A Tool of War at Age 10

FORTUL, Colombia -- The last day in the short and humble life of Irwin Orlando Ropero began at dawn.

When he awoke on Maundy Thursday, after spending the night at his aunt’s house, he ran home to his grandparents’ house a block away. There, he washed his face, ate breakfast, and went out to play.

Four hours later, he was dead, used and discarded in a ruse by leftist guerrillas that shocked even hardened veterans of Colombia’s long conflict.

“It was one of the worst brutalities that I have ever seen,” said Gen. Santiago Herrera, the commander of the local military unit. “All norms of war have vanished here.”

Irwin was a 10-year-old with a round face, close-cropped hair and almond eyes. He liked soccer and vallenato, Colombia’s accordion-laced version of country music. He was his grandparents’ helper, sent to live with them by his mother, who worked on a distant ranch. He was quiet, shy and dirt poor.

He was not the youngest child to die in Colombia’s war. Nor was his death on April 17 big news: In a nation where 2,000 children die violently each year, many in armed conflict, his killing merited a 500-word story on Page 4 in the nation’s paper of record.

Rather, his death was remarkable for a different reason. After 40 years of fighting, it was a symbol of how degraded Colombia’s conflict has become.

Leftist rebels, squeezed by a Colombian military offensive backed by U.S. trainers, intelligence and equipment, have responded with a series of unconventional attacks over the last year intended to demonstrate their continuing strength.

Taxi drivers are turned into unwitting bombers, their cars loaded with explosives without their knowledge, then detonated. Crowds of people are raked with machine-gun fire. Bombs go off in shopping malls, private clubs and fast-food restaurants. A child is used as an instrument of death.

In turning ordinary people into both weapons and targets, the rebels have opened themselves to sharp criticism from the United Nations, human rights groups and even leftists sympathetic to the rebels’ stated desire for a Colombia with a more equitable distribution of land and wealth.

“What is the military advantage in killing a kid? None,” said Jose Murillo, director of a local human rights group.

Irwin lived in Fortul, a town of 7,000 set at the base of the Andes, which hover blue-black in the distance. It lies at the start of Colombia’s vast and shimmering llanos, a verdant savanna of thick, green grass and thin, tall palms where rebels and soldiers have long battled for control.

His home was on the edge of town, in a neighborhood locals call “the slums.” His mother had sent him to live with his ailing grandparents, to run errands and take care of them.

A Humble Family

Miguel Angel, 77, and Isabela Ropero, 75, live in a shack made of rough wood boards at the end of a loam road. The roof is palm thatch, the floor dirt. A small garden sits to one side. A hibiscus blooms with bright red flowers. A wild white rose fills the air with scent, sweet and heavy.

Inside, sun streams through cracks in the walls, dimly lighting the single room. A brown mattress without sheets lies in one corner, where Irwin would sleep with his grandmother. A radio hangs on the wall. It is the only appliance in sight.

Miguel is stooped and slight, his face cracked like the desert floor from a lifetime spent working as a ranch hand under the hot sun. His eyes are still lively, though, and his mind is clear. His wife, Isabela, shuffles uncertainly through the home. She wears flowered skirts and seems at times to not know what day it is or where she is.

When Irwin left his grandparents’ house on that hot, clear morning, he said he was going back to his aunt’s house to play with his cousins. It was Easter week, and school was out.

“Bye-bye,” he called out as he ran off, clad in a red-and-black-checked shirt and black jeans. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He ran across the dirt path and a crude bridge of boards over a sewage canal that drains into the tall, green grass of the pastures that surround the town.

There, outside the home of his aunt, Marina Ropero, he met up with his cousins and other neighborhood friends in the street that runs toward the middle of town. One of the children had a wooden top, and they took turns hurling it onto the hard-packed dirt.

At around 10 a.m., Marina, a no-nonsense woman who makes a living sewing clothes, sent her son to buy brown sugar from a store on the town square three blocks away. The boy asked Irwin to go with him.

“He was a very quiet child,” Marina said of Irwin. “If you told him to do something, he would do it.”

Like so many small towns in Colombia, Fortul’s central square is a monument to faded dreams, proof that progress has been slow in reaching the country’s impoverished millions.

The fountain, topped by a cowboy breaking a bucking horse, is cracked and dry. The grass is overgrown. An arbor arches over one of the paths, sagging under the weight of a massive pink bougainvillea that towers 20 feet in the air. Drunks sleep on the benches.

A Simple Errand

While Irwin waited outside the store, a teenager came up to him. Descriptions vary, but he was a stranger in town.

“Come over here, sardine,” he said, using a Colombian slang for little boy, witnesses later told investigators.

His cousin told police that the teen asked Irwin to run an errand, to deliver a bicycle to the roundabout just outside town on the highway that rushes past Fortul. Then he slapped a Colombian bill worth 35 cents in Irwin’s hand.

Thirty-five cents is a lot of money for a boy who has nothing. You can buy a bottle of the fluorescent pink, apple-flavored soda that is the national drink. Or a fat, green avocado. Or a notebook.

The last would have been important to Irwin. Although he was 10, he had only started school a few weeks before. It is not uncommon in Colombia for rural families to keep their children home to help around the farm or house. In Fortul, only half of school-age children are enrolled, according to education statistics.

His Aunt Marina, though, had decided to finally send Irwin to school. He was four years older than most kids in Garden A, as his classroom was called, but he told his grandparents that he was having fun learning to read and write.

“I’m learning my first letters,” his grandfather recalls him saying. But the family was too poor to afford the $4 fee that teachers asked parents to pay for books and school supplies that the government was unable to provide. So Irwin had to rely on charity for paper and pen.

“They knew he was poor and that he would do anything for money,” said Miguel, his face wrinkling with grief. “They took away my right arm when they took him away.”

Irwin apparently showed no hesitation about taking the bike from the stranger. He told his cousin to go home without him, that he had to run an errand and would be back soon.

The bike was new, purple, kid-sized, so Irwin didn’t have to stretch to reach the pedals. He mounted it and rode out of the town square and toward the roundabout.

The roundabout has been one of the focal points of the war in Arauca, the province where Fortul lies, since President Alvaro Uribe began a military crackdown just north of here.

Two of the province’s three major roads connect at the roundabout. Rebels have repeatedly clashed with the outgunned police and soldiers who guard it. So far this year, two soldiers and four civilians have been killed there.

Riding east down Fortul’s only paved street, Irwin would have passed the police station, a pockmarked ruin of concrete blocks and sandbags. The town’s children had grown up watching the rebels fire homemade mortars at the officers, who would huddle inside, helpless, until the attacks were over.

“My kids hear shots and bombs, and they don’t even react,” said Freddy Garcia, Irwin’s school principal. “For these kids, the conflict is normal.”

Farther down the street, Irwin would have ridden past small shops that sold bootlegged CDs and cheap clothes; the abandoned mayor’s office, never completed because some corrupt functionary made off with the money; restaurants that sold thin cuts of steak, rice, yuca and beans for $3 a plate, and finally, the town’s funeral parlor, a small shop whose walls are lined with coffins.

Once he got to the roundabout, he rode to the southeast side, where Delfelia Cala Martinez, 53, was selling Cokes from a small aluminum stand. About 10 yards ahead, a soldier at a checkpoint was patting down a young man on a motorcycle.

Irwin stopped the bike next to Martinez’s stand. He put his right foot down, then his left foot. Suddenly, an enormous blast rocked the roundabout.

A police investigation later revealed that the center tube of the bicycle had been filled with about 10 pounds of dynamite. The bike was rent to pieces, so it remains unclear what, exactly, detonated the charge. But the technology and modus operandi match that of other recent operations by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the nation’s largest, most active rebel group.

Police believe it was set off by remote control, meaning that someone watched the youngster dismount, then pressed a button to set off the bomb that killed him.

The explosion ripped Irwin apart, like a rag doll shredded by a vicious dog.

His legs were never found. One arm landed 20 feet away. His right hand was nearby. Police found the money the teenager had given him still clutched in his fingers.

His torso came to rest against the black-and-yellow curb of the roundabout, 50 feet from where he had stopped the bike. He lay on his back, facing the clear, blue sky. He was pale, his skin almost porcelain as his blood drained into the street.

Half his face was missing. But the other half was perfectly intact. He was staring at the heavens and seemed almost to be smiling.

The FARC has made no public statements about the bombing. Guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, a smaller leftist group that frequently works with the FARC near Fortul, issued a statement expressing sorrow through a clandestine radio station. Neither militia has admitted or denied responsibility.

But Colombian military intelligence captured a radio communication between two FARC guerrillas later on the day of the slaying: “So how did the job go in Fortul today?” one asked the other, according to the Colombian authorities.

No soldiers were harmed by the bomb.

“They fight here with terror, nothing more,” said Colombian army Capt. Cesar Karam, whose men were patrolling the roundabout that day. Disgust filled his face, and he swept his arm out to one side. “We had to scoop that boy up with a shovel.”

Four people, including Martinez, the Coca-Cola seller, were slightly injured. The bike’s center tube apparently directed the explosion upward and straight into Irwin.

“It was a tremendous blast, you can’t imagine,” said Martinez, who was back selling sodas a few days later. She turned around to show the spot in her back where a piece of shrapnel hit her. “The boy was in pieces.”

The bombing thundered through the town. Soldiers ran to help the wounded. Townspeople gathered to take in the destruction.

One neighbor recognized Irwin’s face and ran to tell Marina, who raced to the roundabout. She nearly collapsed when she saw her nephew’s shattered body. “I was in complete despair,” she said.

Speechless, she walked the five blocks back to her parents house to tell them that Irwin was dead. Isabel began to sob. She has had difficulty eating since his death.

“That child was very close to me,” she said.

It would be another four days before Irwin’s mother, Gladys Maria Ropero, 28, would learn that her oldest child was dead.

A slight woman with slumping shoulders and a gentle face, she worked tending cattle about 30 miles away. A neighbor visited to tell her that she had just heard about Irwin’s death on the radio.

Ropero later recalled how the breath left her body, that she was unable to move or understand what had happened. She paid for a taxi to take her, Irwin’s two younger brothers and sister across the sprawling savanna to Fortul.

They arrived two days after her son was buried. Then she stayed to take her son’s place caring for her parents, finding a job that paid $20 a month as a live-in maid. Her children now live with their grandparents, a family in the one-room shack.

“It was like I lost all my senses. I didn’t know what to do,” she said.

Services for Irwin took place on Holy Saturday, in the open-air cathedral that occupies the west side of Fortul’s central square. Those who attended described an extraordinary service, filled with sorrow and hope.

Father Gonzalo Moreno said it was an appropriate day for the services. For Christians, Holy Saturday marks the day that Jesus Christ lay buried in his tomb. It is often spent in preparation for the next day, Easter Sunday, the holiest day for Christians because it is, they believe, when Christ rose from the dead.

Moreno, a young, thin man with intense eyes, read from Romans: “For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.”

Afterward, Irwin’s 3-foot white coffin, the cheapest the mortuary had, was loaded into a small, brown station wagon that served as the town’s hearse.

The congregation marched slowly behind it toward the cemetery. In their hands, they carried white flags as a symbol of peace.

As they walked through town, residents recall, a surprising thing happened. More and more people came out of their homes to join the march. Even soldiers and police joined in, holding white flags inscribed with the word “Peace” along with their guns.

By the time the procession reached the cemetery, it had swelled from 50 people to more than 300, walking in almost complete silence.

Just outside the entrance, Moreno stopped the hearse. He had the children come forward, nearly 100 of them. The oldest lifted Irwin’s coffin out of the car. The procession moved forward again, the small white box bobbing above a sea of children.

The townspeople threaded into the graveyard, past blue cinderblock walls, jostling tombstones and crypts with statues and columns raised above the earth. They set Irwin’s coffin into a small hole in the back of the graveyard, the air hot and humid and loud with the calls of birds. The priest said a blessing, and then it was over. The crowd melted away. They left the white flags behind.

Afterward, masons came and covered Irwin’s grave with cement. It is one of the few physical reminders of his existence.

He never had a picture taken until police photographed his remains in the street. He left behind no drawings, no toys, not even his name written on a piece of paper.

There is only this: the simple slab, the silence around it and his mother’s and father’s last names, as is customary in Latin countries, scratched into the concrete: “Orlando Ropero.”