sides."

Juan Llorente, a 50-year-old cattle rancher who once lived outside the town
of Turbo, allowed an army patrol to sleep in his house for two nights last
September. "I never thought I'd have a problem," he recalled, since it's a
custom in Colombia to be hospitable."

The very next day after the army unit left, eight guerrillas of Colombia's
largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, came by
the house and took away his 20-year-old son, Neilson Jose. A few days
later, Neilson Jose was found along a road with three bullet holes in his head.

Mr. Llorente immediately left for Cartagena with his wife, four surviving
children and five grandchildren. They were so scared, they left their 60
head of cattle behind, which Mr. Llorente said the guerrillas have since
stolen.

"I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about where I am going to
find food the next day," said Mr. Llorente, a man whose clothes and
mannerisms reflect a middle-class background. "I was never a rich man, but
I wasn't poor, either. But now, I am a hungry man."

Gradually, too, the war is bearing down on Nelson Mandela and other barrios
full of the displaced. Father Castillo said that, of the 15 people killed
in the community this year, six were taken from their homes in the middle
of the night by unidentified men thought to be either guerrillas or
paramilitaries.

Two months ago a local rebel unit kidnapped an engineer working to build
two schools in Nelson Mandela and demanded $250,000 in ransom. "They knew
we had donation money to help the displaced," Father Castillo said, and a
settlement was eventually worked out for a $10,000 payment.

"We asked them: `Why are you destroying what you say you want to construct
for the poor,' " he recalled. "A comandante answered, `I know we make
mistakes, but you have to pay.' "