COCAINE WARS MAKE PORT COLOMBIA'S DEADLIEST CITY

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia -- Visitors to this city can be forgiven for
thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums
surrounding its port, the country's most important on the Pacific
coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the
deadliest urban center in Colombia's long internal war.

Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road
from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police
headquarters. The stately Hotel Estacion, a neo-Classical gem built in
1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or
export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues.

"It's as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia," said Lt. Nikolai
Viviescas, 25, a police officer who was transferred from Bogota six
months ago. "It feels like another country."

Although Bogota, the capital, and other cities have become secure and
prosperous enough that it is possible there to forget about this
country's four-decade-old civil conflict for a while, Buenaventura is
a different story.

Killings in this city of about 300,000 climbed 30 percent last year,
to 408, giving Buenaventura the nation's highest homicide rate at 144
per 100,000, more than seven times the rate in Bogota and four times
that of Medellin. And this year, the police say, 222 people have been
killed here.

A vast majority of the killings are the product of a narrow
territorial conflict over control of the edge of the city's slums,
acres of wooden shacks built on stilts over the sea. From these
makeshift wharves, police and naval officials say, fast boats depart
with cocaine for points north. Buenaventura's geography, crucial in
connecting Colombia to the global flow of trade, also holds strategic
cachet for drug traffickers.

Despite receiving more than $5 billion in antinarcotics and
counterinsurgency aid from the United States this decade, making the
country the largest recipient of American aid in the hemisphere,
Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine producer and the supplier
of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

Drug lords, rebels and resurgent paramilitary gangs all draw on
Buenaventura's slum dwellers as their foot soldiers.

The police say that many of the combatants on the rebels' side belong
to the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Urban Front, a cell of the main rebel
group FARC that is based in Cali and opposes the Autodefensas
Campesinas del Pacifico, composed mostly of former paramilitary fighters.

"Nothing in this fight is about ideology," said Antero Viveros, the
head of a community group in Lleras, a large slum controlled by the
guerrillas. "It is about drugs, with members of one ethnicity killing
each other."

Despite its emergence as Colombia's most dangerous city, people
displaced by fighting in the countryside still see Buenaventura as a
refuge. About 42,000 refugees have arrived here since 1998, mostly
Afro-Colombians from rural areas, according to the federal government.
They swell the ranks of what may be Colombia's poorest slums.

"If you're hungry, you'll do whatever imaginable to survive," said
Fernando Nunez, 29, a Lleras resident who ekes out a living repairing
old cellphones.

President Alvaro Uribe has forcefully criticized the violence here and
sent new police and navy commanders to the city at the start of the
year. About 2,000 soldiers and police officers, who also wear combat
uniforms and carry semiautomatic weapons, patrol Buenaventura.

Still, critics say authorities have long neglected Buenaventura's
problems in part because Afro-Colombians receive scant federal
attention. Nongovernmental groups say Afro-Colombians account for up
to a quarter of the country's population of 44 million, by some
measures giving Colombia the largest black population in the
Spanish-speaking world. And more than 80 percent of Buenaventura's
residents are black.

This month, when the president chose Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata as
culture minister, was the first time an Afro-Colombian ascended to a
cabinet position in the country's history. Yet political analysts and
black advocacy groups said the appointment was largely to appease
Democrats in Washington who complain of racial exclusion in Colombia
as they weigh a trade agreement.

"The war in Buenaventura is not going to be ended by symbolic actions
from Bogota," said Rosaliano Riascos, a Buenaventura native who fled
the city after a wave of paramilitary-led killings several years ago.
Mr. Riascos, who heads an independent black advocacy group in Bogota,
said it had been a year since he returned to Buenaventura to visit
family. "Buenaventura is a no-man's land," he said.

The entrance to Lleras looks like that of any shantytown elsewhere in
Colombia, with cinder-block shacks and a few paved streets. But deeper
into the slum, the structures are made from discarded wood, with
newcomers squeezing into lean-tos alongside older houses. Rusted
barrels collect rain from zinc roofs, the only source of fresh water.

Sewage bubbles down trash-strewn dirt roads before flowing into the
sea. Stereos blare vallenato and reggaeton music. And precariously
built homes are hoisted above the water on spindly pieces of wood.

Many of the residents of these hovels hesitate to offer their names
out of fear of retaliation over what they might say. One middle-aged
man, offering a visitor a cup of rum from the steps of his house, said
he had worked as a stevedore at the port years ago before losing that
job. "Now," he said, "I do nothing."

Some economists hold up Buenaventura as an example of the risks of
exposing certain areas of developing economies to market forces. Maria
del Pilar Castillo, an economist at Valle University in Cali, said
many residents lost economic security when the city's port was
privatized more than a decade ago, cutting its work force and reducing
benefits.

With taxes on the imports flowing through Buenaventura's port largely
going directly to the central government, the city reaps few benefits
from international trade, even as Colombia's economy grows more than 6
percent a year. So the poor in Buenaventura, with an unemployment rate
of about 28 percent, resort to the drug trade.

"There is no other viable industry here, so there are no other viable
jobs," said Ana Maria Mercedes Cano, director of Buenaventura's
Chamber of Commerce. "So we live in a situation with violence all around us."

Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross-fire. Guerrillas were
blamed for an attack earlier this year in which five people, including
one police officer, were killed when a homemade mortar shell was fired
at a police truck. Security officials here say laws that are lax on
minors, who carry out many of the attacks, make it difficult to reduce
the killings.

"We have a justice system designed for Switzerland, yet we have no
Swiss here," said Col. Yamil Moreno, the chief of police in
Buenaventura. In the same breath, Colonel Moreno, who was transferred
here from the north, callously described Buenaventura's dying combatants.

"These vagabonds," he said, "are good only for drinking, dancing and
killing."