Begging for peace amid so much death - violence, death and destabilization in Colombia for the prizes of natural resources such as bananas, rubber, cattle, oil, and uranium - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 24, 1997 by Tom Boswell

The union workers displayed color snapshots of another office of theirs, three blocks away, in a state of devastation Just two weeks earlier the guerrillas had attacked it with grenades.

"I think they have lost all their principles," a local resident said when queried about the guerrillas. "They are just robbers and bandits."

A computer teacher who served as my companion and guide was visibly shaken when he met me one day. He said an elderly man who worked as a porter at his school was shot and killed that same morning. Two men shot the porter in front of a group of young students while four more waited on the street. Then the assassins fled on a motorbike.

My guide said the man, known affectionately by teachers and students as el viejo (the old one), was well loved by all. But, with motives for the shooting unknown, the man became another number on the body count of government agencies and nonprofit groups.

Moreno, the priest who coordinates human rights work for the diocese, was also aware that he, too, could someday be a statistic. He said he is not afraid, shrugging. It is the role of the Catholic church, he said, to accompany those who are forced to flee the violence.

This accompaniment is an overwhelming task: The Colombian Conference of Bishops calculates that 600,000 people nationwide, or 1.6 percent of the entire population of approximately 38 million, has been displaced by violence during the past 20 years. In 1995 alone, more than 4,000 families abandoned their homes in Uraba following a paramilitary sweep through the region.

Flight from terror

"Many people have had to flee two or three times," Moreno said. The paramilitary will sometimes allow them to return, but only to territory which the paramilitary, not the guerrillas, control.

Shantytowns have sprung up all around Apartado, doubling the city's population over the past five years. Called "invasions," these suburbs of wood and tin shacks often appear literally overnight. While I was in Apartado, a group of 100 refugees, mainly children, arrived one evening. They had fled to Panama for asylum but were sent back. Colombia's Minister of Interior asked Cuartas to receive them.

In these newly-settled areas, the government buys and distributes the land. The church helps the refugees gain titles, establish cooperatives and set up other economic ventures.

Cooperatives are targets

Moreno said the paramilitary groups consider the cooperatives "subversive" activity. "When violence begins, this is the first thing they destroy," he said.

Driving though a shantytown, several city officials pointed out rows of small shops forced by paramilitary groups to close. In San Jose, a village seven miles east of Apartado, a cooperative cocoa bean factory was raided earlier this year and the four co-op leaders killed. Now this building, once the pride of the community, sits vacant and lifeless. During my week in Apartado, this same village was bombed by the military. Six more people died.

"You say goodbye to your children in the morning, and you don't know if you'll come back home," said a furniture worker from one of the shantytowns.