Down the River in Colombia - www.americas.org

Progressive, The, April, 2000 by Chip Mitchell

It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad

My first day off the plane, I see why the Magdalena River Valley of Colombia is considered ,one of the most dangerous places in the hemispheres most violent country. Near the central plaza of Barrancabermeja, the valley's major city, two national police officers are guarding a half-acre of grass and concrete surrounded by a twelve-foot wall. Inside, 150 peasants have been trying to make do since arriving ten days ago, when the Colombian civil war shook their fishing village on a Magdalena tributary called the Cimitarra. They say they ran into the hills to escape bombing and machine-gun fire from a navy flotilla and airborne army troops.

"It was raining bullets," says Ana Garcia, an elderly woman. "We left everything we had. We don't know whether our homes are ruined."

In Bogota, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Curtis Kamman hears of the attack and deflects blame. "It's not always clear it's the army," he tells me. "Apparently, the paramilitaries have helicopters."

That's cold comfort for the peasants, including forty children, who walked for five hours to get here. There's little hope the government will provide shelter or protection if they return home, and Barrancabermeja's churches are already overflowing with refugees. It's an all-too-familiar story for the nearly two million Colombians displaced by the war, which has been raging now for almost four decades.

"We don't know of any actions by the military to stop the assassinations and massacres behind the displacements," says Jorge Rojas, executive director of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement in Colombia.

Since the 1980s, rightist paramilitary groups have worked for cattle ranchers, drug traffickers, transnational oil firms, mining companies, and other vested interests. The private armies committed 63 percent of the nation's 219 massacres last year, according to the Permanent Committee for Defense of Human Rights in Colombia. A December report by New York-based Human Rights Watch blames the paramilitaries for three quarters of all abuses, and a February report by the group cites collaboration between the Colombian army and the paramilitaries. Together, they are behind most of the 35,000 political slayings over the last decade.

Last year, the United States sent military and police aid to Colombia totaling nearly $300 million, making it the third largest recipient, behind only Israel and Egypt. The Administration is pushing Congress to increase the sum to $1.6 billion over the next two years. Nearly 85 percent is slated for the nation's armed forces. Three army battalions would get U.S. Special Forces training, radar bases, intelligence assistance, thirty-three Huey helicopters, and thirty sophisticated Blackhawk choppers.

It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in Colombia. The leftist guerrillas kidnap for ransom and squeeze protection taxes from a peasantry that cultivates the raw material for cocaine. Three North Americans disappeared last year as they worked with a Colombian indigenous community that was fighting proposed drilling by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum. After their bodies turned up across the Venezuelan border, it wasn't rightist paramilitaries taking responsibility, but the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest leftist army.

"No matter whether it's the army, the guerrillas, or the paramilitaries occupying your town, you have to obey them or you become a target," says Regulo Madero Fernandez, president of the Barrancabermeja-based Regional Corporation for the Defense of Human Rights.

In the Middle Magdalena, as this part of the valley is known, the paramilitaries are particularly vicious.

On May 16, 1998, during a party on a Barrancabermeja soccer field, a hooded group slaughtered a dozen people and hauled away dozens more in trucks. Neither an army unit within earshot nor the national police did anything to pursue the killers.

"If we had known about it, of course we would have stopped it," says Captain Victor Gutierrez, the area police commander. "We would have shut down the city, but we also have banks and other businesses to protect."

Much of the paramilitary violence aims to clear away peasants from farmland. As many as 40,000 Middle Magdalena residents, most lacking titles for their plots, have been displaced in recent years. In November, a wave of attacks uprooted more than 3,000. About half of the refugees have ended up in shacks on the outskirts of Barrancabermeja.

Paramilitaries also target organizers such as Workers Trade Union leader Alvaro Remolina, who has called attention to the labor practices of Texaco and Occidental. On January 11, his nephew was murdered near the city of Bucaramanga, while his brother and a friend disappeared in the town of Giron. He lost another brother to assassins in 1996, and uniformed soldiers killed his sister-in-law last July.

In the nearby San Lucas highlands, the site of plentiful gold deposits, U.S. and Canadian conglomerates such as the California-based Conquistador Mines have been moving in over the last few years. Small, independent miners are in the way. On April 25, 1997, according to written accounts, paramilitaries entered the town of Rio Viejo, decapitated local miner Juan Camacho, played soccer with his head, and mounted it on a stick.