TALES OF COLOMBIA: A WAR WEAVES COMMON THREAD OF TERROR - PART 1

A young guerrilla fulfills her dream of joining the insurgency; an
ex-guerrilla switches sides to fight for a right-wing paramilitary squad; a
coca grower finds himself caught between rival armed groups and the
Colombian police; a boy is evicted from his childhood home and forced to
live on the bloody streets of a commune; a mother agonizes over her
3-year-old son kidnapped at gunpoint from their home in an affluent Bogota
neighborhood. Latin America's longest-running civil war unfolds through the
lives of five people.

Rafael, 'The Poet'

"Let me introduce myself, as no one knows who we are. I am one of the
displaced that came here from Cesar."

Sometimes the 11-year-old author of these lines, Rafael Redondo, awakens in
the middle of the night and remembers gunfire. He is startled from sleep by
memories of the day when a right-wing paramilitary squad stormed into his
village in northern Colombia, killed two men and threatened to make the
entire hamlet "disappear." Days later, on Christmas Eve 1996, Rafael, his
parents and five brothers and sisters joined 14 other terrified families and
fled the village for their lives.

When he wakes, Rafael discovers his nightmare is not over. Now resettled in
a violent neighborhood in Colombia's oil center, Barrancabermeja, he still
hears gunshots. A wave of murders has terrified his new hometown, leaving
nearly 300 people dead so far this year.

"You can't stay out on the streets for long," Rafael said. "You never know
when a shooting will break out and someone could fall over dead."

Instead of escaping the violence, Rafael's family moved into the middle of a
widening war being fought by leftist guerrillas, paramilitaries and the army
for possession of one of the country's most valuable regions. The target:
Barrancabermeja, the largest city in a strategic river valley rich in oil,
gold and, most recently, coca, the shrub used to produce cocaine.

Rafael hides his fear well. The smiling boy is playful and quick to compose
poems describing his daily life. When he talks about the violence, however,
he begins dreaming of home.

"I liked it there, back when we were still not in the middle of the
conflict."

Rafael's words are echoed by a growing number of Colombians who have been
swept up in the country's civil war, now nearly 40 years old, a conflict
that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in the past decade and forced
hundreds of thousands from their homes.

In October 1999 millions of people marched through cities across Colombia to
demand an end to the bloodshed. Despite their pleas, the war continues
unabated.

In recent weeks Colombia's largest guerrilla army, the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, has launched a series of bloody
attacks on police stations, killing dozens of officers. Kidnapping, one of
the main sources of funding for guerrilla groups, is on pace to reach an
all-time high.

Production of cocaine, which the government says provides guerrillas and
paramilitaries hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profits, is
booming. The number of families forcibly displaced is surging: Nearly
135,000 people were evicted from their homes by armed groups in the first
half of this year, according to Codhes, a Colombian human rights
organization.

The Colombian government, vowing to finally end the conflict, has launched
"Plan Colombia," a $7.5 billion strategy to negotiate peace with guerrilla
groups (luring them to the negotiating table by offering land) and to
destroy Colombia's illegal drug industry, which is responsible for as much
as 80 percent of the world's cocaine and a growing percentage of its heroin.

The spearhead of the campaign will come from a $1.3 billion gift from the
United States -- an aid package heavy on military assistance that provides
the Colombian army special training and helicopters to hunt down
narco-traffickers and to destroy the coca and poppy fields that supply them.

The prime target of Plan Colombia is the thick jungle of southern Colombia,
where as much as four-fifths of the nation's coca is grown. Caught in the
crosshairs are campesinos, or peasants, such as Angel Guarnica.

Campesinos In The Crosshairs

A chunk of rotting roots crumbles from Angel Guarnica's fingers. He tosses
the desiccated remains aside and surveys a field overrun by weeds and grass.

"All this used to be plantains, yucca, pineapple," he grumbled. "Now it's
all lost."

Guarnica has labored 14 years to help tend this farm outside of Puerto
Caicedo, in Colombia's southern Putumayo department, caring for a crop of
vegetables and a large field of coca. That ended in November 1999 when three
crop-spraying planes flew over the farm, coating everything with a
coca-killing herbicide.

The coca, ironically, is the only crop to have survived. Although the plants
were destroyed, their seeds bore new stalks within months. The vegetables
did not fare so well. All that remains of them are clumps of dried leaves
and hollow stumps.

Guarnica now works to replant the farm, but he keeps one eye to the sky. If
the planes come back, he said he would simply move somewhere else.

"How can you fight it?" he asked. "All I have is a machete and a shovel. If
I see them come to fumigate, I'll just go to the village."

The spray planes, however, are not the only threat to Guarnica's livelihood.
The fields around him have become a battleground between the FARC and
paramilitary forces, each competing for control of the world's richest
concentration of coca.

The guerrillas rule Puerto Caicedo, but paramilitaries have threatened to
attack. In June a team of paramilitary commandos infiltrated the village and
killed the owner of a drug store. Now the entire village dreads the day the
paramilitaries will launch a full offensive.

Fearing the fighting, hundreds of farmers and peasants in Putumayo have fled
their lands and moved into a school compound in the town of La Hormiga.
Among them is Flor, who with her husband and five children abandoned their
coca field in June when the FARC threatened to invade their village.

Flor has grown coca for the past 10 years. Despite high expectations, she
never earned much money, she said. Spraying pesticides against coca-eating
insects is expensive and the price of chemicals needed to process the coca
into coca base is high, she said. What is more, exposure to the fumes of the
chemicals has made her entire family sick.

"The only ones who make a lot of money from coca are the narco-traffickers,"
she said. "The only profit we get is illness."

The Paramilitaries

Outside Puerto Asis, the biggest town in Putumayo, a member of the feared
AUC paramilitaries inspects his automatic weapon in the hot sun. Covered
with green and black warpaint, "Eduard" (his nom de guerre) crawls through
waist-high sawgrass, narrowing his eyes in search of a target. Along with 50
of his fellows, Eduard is sharpening his military skills in an exercise
straight out of a special operations training manual.

Eduard used to fight on the other side. He spent nine years in Colombia's
second-largest guerrilla force, the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN),
before he was captured and sent to prison. Following his release three years
later, jobless and separated from his wife, Eduard sought financial help
from his former guerrilla comrades so he could support his young son.

When the ELN refused, Eduard began to fear for his life. He worried the ELN
might rather have him killed. It was at this moment that Eduard approached
the paramilitaries.

"At least here [in the paramilitaries] there is economic support. But in the
guerrillas, ideologically they brainwash you and make you a social outcast,"
he said.

The paramilitaries, many of them organized in the early 1980s to defend
landowners against guerrilla kidnappings, are now a force of between 5,000
and 7,000 troops, a significant number of them ex-guerrillas such as Eduard.
In recent years they have spread from their power base of Cordoba and Uraba,
in the north, and moved south, deeper into territory historically occupied
by guerrillas -- an area home to people such as Daisy.

The Guerrillas

Two hundred miles away, in the kitchen tent of a FARC camp, Eduard's enemy
sits slicing green onions for lunchtime soup. The Kalashnikov rifle strapped
to her back interferes with the young woman's work, so she unslings her
weapon and rests it against the tent post.

"Daisy," as she calls herself, belongs to a security detail of the FARC
stationed deep within a demilitarized zone the government ceded to the
guerrillas to encourage peace talks. Her outfit runs checkpoints in and
around Los Pozos, the tiny hamlet at the center of the zone where FARC
commanders and government officials meet regularly to negotiate.

Daisy claims to be 20 years old, but she looks younger. She said she has
fought with the FARC for five years. The daughter of Communist Party
members, raised in a rural, mountainous area controlled by the FARC for
nearly four decades, she never thought of doing anything else.

"This was all I knew," Daisy said. "Since a kid all I dreamed about was
becoming a guerrillera."

Of her 14 siblings, three brothers have also taken up arms with the
guerrillas, and she expects the others will also enlist in the FARC when
they come of age.

She was with FARC for two years before she was able to return home to see
her family. Even so, she was lucky. Many of her comrades can never return
home; their parents live on the other side of the front line. Sneaking
across military checkpoints is a risk few dare take.

Although it is Latin America's oldest surviving guerrilla army, the FARC now
has a face that looks more and more like Daisy: young, and increasingly
female. More than 30 percent of its soldiers are women, and many of the
guards patrolling Los Pozos are no older than their late teens.

Marisol Suarez would like to know if these young guerrillas are holding her
3-year-old son.

The Kidnapped

On the morning April 7, while Suarez was at work, armed men broke into her
home in an affluent neighborhood in northern Bogota, tied up her sister,
mother and father, and kidnapped her son, Andres Felipe.

"They took him away in our car, along with the babysitter. But two of them
stayed in the house. After a while, my sister managed to untie herself. She
ran out into the street and started screaming, so the men fled," Suarez
said.

Someone called several days after the kidnapping to demand $4 million for
the boy's release. Then, in early July, Colombia's attorney general, Alfonso
Gomez Mendez, announced he had evidence that Andres Felipe was being held
inside the FARC's demilitarized zone.

Confronted on national television by families of other kidnapping victims,
the FARC's chief spokesman, Raul Reyes, promised to investigate. He has yet
to divulge any information about the incident. To make matters worse, the
kidnappers have cut off all contact with the family.

"Unfortunately, since April 7 we have had no proof that he is alive," Suarez
said. "They wouldn't let us talk to him on the telephone unless we paid them
40 percent of the ransom, but we didn't have that kind of money. So,
unfortunately, we have had no news of him."

Suarez said that if her son is returned, she will probably leave Colombia
for good.

"It saddens me to leave the country, but unfortunately this is what we have
to do, me and all my family. To begin a new life in another place."

She will not be alone. Two million Colombians have left the country in the
past three years, with no intention of returning, according to Colombia's
secret police, the DAS. Unless the war comes to a sudden end, and the
struggling economy makes a surprising turnaround, many Colombians fear the
exodus from their country will only continue.

Come back to this section of our Colombia site for future reports by Steve
Nettleton.