Environment : In Colombia, Recycling Is a Deadly Business : * Destitute people sift through trash to eke out a living. But now a series of related murders has the country reeling.

The wind whipping across the open landfill drove dust, plastic bags, flies and bacteria toward scores of people wearing rags around their heads for protection. Stooping amid mounds of putrid garbage, the men and women used sticks to search for recyclable material to be sold later to pay for food and other necessities.

From his position high on a nearby rise, the landfill’s supervisor could not gauge the intensity in the people’s eyes as they desperately searched for sustenance. He could see only rag-wrapped human beings, tiny as ants in the distance as some of them darted away from the main group toward an approaching garbage truck loaded with fresh trash.

“Look at them,” he said, making no effort to hide his contempt for the scavengers, permitted to comb the landfill for a small fee. “You have to be careful of them because they have so many bad habits. They find their food in the garbage, they often rob and they spend 60% of what they earn on liquor.”

The landfill supervisor is far from alone in his view. Their fellow Colombians often refer to the recyclers as “disposables,” equating them with the trash they collect.

Now, however, the country is beginning to face the dangerous consequences of such dehumanization as a result of a series of gruesome killings uncovered in this Caribbean port city of 1 million early last month.

A group of guards stands accused of using a trash heap as bait to lure as many as 50 recyclers and other street people to the private Free University, then clubbing them to death in order to sell their bodies for $200 apiece to the medical school.

The crimes--branded “a repugnant trade in death” by investigators--have cast a spotlight on the roughly 50,000 families in Barranquilla and other Colombian cities who eke out a slim existence by combing through piles of garbage to salvage perhaps $2 per day worth of recyclable materials.

Nascent associations of independent recyclers are using the macabre scandal to underscore their vulnerability, to demand that the government legalize their unofficial trade and to pressure their countrymen to recognize the value of what they do.

“People in Colombia have mistakenly come to associate trash with the people who work in it,” said Guillermo Torres, an official at the Social Foundation, a non-governmental organization in Bogota, the Colombian capital. “The massacre in Barranquilla was so shocking that it woke Colombia up to the problems these people face all over the country.”

Founded by a Jesuit priest in 1911, the Social Foundation has long used profits from several wholly owned businesses to fund programs benefiting Colombia’s poor. It set up a trash recycling program in the mid-1980s, when it become apparent that garbage scavenging had become the only means of subsistence for thousands of people.

Recycling had gained popularity here because of environmental concerns and a financial crisis that inspired industries to try to reuse materials rather than buy new. But neither government nor industry has made any organized attempt to collect recyclables, leading to the emergence of the ragtag community of trash pickers living on the fringes of Colombian society.

Most recyclers either push wooden carts along city streets from one garbage pile to the next or live and work at open landfills like the one in Barranquilla. Precisely because recycling is so unorganized, the work has attracted those with no other employment options, including drug addicts and criminals trying to make some quick cash as they roam the streets.

Torres estimated that such offenders account for only about 5% of recyclers. But he added that their presence has led to a general view of recyclers as pariahs. More tolerant Colombians simply avoid them. Those with less understanding, including many police, take a more hostile approach.

Rodrigo Ramirez began rummaging through garbage on the streets after he lost his job in construction 13 years ago. For the most part, he said, he is pleased with his choice. “I found a way to continue working honorably in a great business. You don’t need references to begin, and they can never take the job away from you.”

But he added that police have occasionally turned his trade into a painful nightmare by beating him and once, several years ago, burning his wooden cart on the street.

“I became aggressive when they did it, and so they arrested me,” he remembered. “Of course I became angry. When they burn my cart, they burn my possibilities of eating. They take away all of my hopes and opportunities.”

The 33-year-old Ramirez now spends his time trying to safeguard the hopes and opportunities of thousands of other scavengers as vice president of Colombia’s National Assn. of Recyclers. He hopes to build on a membership of 2,500 families organized in local cooperatives in eight cities.

After the killings in Barranquilla, the association began pressing Congress to pass a bill legitimizing the trade and providing social security and other state benefits. The independent recyclers also want to stop government garbage collectors from recycling on the side.

“These people already have salaries and benefits,” said Ramirez in his office in Bogota. “They don’t need to be taking away work from us.”

Colombia’s Justice Ministry recently reacted to the Barranquilla killings by sponsoring newspaper advertisements supporting recyclers’ right to decent lives. But the national government has not yet addressed the recycling association’s demands. At issue is not only the safety of recyclers, but also their future role in helping dispose of Colombian garbage.

Recycling advocates point out that although 30% to 40% of Colombia’s garbage is recyclable, less than a third of that is currently being salvaged. They maintain that a government program to organize recyclers could save the state millions of dollars it now spends hauling recyclable trash to landfills, improve the environment and protect the street workers by changing society’s perception of them.

Many of the association’s members, supported by the Social Foundation, have already made significant progress toward improving their working conditions.

This year, for example, the foundation has allocated about $300,000 to aid recyclers. In Bogota, for example, such aid funds a warehouse for recyclables and a day-care center serving three recycling cooperatives, each with scores of members.

But the association has its work cut out for it in places like Barranquilla, which, like many other Colombian cities, is home to so-called social cleaning squads--vigilante groups that stalk and kill street people, often with police cooperation. Human rights groups contend that most of 267 unidentified murder victims in Colombia last year were undocumented street people killed by the squads. At least some of those victims were recyclers whose only offense was their shabby appearance.

A Barranquilla government official said that many of the killings in his city go undiscovered because the victims often have no families to report them missing. “My guess is that there are about four killings a day here,” he said.

The city’s recyclers note that nobody seemed to care about such murders until last March, when a man named Oscar Hernandez, still bloody from a severe beating, showed up at a police station. He told officers that guards at the city’s Free University had asked him to collect garbage on campus and then beat him over the head with a stick. After guards left Hernandez for dead in a tub of formaldehyde, he escaped through a back door.

When police raided the university’s medical school, they discovered the remains of more than 30 bodies. News reports later quoted the university security chief as saying that he had murdered at least 50 people for pay on orders from the university director.

“There is nothing in the history of the country nor in the most repugnant of crimes to equal the discoveries at the Free University,” commented Bogota’s El Espectador newspaper.