CASUALTIES OF WAR

THE STORY OF COLOMBIA'S 1.5 MILLION FORGOTTEN REFUGEES.

It has been two months since death squads forced Jose Cabral and his family
to flee their hometown in northwestern Colombia, but the small-scale farmer
is still too frightened to consider ever going home—or letting a journalist
use his real name. Who can blame him? On the morning of May 29, Cabral was
returning from a nearby town when his bus was stopped by 400 armed members
of a right-wing paramilitary group. Dressed in army fatigues—many with black
ski masks covering their faces—the men screamed at the passengers to get off
the bus. Cabral, in his early 50s, watched one of them walk up to a
trembling teenage boy and, without warning, shoot him four times in the
head. The paramilitaries accused four others of being communist subversives
and killed them on the spot. By the time Cabral reached home later that day,
the "paras" were moving into nearby hamlets, slipping death threats under
doors, shooting and hacking to death with machetes a dozen residents. It
took only a moment for Cabral to make a fateful decision: he gathered his
wife and three daughters, bid farewell forever to the lives they had built
and, along with 2,000 others from the area, started a treacherous two-day
march into the unknown.

With their escape, Cabral and his family became the latest statistics in the
worst—and most overlooked—humanitarian crisis in the Americas: Colombia's
swelling legions of internal refugees. The escalation of violence in the
countryside has forced more than 700,000 people to abandon their homes in
the past three years, raising the total number of internal exiles to an
estimated 1.5 million since 1985—a figure that is much larger than the
number of ethnic Albanian refugees who fled Kosovo and that ranks third in
the world, behind Sudan and Angola. These rural peasants, including nearly a
million women and children, are trying to escape an increasingly barbaric
war waged by Marxist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary forces, and the
Colombian military—all fueled by disputes over land, ideology and the
illegal drug trade. Poor, anonymous and deeply traumatized, they are
flooding the "belts of misery" around major cities and deepening the
nation's worst recession in half a century. Because they remain inside
Colombia's borders, they are not technically refugees but "internally
displaced people," a bureaucratic euphemism that shouldn't obscure the full
scope of Colombia's tragedy. Says Hiram Ruiz, the senior analyst at the U.S.
Committee for Refugees: "Nothing in this hemisphere even remotely approaches
this crisis in terms of human suffering." Adds Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of
the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, "This is an
emergency situation."

The mass exodus has been silent and almost invisible. Small groups leave
their homes deep in the countryside, far from television cameras, often in
the middle of the night. There usually are no refugee camps for them, so
they filter into shantytowns, too fearful to announce their arrival but too
numerous to ignore. The makeshift camp in the border town of Cucuta, where
the Cabral family landed, is one of the rare places where the impact of
human displacement can be seen. Cabral, his wife and his daughters sleep
together on a plastic mattress on the floor of a local gymnasium along with
325 other refugees. Restless and bored, Cabral spends his days pacing back
and forth in the fenced-in, overcrowded camp, wondering how he will support
his family. "I will never go back," he says. "The paramilitaries could pull
us out of our homes any time they wanted and massacre us." He's right. One
week after the refugees arrived, a group of seven farmers tried to leave the
camp and retake their homes. They were intercepted by paramilitaries at a
bus stop and gunned down before they even left Cucuta.

And the situation is only getting worse. President Andres Pastrana has tried
to hold peace talks with the 13,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC). But the violence has spun further out of control. The
leftist FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), both financed
by drugs and extortion, now control nearly 40 percent of the country,
including the coca-producing region where an American plane crashed two
weeks ago, killing five U.S. servicemen and two Colombians (box). Over the
past few weeks, FARC has blown up bridges, bombed dozens of towns and
attacked Army units just 25 miles south of the capital, Bogota. Last Friday
military authorities said FARC guerrillas set off a 220-pound car bomb
outside an Army base in Medellin, killing at least 10 people and injuring
almost 40 civilians and soldiers. The ELN, for its part, has carried out
bizarre kidnappings, in one instance taking hostage a church full of
worshipers. But perhaps the most menacing force is the right-wing militias,
financed by rich landowners, who have used terror to expand their power.
According to most experts, they are responsible for the majority of the
massacres, chaos and mass expulsions over the past three years. Not
surprisingly, as the atrocities have accumulated, the number of displaced
people has soared from 90,000 in 1995 to 308,000 last year. And plenty of
experts fear the pace is accelerating this year.

Colombia's peasants and farmers are not simply caught in the cross-fire;
they are targets in the dirty war. Rather than risk losses in battle, the
guerrillas and paramilitaries use a Vietnam-era tactic known as "taking the
water from the fish." They force people from their homes, depriving their
enemies of supplies and shelter, and seize the land. The armed men take
farms, gold mines and coca plantations to expand their influence and build
their war chests. In December 1995 the government announced the construction
of a canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific in the Uraba region near the
border with Panama. The canal was never built, but land values rose 1,000
percent, attracting the right-wing paramilitaries. They took control of the
area by carrying out public beheadings, dumping bodies into rivers and
razing homes. Some 90,000 people fled the region over the next two years.
Six hundred are still crammed into a fetid camp in the port of Turbo,
suffering malnutrition, filthy conditions and suffocating heat.

The guerrillas, too, have targeted farmers in their enemies' strongholds.
Last month FARC attacked an area in southern Cordoba held by the
paramilitaries and coveted for its hydroelectric plant and nickel mine. They
entered the town of Juan Jose, beheaded four residents for being
paramilitary supporters and killed 35 soldiers in combat. All this in the
name of the poor. Now an additional 1,000 people are on the run, headed for
the shantytowns of Bogota, Medellin, Bucaramanga or Monteria. The irony, of
course, is that the leftist guerrillas, who have fought for 35 years to
redress Colombia's gaping inequalities, have helped engineer a reverse land
reform. Not only does the exodus from the countryside impoverish the
refugees, but their deserted land is snapped up by wealthy landowners, drug
traffickers and friends of the different private armies, widening the gap
between rich and poor.

The vast river of displaced people threatens to engulf the cities and
overwhelm social services. This year refugees are flowing into the "belts of
misery" at a rate of 533 per day, according to Codhes, a Colombian refugee
agency. They arrive bedraggled and brutalized, with few skills for urban
life and fewer friends. With the nation enduring its worst economic crisis
in decades—including negative growth and 20 percent unemployment—the
government has been hard pressed to help. Pastrana has budgeted just $40
million to handle the crisis, mostly for food and housing. But overwhelmed
city governments have done little. "The mayors don't have programs to deal
with the refugees, and nongovernmental programs don't have resources," says
Neider Monevar, a psychologist who works with refugees. "Refugees feel both
traumatized and utterly abandoned."

It's been even harder to get the world's attention. The U.S. Committee for
Refugees, a nonprofit group in Washington, has launched a campaign
highlighting the plight of Colombia's displaced, and the International
Committee for the Red Cross is working directly with refugees in the
shantytowns. But the United Nations is barely engaged, in part because the
Colombians have not crossed international borders. For its part, the United
States has been fixated almost exclusively on the drug war. But this year
the Clinton administration decided to budget $2 million for Colombia's
refugees. (Compare that with the $238 million the United States spends on
the anti-narcotics effort in Colombia alone—or the $500 million it gave last
week to Albanian refugees returning home to Kosovo.)

Sandra Orejuela could use a little of that money. The 28-year-old peasant
fled paramilitary violence in the countryside two years ago and landed in
the Usme slum just outside Bogota. The ghetto, once a fertile valley at the
foot of a mist-shrouded national park, is now a vast warren of concrete,
plywood and aluminum shacks. Orejuela now lives with her husband and four
small children in a cramped apartment on an unpaved street. The floor is
bare concrete, the windows are covered with cardboard and water arrives
through a hose connected to a nearby river. Her husband travels four hours a
day to a job washing cars, for which he makes $25 a week. And they are the
lucky ones. Many of their neighbors compete with other refugees to sell
pencils and trinkets on street corners or turn to begging, crime or
prostitution. "Necessity can drive people to do the unthinkable," says Ruiz
of the U.S. Committee for Refugees.

Children suffer the most. Six out of 10 refugee children in Bogota do not
attend school, mostly because they cannot pay tuition. Psychologists say
many of those who do are tripwired to explode. They have seen relatives and
friends butchered and their villages bombed by military helicopters. They
cannot forget. Kindergartners spontaneously draw pictures of weapons during
art class. Elementary-school students play at being guerrillas, death-squad
members or soldiers during recess. As they grow older, refugee children are
often so lost and angry that they are easy recruits for the warring groups
that have urban militias prowling the ghettos. Jorge Rojas, director of
Codhes, recalls an 11-year-old boy who had seen his father killed by
paramilitaries. "Psychologists and social workers tried to help him and
failed. Now he is with the guerrillas and itching to get even." Rojas
reflects: "Our great challenge at the end of the century is to prevent war
orphans and sons of refugees who have witnessed cruelty from becoming
protagonists of urban violence in the next one."

How to break the cycle of violence? The peace talks have been
suspended—indeed last Friday's bomb in Medellin went off just as government
envoy Victor Ricardo was meetng with FARC to restart them. He failed. Now
Colombians fear illegal armies could plunge the nation into deeper chaos—as
they did 50 years ago during a reign of terror known simply as La Violencia.
Marches protesting the violence periodically break out all over the country,
while the government is trying to help—in a small way—by returning hundreds
of refugees to their homes or to safer regions. They go back with titles to
land, credits for housing and crops, and a mandate to share profits and
decision making. The idea is to forge communitarian values that will resist
violent intruders, who often get invited into a town to resolve local
disputes. "The armed group quickly establishes itself, and its enemies then
begin to view the village as a legitimate target," explains Fernando
Medellin, the government official in charge of refugees. "The trick is to
break the cycle by forging cohesive, self-ruling communities that don't need
private armies or the government to resolve conflicts." A bit idealistic,
perhaps. But without a stronger civil society, Colombia seems destined to
enter the next millennium as a nation of warlord armies and their terrified
victims, who flee for safety in the dead of night, too terrorized ever to go
home again.

Newsweek International, August 9, 1999