MAYOR IN COLOMBIA MORE LIKE A FUGITIVE

He fears for his life from left and right

PUERTO ASIS, Colombia -- Just hours after Nestor Hernandez was sworn in as
mayor of this jungle town in southern Colombia, he was abducted by leftist
guerrillas, dragged across the border to Ecuador and tied to a tree.

That was his comeuppance for defying a rebel order banning newly elected
municipal officials from taking office last January. The guerrillas
released Hernandez after 11 days, but his troubles were just beginning.

In February, he earned the wrath of the Colombian army when he accused
officers of collaborating with right-wing paramilitary death squads. A few
days later, two grenades exploded in front of his house.

"I represent a very high risk of danger," said Hernandez, who took refuge
in a friend's apartment after the attack. "No one wants to rent to me. No
one wants to be my neighbor."

With rebels, paramilitaries and the army all fighting for power in
Colombia's remote towns and villages, Hernandez and other mayors have found
themselves in the line of fire.

In the past three years, 29 mayors have been assassinated, mainly by
rebels. Hundreds of town council members have also been killed, kidnapped
or threatened, and many have been forced to resign. In the run-up to
nationwide municipal elections last October, nearly 40 candidates were shot
dead.

"To be a mayor here, you have to really love your community," said Gilberto
Toro, executive director of the Colombian Federation of Municipalities.

Hernandez, 40, says he took the mayoral job with hopes of ending the
violence and bringing jobs to Puerto Asis.

But he acts more like a desperate fugitive than a city hall power broker.
During a recent interview, he wiped the sweat from his face and kept an eye
on the street in front of his friend's apartment in case any strangers came
calling.

He spends half of his $1,500 monthly salary on bodyguards. To fool would-be
assassins, he rents a variety of cars and pickups and constantly sends his
driver on decoy trips.

"I never go to social events," he said. "The bodyguards scare people."

For all his determination, Hernandez lacks a real mandate to carry on his
mayoral duties. Due to guerrilla threats, nearly all of Puerto Asis' 17,000
eligible voters stayed home during last October's election. Hernandez won
with 102 votes. The loser received 55.

"It was horrible," Hernandez said of the election. "The guerrillas were
everywhere. People who voted risked their lives."

Hernandez first learned about political struggle as a university student in
Poland. He earned a scholarship to study oceanography in the Baltic port
city of Gdansk -- the birthplace of the Solidarity labor union, which led
the protests against Poland's Communist government in the 1980s.

With a degree and a Polish wife, Hernandez returned to Colombia in 1987.
But the only jobs in oceanography were in the navy, which rejected
Hernandez because he had studied in the former Eastern bloc. Even today,
people call him "the Pole."

To make ends meet, Hernandez sold fertilizer and pesticides in Puerto Asis,
335 miles southwest of the capital of Bogota in the impoverished state of
Putumayo. The region's main cash crop is coca, the raw material for
cocaine.

Hernandez advised farmers how to use the chemicals to grow more coca
leaves. "If I sold the product, I had to prove to them that it worked," he
explained.

Later, when Hernandez turned to politics, he developed a more critical view
of the drug trade. "None of the profits stay here in the region. What stays
are the problems," he said.

Puerto Asis' reputation as a regional cocaine center attracted the
country's largest guerrilla organization -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials, FARC. The rebels have financed
their 34-year war against the state, in part, by taxing coca farmers and
providing protection to drug dealers.

The FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN, are a dominating
power in about 200 of Colombia's 1,074 municipalities, according to Camilo
Echandia, an adviser to the Colombian government's peace commission. In
these zones, the guerrillas often dictate how city revenues should be
spent; they decide who will be hired for municipal jobs.

In Puerto Asis, local politics became even more complex with the arrival of
the paramilitaries, who are trying to dislodge the rebels. In January and
February, paramilitaries killed 38 suspected guerrilla supporters.

"They had a list of people and just began killing," said Diego Orozco, the
local director of a government program that funds alternative crop projects
for coca growers.

With the body count rising, Hernandez traveled to Bogota to denounce the
killings before the interior minister and the national media. Citing
eyewitness accounts from Puerto Asis residents, Hernandez accused the army
of providing helicopter support for the paramilitaries.

Top army commanders sued Hernandez for slander. But the eyewitnesses, many
of whom feared for their lives, would not agree to testify in court.
Hernandez was forced to publicly retract his statements.

Back in Puerto Asis, someone tossed two grenades at Hernandez's house,
seriously injuring a night watchman.

Some observers suspect that Hernandez agreed to speak out against the
paramilitaries when he was in guerrilla custody. But Hernandez denies that
he cut any deals.

He insists that his survival strategy involves denouncing human rights
abuses on all sides and focusing national and international attention on
his predicament.

"If they kill me, it would have a huge political cost," he says. "That is
my own security."

John Otis is a free-lance journalist based in Bogota.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson