WAR? WHAT WAR? COLOMBIANS DON'T WANT TO KNOW

Peace seems just an afterthought as a blood-soaked country gets ready to vote

Toronto Star Latin America Bureau

SAN JOSE, Colombia

THE WOMAN is belligerent. She is feeding her own children, as well as
refugee kids, and has no time for questions from a Canadian reporter.

``What good does it do to tell the world about the killings in Colombia?''
asks Dora Maria, a respected teacher in this jungle village in Antioquia
province.

``Canadians already know what's happening here,'' says the middle-aged
woman. ``The whole world knows. Nobody does anything. Nobody cares.''

She gives only her first name. Others speak about her dedication to her
elementary students and explain why she is so angry.

Her town, about a four-hour drive north through the mountains from Medellin
in northwestern Colombia, suffers first-hand from this country's dirty war.

More than 800 refugees, driven off their land two weeks ago by death
squads, are staying in this village of a few thousand.

They are being fed by the International Red Cross and local Catholic church
and they are sleeping at Dora Maria's school.

They brought their fear with them. It's another sick victory for the death
squads that control vast regions of northern Colombia through terror.

What is interesting about Dora Maria's attitude is that her rage isn't
directed against these paramilitary killers, or even the government of
President Ernesto Samper.

He will be replaced in presidential elections that begin with a first round
tomorrow. But he leaves an indisputably weak legacy.

During his four years, guerrilla violence has increased, narco-traffickers
have intensified their grip and death-squad activity has surged, heaping
atrocity on atrocity.

Limits of human endurance are strained. Children are shot and left to die
in a town square in Meta province, a butcher hangs from his own meat hook
in Rio Sucio and paramilitary soldiers play soccer with human heads near
the Gulf of Uraba in Antioquia.

``The country is in the throes of an all-out war trapped between barbarity
and the empty rhetoric of an autistic political class,'' historian Arturo
Alape wrote recently.

Colombians refer to their country as ``the Black Hole'' or call it ``the
Bosnia of South America.''

``We are in a situation of national chaos,'' says Father Ernesto Gomez in
San Jose. He is trying to hold his parish together despite death squads
moving in from the north, the guerrillas holding firm to the east and south
and the army seemingly powerless.

Yet Dora Maria, like many other Colombians, plays a vague blame game,
directing her great and understandable anger at some unknown culprit far away.

When she is asked to sit down and consider what it is she expects the world
- - in this case, Canadians - to do, she throws up her hands.

``God only knows,'' she says. ``God only knows how we can end this
nightmare.''

That is the paradox of Colombia on the eve of tomorrow's elections.

Everybody talks about how bad things are.

But evidence suggests the national will to stop the killings - or, perhaps
more accurately, a belief they can be stopped - doesn't exist in Colombia.

Not yet, anyway.

In recent years, heavily armed guerrilla groups have taken control of 40
per cent of the country from a poorly led military and there is little
indication new leadership has emerged to halt the nation's deterioration.

Also, right-wing death squads are locked in a dirty war against leftists
and suspected rebel sympathizers. Human rights groups claim the squads have
the tacit support of the army.

So, tomorrow, when Colombians go to the polls, they'll be looking for a new
president to provide some relief.

Polls show the two front-runners to be Andres Pastrana, 43, a conservative
former Bogota mayor, and Horacio Serpa, a 55-year-old former interior
minister under Samper who is backed by the powerful Liberal party that has
ruled Colombia for much of this century.

Noemi Sanin, 48, a former foreign minister running as an independent, is
surging in third place, opinion polls show, while retired army Gen. Harold
Bedoya, 59, campaigning on a law-and-order platform, lags well behind.

No candidate is likely to win a majority of votes tomorrow, forcing the two
top contenders to face a runoff June 21.

``Things are very complicated. But maybe until things get much more
complicated, nothing is going to get better in Colombia,'' says Maria
Teresa Ronderos, political commentator and editor of the magazine La Nota
Economica.

``We are in a situation where the guerrillas and paramilitaries have become
huge powers in Colombia. And, yet, I honestly don't believe the political
and economic establishment is truly aware of that fact.''

It is a stunning statement.

How can people not be aware?

The country has been at war for 40 years. The fighting has worsened during
Samper's years in office, under a president distracted by charges he
accepted $8.5 million from the Cali drug cartel to win office.

Bloodshed is widespread. In 1996, amid the tens of thousands of murders,
officials say 1,420 people died in 288 massacres - many of the killings by
rightist militias.

Human rights agencies describe Colombia as the bloodiest country on Earth.

There are more than a million refugees from war - mostly displaced by the
death squads - in a population of only 38 million.

There are more than 20,000 rebels, the biggest group being the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and an estimated 8,000
death-squad members, mostly belonging to private armies contracted by big
landowners and calling themselves Headcutters, Scorpions, the Black Hand or
the Cobras.

``All of this is true,'' Ronderos says in an interview. ``But this reality
has not sunk in. We are no longer in control of our country after four
years with Samper. But the established orders do not yet realize that war
is worse than anything else. As unbelievable as it may be, they don't get
it.''

Ronderos adds: ``The danger is that the state is leaving the paramilitaries
to fight their war. The paramilitaries are much more interested in fighting
rebels than the army. Down the road, the question will be: Who will control
the paramilitaries?

``Up until now, everybody is benefiting from the war. That's why we keep
having war. Everybody is winning in the short run. Everybody will lose in
the long run.''

Ronderos is referring to landowners who use private paramilitary armies to
throw peasants off their land under the guise of fighting guerrillas,
rebels who finance their fight by taxing the cocaine trade and politicians
who use the war in their campaign strategies.

Sociologist Ricardo Vargas, from the Bogota-based human rights group CINEP,
argues that the state has privatized the war against the rebels by
delegating to paramilitary groups.

``This (war) has proven quite profitable to the new class of
narco-landowners,'' he wrote in the Latin American review, NACLA Report On
The Americas.

According to Vargas, the landowners have accumulated more than 3 million
hectares ``using newly created private armies to `cleanse' the countryside.''

``War is the Number 1 employer in the country,'' says a human rights leader
in Medellin who has to remain anonymous. He has received death threats and
many of his colleagues have recently gone into exile.

``The guerrillas can pay wages of $400 a month, so can the paramilitaries.
The army pays a little less,'' he says. ``In Colombia, our business is war.''

The failure of Colombia's politicians to come to grips with the tragedy is
evident in the election campaign.

One would think that, with reports of FARC rebels breaking out 346
prisoners from a Bogota jail, a retired general gunned down, three more
human rights leaders assassinated and bombings at all political
headquarters, there would be only one campaign issue: Peace.

But that doesn't appear to be the case.

On Thursday, for example, the biggest story in the media here was the
decision by health officials to allow the sale of the potency drug Viagra.
Other articles explored its effect on the female orgasm.

In the campaigns, peace almost seems to be an afterthought. In television
appearances, candidates offer views on possible peace talks after long
dissertations about unemployment, international investment, Colombia's role
in the global community and the country's World Cup soccer team. Of the top
four candidates, only liberal Serpa's slogan - ``The Road to Peace'' -
addresses the country's major issue.

The others campaign under different slogans:

* ``Change is Now'' from front-runner Pastrana.

* ``Real Change'' from Sanin.

* ``Law and Order'' from Bedoya.

It is almost an invisible election. In the countryside, one might see a few
posters, nothing more. In the capital, it is a low-key event.

The campaign almost seems part of the unreality described by analyst
Ronderos for what is going on in Colombia today.

FARC guerrillas, who have grown from a small group of only 18 fighting
units to having troops in half the municipalities in the country, still
don't seem to be taken seriously as a fighting force by the government.

In an interview, for example, Bedoya, who retired from the army last year,
describes his frustrations with his failure to keep his army equipped.

In March, 82 soldiers from an elite Colombian squad were killed in the
southern jungles of Caqueta, ambushed by FARC rebels. It was the same trick
the rebels used last year to capture more than 100 soldiers in two separate
incidents. Five rebels are decoys, then the trap closes in a pincer
movement. It works, say military experts, because the army doesn't believe
it is fighting a strong and dangerous equal.

There is a sense of unreality, too, about the massacres.

A journalist friend describes having covered the killing of 21 people in
Meta, then telling friends what had happened at a Saturday night party in
Bogota. They were middle- and upper-class Colombians in their 30s and 40s.
``Nobody wanted to listen,'' he says. ``They don't care. For them, it's
still something happening very far away. The war doesn't concern them. Not
really.''

War is immediate, though, for poor Colombians in the provinces.

``People talk about peace. The candidates say they have the answer, but
it's just words. They won't do anything, either,'' says Fabian Cortes, 45,
a refugee from the death squads. He is living in squalid settlement in El
Pinal, a mountain slum above Medellin.

``We have no faith. We have no jobs. We have no food. It's hard to think of
anything when your stomach is empty,'' says the banana worker, who fled
with his wife and two children after seeing his co-workers killed in the
Rio Sucio massacre 18 months ago.

The death squad - the Iguanas - decapitated 16 so-called rebel
collaborators and threw their bodies in the Rio Sucio. Then, they crucified
18 more, most of them youths, leaving their bodies on makeshift crosses.

``The vote on Sunday means nothing to us. Politicians don't care about poor
campesinos,'' says Cortes. ``The killing will continue.''

Refugees in San Jose describe how the death squads killed seven banana and
coffee workers on May 11.

``Then, they told us, `Get out in 15 days or we will come back and kill you
all,' '' says Maria Duque, 63. Her son, John Fabio, 22, was killed.

``My son was a very good boy. He always looked after his mother. I ask God
to forgive those who killed him, and I beg God not to let them kill anybody
else.''

``It is not God who is doing the killing,'' says Father Gomez. ``It is the
evil of man. They have no respect for human life. It is horrible what they
are doing. We are seeking any help we can get for our poor country.''

A few weeks ago, he went to say Mass in nearby El Aro. Death squads had
killed six people, including a storekeeper who was said to have done
business with rebels. Before he died, they pulled out his fingernails and
cut out his tongue and genitals.

Two final scenes from the election campaign offer a brighter view, an
antidote to the pervasive feeling of hopelessness. Both took place
Thursday. Both show the quirky optimism of the human spirit:

* On a rainy Bogota morning, analyst Ronderos describes over breakfast all
the reasons one should despair for the future of Colombia. Things will get
worse, she asserts.

``And yet,'' says Ronderos, a short, dark woman in her late 30s, ``I do
feel optimistic. ``The government is the same. The politicians are the
same. But we are seeing now - for the very first time - a mobilization of
the people.''

She describes the emergence of a dozen movements for peace, including the
National Conciliation Commission, letter-writing campaigns, recent marches
through the streets of the major cities, even the newly formed Soccer for
Peace movement that has ordinary people playing the national sport for a
different reason.

``Really, we have not seen such a thing before. This is really new,'' she
says. ``We are, slowly, waking up - even if it is going to take a long,
long time. I deeply believe we will have a better future. Eventually.''

* Later that gloomy day, Antonio Jose Fuentes, president of the left-wing
Patriotic Union, gives an interview in the party's run-down Bogota offices.
Since its formation in 1986, 3,500 party members, including a presidential
candidate, two senators and two party presidents, have been assassinated.

Fuentes, 58, has strikes against him. He is a senator and party president.

``Sure, the odds aren't good that I will survive,'' he says. ``I am afraid.
You'd have to be crazy not to be.

``But I will keep fighting. I would rather risk death than do nothing to
work for a better Colombia,'' he says.

His children, civil engineering student Antonio, 28, and artist Tania, 26,
agree with their father.

They, too, they say, will find a way to work for peace in Colombia, no
matter what the cost.


Checked-by: Mike Gogulski