Crisis in Colombia as Civil Strife Uproots Peasants

New York Times
21 October 1999
By Larry Rohter
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CUCUTA, Colombia -- For Jose Moreno, his family of six and his neighbors, life as refugees began suddenly in mid-July with the arrival of a group of armed men at their small village north of here.

We are going to do a cleanup in this area, so it is best you go away for a time if you don't want to get hurt," Mr. Moreno remembers the masked strangers announcing.

Since members of a right-wing paramilitary death squad killed 11 people in a nearby settlement just a few days earlier, the residents of the Morenos' village, La Pista, took the warning seriously.

Leaving their animals and belongings behind, they fled across the border into Venezuela, beginning an odyssey that has brought them to a makeshift camp in an open-air coliseum here, where they are officially classified as "internally displaced people" and have little prospect of returning home.

"We want to go back to our homes and our yucca and banana fields, but we are afraid the paras will kill us," said Luis Mariano, another resident of the same remote mountainous area.

"And so here we are," he said, "without a peso to our name, without jobs or hope, depending on the charity of others and sleeping on the ground and waiting for someone to bring us our next meal."

As Colombia's longstanding civil conflict intensifies, the fighting is inflicting a major social crisis on a country that is already deeply fractured. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are being forcibly uprooted and turned into fearful, persecuted migrants. The vast majority are peasants caught in the crossfire between Marxist guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitary forces that seek to wipe them out.

Fernando Medellin, director of the Solidarity Network, a Colombian Government agency that deals with the problem, estimates that fighting has displaced 1.5 million of Colombia's 40 million people at one time or another since 1985. But half of that has been since 1996, human rights groups estimate, with the number expected to swell by at least 300,000 this year.

"Even more important than the total is the fact that the numbers are still increasing, not holding steady or declining," Leila Lima, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' delegate to Colombia, said in an interview in Bogota.

International relief and aid agencies describe the plight of Colombia's displaced people as the largest human emergency in the Western Hemisphere. In numerical terms the problem is greater than in East Timor, Chechnya or even Kosovo. But in contrast to those places, "here the phenomenon is silent and gradual, and so it is invisible in a certain way," Ms. Lima said.

Unlike victims of those other conflicts, displaced people in Colombia are not readily distinguishable by their ethnicity, language, or religion. Instead, they are ordinary citizens who happen to stand in the way of the armed groups that have been warring with increasing ferocity since the 1960's in this Texas-size South American country.

Nor, for the most part, have Colombia's displaced people been resettled in large groups, provided for and protected by international relief organizations or their own Government-which has only belatedly acknowledged the extent of the problem. "For the most part, this is not a country of camps," said Rolin Wavre, chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Colombia.

No precise figures exist, but human rights groups estimate that more than half of the displaced have been uprooted by right-wing paramilitary groups.

Left-wing guerrilla groups are considered responsible for forcing out more than a third of those displaced, with the Colombian armed forces are considered responsible for less than 5 percent.

Colombia's crisis is so widespread and deeply rooted that some people have been displaced more than once. In 1993, for instance, Roque Murcia, now 54, and his wife, Delia, fled from their farm near Turbo in the northwest after a heavily armed paramilitary unit showed up and accused local residents of collaborating with the guerrillas.

"They came and said that we had better go away until further notice, because they didn't want to have to kill us," he recalled during an interview at the coliseum here. "Since they had already killed some friends of mine, I did what they said."

Unable to find anyone to buy his property, Mr. Murcia abandoned two horses, two mules and 185 acres of fertile land planted with corn, bananas and cocoa, to which he still holds title. After a time in a camp in his native province, he fled here to the other side of the country.

Here he eventually found work as a laborer on the farms of others, scratching out a meager living until the paramilitary forces showed up once more with the same message.

"Now here I am living the same tragedy all over again," Mr. Murcia, whose wife, 53, was recently given a diagnosis of cancer but has been unable to receive treatment, said morosely. "I find myself more desperate than when I was displaced from Turbo."

As part of the relief effort that the Colombian Government has begun to mount, refugees like Mr. Murcia are entitled to a card that makes them eligible for free health care and other benefits. But after summary executions of some people carrying the card at roadblocks by paramilitary or guerrilla units who suspect the refugees of supporting the enemy, many are understandably reluctant to apply for such status.

Fear has also led many to flee camps or other organized settlements where they might receive help, creating what one foreign relief worker calls "belts of misery" around large cities like this one or Medellin or Cali. But even there, they are regularly hunted down and killed by one side or the other.

"Displaced families don't like to identify themselves as such, out of fear," said a Government employee who works with them here. "They prefer to camouflage themselves among other people, and we don't like to identify them either, because it stigmatizes them and exposes them to danger."

One foreign relief worker here said, "As the saying goes in Spanish, they are caught between the hammer and the anvil."

The experience of the group of 635 families that lived in the mountains north of here until this summer illustrates that point. Desperate to avoid the growing clashes south and west of their villages that accompanied the arrival of the paramilitary death squads, they crossed the border into neighboring Venezuela, where they were settled temporarily in a camp under military supervision.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has described the situation along the border as "a mini-Kosovo," but he has made no effort to offer the refugees shelter or asylum.

In an interview in Caracas this summer, Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel said Venezuela's position was that Colombians who fled "are not refugees," but merely people who were "temporarily displaced" and therefore were not entitled to any international protections.

Citing international law, relief and aid agencies unanimously reject that interpretation. But when the peasants moved back across the border and were placed in the coliseum here in their home province, they were met with an even more threatening welcome.

"Behind the peasant exodus is the hand of the guerrillas," the regional military commander, Col. Victor Hugo Matamoros, was quoted as saying in a recent interview with La Opinion, a local newspaper. "Those who are in the coliseum are with the FARC," the acronym for the country's biggest insurgent group. He later retracted those comments, saying they had been taken out of context, but the declarations, which the refugees heatedly deny, added to the tension.

The recent surge in the ranks of the displaced could hardly come at a worse moment for the Government. Colombia is enduring its worst recession in 70 years, and the cost of rebuilding from a devastating earthquake on the other side of the country in January is competing with the needs of the displaced for the limited money available for relief.

As a result, hostility against the displaced seems to be growing. The Mayor of Cali said recently that he was going to install highway checkpoints on the outskirts of his city to ferret out and turn away the displaced. He retracted the measure only after an outcry from human rights groups.

But conditions in organized settlements like the one here are hardly better. The displaced in the coliseum have no tents, food is strictly rationed and medicine is in short supply. Their children are not in school, and most worrisome of all, there is no sign of when their ordeal might end.

"These people are confused and drifting," said the Rev. Gustavo Sanchez Ardila, a Roman Catholic priest whose parishioners were forced to flee the settlement of San Martin de Loba, just north of here, in August.

"They have lost the only things they had, their homes and animals, and do not know what to do or where to go. It is the saddest thing I have ever seen."