River of Death : The people of Marsella would deny the horror of Colombia’s violence. But the Cauca river, and the hundreds of corpses that wash up on its banks, will not let them.

IN THE WESTERN COLOMBIAN TOWN OF MARSELLA, JOSE PALACIOS, THE gravedigger, watches another dusty car turn the corner and creep toward the cemetery so slowly that it’s hard to tell exactly when its forward motion ceases. After the car doors open and thunk closed, the family stands silent for a moment before beginning the long walk up the terraced cemetery toward Palacios.

Days before, the family was at home, miles to the south, awaiting the return of a loved one. When hours turned into days, they packed their overnight cases and drove north, following the muddy Cauca River as it flows up to a bend on the outskirts of Marsella. There, the water’s surface is tickled only by a slow eddy, gently spinning debris into the shoreline’s reeds. The family raced along thinking of that eddy, and of the horrifying possibility that it was washing something larger ashore, something gray and bloated, breaking the water’s surface, coming to rest on the riverbank.

So do many, both the living and of the dead, come to Marsella, a picturesque coffee town of 30,000 at the base of Colombia’s western Andean range about 120 miles west of Bogota. Since 1988, more than 275 bodies, most of them unidentified victims of drug violence, have washed up here; 41 victims in the first six months of 1992 made it the worst half-year since the gruesome flotilla began. And those bodies are just a fraction of the number that pass by and continue downriver into oblivion.

The victims are the enemies of the drug lords who rule the northern Cauca Valley. They are rival traffickers, subordinates who double-crossed their bosses, leftist guerrillas trying to extort money from the criminals or human-rights workers determined to denounce their crimes. Their families may or may not have known that their relative was threatened, but once the person disappeared they knew where to begin looking for the body. Waiting for them, all of them, is Palacios. He has buried 600 bodies in six years.

“I tell them, especially the women, ‘You are not going to see anything pleasant. You are going to see something macabre and awful. You have to calm yourself.’ ”

The families stay only as long as it takes to view the body and, on those few occasions when identification is possible, to make arrangements to take it home. Then they quickly leave Marsella. Many of Marsella’s residents are insulated from the families’ pain, but even those lucky enough to avoid the sight of the corpses in the water cannot escape the smell of them on the wind. The stench quickly fills offices, schoolrooms and houses, making working and studying, not to mention eating and sleeping, nearly impossible. Added to the assault on the senses is the strain placed on a small town’s budget by hundreds of impromptu burials.

The people of Marsella know the bodies come from another place, and they desperately want outsiders to know it as well, want them to understand that their town has nothing to do with drug-related violence of the Cauca Valley just to the south. Residents make a point of repeating the same self-deceptive refrain to any visitor who asks about the bodies: The dead are not ours.

At first glance, the floating corpses seem to be the only dark stains on Marsella’s surface, which otherwise shimmers with relative prosperity and peace. Residents speak with pride about their town’s coffee-fueled economy and its reputation as an ecologically minded place where a person can live without the fear of criminals so prevalent in other regions.

Former Mayor Manuel Salazar is just one of many residents repeating the mantra of Marsella: “This is a town known for its tranquillity and peace, but because of an accident of nature, we are forced to deal with the dead that are not ours and that are prejudicing people’s view of Marsella.”

The townspeople’s protestations exemplify a national tendency to downplay overwhelming evidence that Colombia’s violence threatens nearly everyone. President Cesar Gaviria and others in his administration have helped reinforce such denials by claiming to have led Colombia out of the terrorist nightmare of the late 1980s and into a new era.

Gaviria did succeed in coaxing leaders of the Medellin cartel--including its boss, Pablo Escobar--into jail last year through an offer of leniency, and the surrenders did coincide with an end to indiscriminate drug terrorism, including car bombings and assassinations of police. But the president’s credibility among Colombians was severely damaged by Escobar’s escape in July from a special “prison” and revelations that the drug baron had been running his multibillion-dollar cocaine business from the facility, which was equipped with a water bed, a 60-inch color television, stereo equipment and a Jacuzzi.

The disclosures offer strong evidence that it was Gaviria rather than Escobar who surrendered. The president’s claim that he has reduced drug violence also rings hollow. Although such violence has become less dramatic with an end to car bombings, there were 28,284 homicides in Colombia last year, breaking the record of 24,267 set in 1990 and making the country, with a population of 32 million, the most violent per capita in the Western Hemisphere. The 1991 figure also surpasses the 24,703 murders registered in the United States--a country with nearly eight times Colombia’s population.

Faced with such grim statistics and the hopeless feeling that the government only makes matters worse, Colombians work hard to convince themselves that the killing has nothing to do with them.

“Colombians’ reaction to violence is very much like many people’s reaction to AIDS,” says Clara Lopez, a Bogota human-rights activist and former Bogota City Council president. “They don’t try to address the problems. Instead, they simply try to seal themselves off from (the bloodshed) because of fear that they will be contaminated.”

The country’s violence has fragmented like a grenade in recent years so that the groups behind it are now too numerous to count, much less pacify. Controlling entire regions in the countryside and several neighborhoods in the cities are drug traffickers, leftist guerrillas, former leftist guerrillas turned bandits, right-wing death squads, common criminals, vigilante groups and various combinations of each.

Those who cross any of the multiple actors by, say, denouncing them to authorities, often wind up in the Cauca River or some other dumping ground. Despite government efforts to protect judges and witnesses and reduce corruption among law enforcement officials, one law still reigns-- la ley de silencio .

Although the people of Marsella may claim to live in a peaceful region, they, too, obey that law because they know that the criminals upstream can kill anyone, anywhere in Colombia.

AT A SCHOOL JUST 100 FEET FROM THE RIVERBANK, the stench of a body occasionally forces Eldilma Gaviria (no relation to the president) to dismiss her class of 24 children. On other occasions, she shuts the doors and windows against the smell and gives students cotton balls soaked in alcohol to sniff.

The bodies land at a point on the Cauca River known as Beltran, and often wait there for days while the mayor searches for an available four-wheel-drive vehicle to carry the town’s judge and coroner to the site. The journey down the rutted road winding from the hills into the valley takes 40 minutes in good weather.

For Gaviria and her students, the wait for official action often becomes unbearable. The teacher says that the putrid bodies, combined with a scarcity of potable water, probably explain why so many of the children are so often sick. She also worries about the five students who have nightmares about the corpses. “How will all of this affect the little ones in the future?” she asks. “I pray every day that some solution will be found.”

Once officials examine a body, they transport it from the riverside up the hill to Marsella’s graveyard, smack-dab in the middle of a poor neighborhood. Here, a stairway of ramshackle houses is separated from the wall of the terraced cemetery by a path of dirt wide enough, but not nearly smooth enough, to be called a street.

Seventy-three-year-old Aura Rosa Acevedo sits motionless on a narrow wooden porch and breathes in the wind-borne scent of the cemetery’s bougainvillea and wild irises. She enjoys these moments while she can; the breeze can turn rancid from one minute to the next.

Today, her neighbors are also out enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. One of them, Zoelia Correa, leans against Acevedo’s porch, and complains about the times that she, too, has had to lock herself inside.

“Just imagine. They leave the corpses sweating in the sun for days!”

“Yes, in the sun,” Acevedo chants in turn. “ Ave Maria! Nobody eats. Nobody can eat in peace with that smell.”

Correa smiles and addresses her thin teen-age daughter standing nearby. “That’s why you’re so skinny isn’t it?”

Everyone laughs at the joke because, after all, what else can they do?

As the town’s body count grew from scores to hundreds in the late 1980s, several residents became desperate enough to propose that authorities dynamite the river eddy so the corpses would not land. Later, the same people suggested that the problem could be solved with something as simple as a push with a stick.

“People were asking, ‘Why don’t they just push the corpses so they will continue downstream?’ ” remembers Tomas Issa, a Marsella storekeeper. “Those of us opposed told them that, in the first place, it’s against the law. And in the second place, the majority felt that the corpses should be recovered . . . and identified if possible because it’s very hard for a family who has lost someone and doesn’t know whether they are alive or dead.”

THE FAMILIES ARE UNLIKELY TO FIND OUT ANYTHING about missing loved ones in the Cauca Valley. Traffickers there began building a criminal fiefdom in the 1980s by tossing the remains of any human obstacle into the river that runs the length of the valley, which extends north from Cali and ends just south of Marsella. Taking advantage of the surrenders in 1991 of their Medellin rivals, traffickers in the valley increased their power and fattened their bank accounts by capturing as much as 70 percent of the U.S. cocaine market. Although leaders of the northern valley group had initially worked in close association with their Cali colleagues, they gained more independence with time. Like the Medellin cartel of old, they also grew more land hungry and vicious.

Massacres became common in the Cauca Valley as traffickers, in league with members of the police and army, began killing anyone thought to threaten their interests--back-stabbing subordinates as well as suspected sympathizers of the region’s leftist guerrillas, who extorted money from traffickers and other large landowners. The traffickers distinguished themselves from the Medellin cartel by their stealth. Enemies of the Cauca Valley drug barons just seemed to disappear--that is until some of them began turning up on the riverbanks of Marsella.

With its well-tended plaza and friendly police officers, the town seems positively inviting. Decades of increasing coffee exports combined with something approaching equitable land distribution have made the region one of Colombia’s most stable. In less fortunate Colombian towns, two leftist rebel groups continue to sandblast the nation’s feeble economic and social foundations.

Perhaps because of its relative wealth, Marsella also basks in an uncommon civic pride, reflected in people’s comments about their “green town,” one of a few in Colombia that spends a substantial amount of its budget on environmental projects. Strike up a conversation with any resident and at some point he or she will boast about the cool glades of the botanical garden and the forest planted by Don Manuel Salazar, the former mayor, who won a U.N. environmental prize for his lifelong work. Each year, the attractions draw nearly 30,000 tourists, mainly Colombians. Most of them stop to gaze at the red and white spires of the town’s walled cemetery, declared a national architectural treasure.

But on certain days, apprehension spoils the walk from the town plaza down the steep cobbled street to the cemetery, days when black flecks of vultures circle high in the hot air, spiraling down and down and down toward one of the cemetery’s quadrangles, where on the grassy turf, a plastic bag is open just enough to reveal a gray body, gutted and decapitated.

Some of the bodies are just trunks when they arrive in Marsella, their heads, arms and legs cut off by drug traffickers trying to prevent the identification necessary to file murder charges. So a mother or father or brother or sister probably won’t recognize the corpse, marred by the killer, by the river, by vultures.

Fewer than 20 percent of the bodies arriving on the riverbank are ever identified. Those family members who do recognize their relative usually do so on the basis of the few clothes clinging to what is left of the body. Even while the horror of recognition is still hitting them full-force, the relatives are forced to deal with another nightmare: trying to get the decomposed corpse home.

After assuring them that it can be done, the gravedigger Palacios goes to work, scrubbing the cadaver with laundry soap, bathing it with gasoline and formaldehyde, and filling its cavity with sawdust and lime. By the time he wraps the corpse in two plastic bags, “it doesn’t smell so much.”

Palacios is so good humored, his blue eyes so calm, that sometimes it’s easy to forget the horror he has seen. He says preparing the dead and calming the grief-stricken fills him with more pride than disgust--just one reason the gravedigger’s trade seems to fit him as snugly as the dirt-encrusted skull ring around his finger. Palacios, who found the ring in the pocket of one of the unidentified corpses, spends his off-hours enjoying other sepulchral fringe benefits. At a tavern down the street from the cemetery, people buy him shots of aguardiente , a Colombian firewater, to thank him for his service to Marsella. The bartender will also occasionally pay him homage by playing a jukebox song called “The Gravedigger,” about a man burying his heart along with his dead little girl.

Palacios had to put his partying on hold in early March to deal with what he calls “the worst time ever,” when 22 corpses landed on the riverbank within a week. For the first time, the smell rose from the cemetery to the central plaza some 10 blocks away, convincing many residents that the northern valley’s violence was no distant tragedy, but a direct threat to the town.

The arrival of the bodies in March convinced Aura Rosa Acevedo, Zoelia Correa and others living around the cemetery to try something, anything; they wrote a letter pleading for help from President Gaviria. Experience, however, makes both women skeptical that anything will be done soon to solve the problem. They have listened for years as local leaders talked on about the bodies without taking any action.

“Two mayors in a row have promised us they would do something to prevent the bodies from remaining out in the open for so long,” says Correa, adding that the government did build a small morgue, big enough for two bodies, in the cemetery. “That didn’t do us much good in March, when so many bodies were lying around.”

Families reclaimed a surprising 13 of the 22 decomposed corpses, but only after several hot days of suffering for Correa and others. The rest were buried in common graves bearing the letters N . N ., meaning “No Name,” an English phrase that has caught on in Colombia. The families came and went, and nobody, not even the sympathetic Palacios, wanted to have any more to do with them. The gravedigger shares the common view that it would be suicidal to show too much interest in the families’ losses and why they happened.

“One is just not accustomed to asking such questions,” he says.

MARSELLA HAS HEARD THE RIVER’S TERRIFYING MESSAGE loud and clear, and the town’s response is best expressed in the words of 9-year-old Juan Pablo Mejia, whose family lives near the cemetery: “We’re more afraid of the ones still alive than the ones already dead.”

The taboo against offending the “live ones” in the northern valley applies even when the news from upriver is good. Days after the March massacre, police officials accused a suspected northern valley drug boss, Ivan Urdinola, of ordering the killings. Later, about 300 national police swept into the valley and arrested Urdinola and several other suspects.

The residents of Marsella were hoping that maybe the worst was over. Between the time of the arrests and late August, only nine bodies had arrived at Beltran--a record low. Nearly every person I talked with agreed that the problem may have finally diminished, but when asked to explain why they thought the river was coughing up fewer dead, nearly everyone averted their eyes and blurted out the same evasive “Who knows?”

Even the former mayor was no help. When asked about Urdinola and his possible responsibility for many of the killings, the 69-year-old Salazar became just another rambling official.

“I would not venture to say anything,” he mumbled, “because in reality, I don’t even know what the motives are for these killings, so it is very difficult to go and certify that this is for this or that motive, but I just hope that whatever the motive, this violence calms down.”

In fact, it was hard to get anyone other than children even to say the name Urdinola . The hush is partly explained by the lack of witnesses willing to testify, which means that the drug suspect, like the escaped Escobar, may not be in jail for long. Another factor is that, contrary to popular claim, Urdinola has established a foothold in Marsella by buying land there.

One of the three helicopters used to search for Urdinola was dispatched to the town, where special anti-narcotics police found a small arms cache on a farm belonging to the accused trafficker. Urdinola is not the only northern valley boss with ties to Marsella. Police also raided farms belonging to two other suspects still at large.

Political scientists and criminologists who have studied Colombia’s drug gangs say they establish strangleholds over regions simply by making it impossible for people to denounce them. Many Colombians tend to avoid legal avenues because the lack of protection for judges and witnesses makes them useless in the best cases and life-threatening in the worst.

In the past 13 years, 81 Columbian judges have been assassinated, most of them by drug traffickers, After the government increased pressure on the Medellin cartel in the mid-1980s, the organization responded by killing a justice minister, an attorney general, and scores of other judicial officials. In 1990, the cartel’s killers took their bosses up on an offer to pay more than $4,000 dollars for the head of any police officer. By the end of 1991, some 300 police officers lay dead.

“Given the weakness of the state, people don’t know whom to trust,” says Rodrigo Losada, a Bogota political scientist. “Of course a person knows when he’s talking to a police officer or a judge. But even so, the person can’t feel secure because the police many times are in alliance with drug traffickers and because our judicial system provides no anonymity for the informant. . . . In this context, it’s better to say nothing.”

The silence cripples investigations and leads to a widening circle of impunity, bloodshed and in Marsella’s case, denial. Even the few people who talk openly of the cocaine mafia’s presence in the town refuse to believe that it will increase violence there--instead, they hope that some miraculous epiphany will make traffickers realize that they have to respect the rights of other residents.

The same view has been expressed again and again about Cali and the northern valley, where groups of middle- and upper-class traffickers are thought to be “better educated” and thus less predisposed to violence.

“The (traffickers) can buy land if they want to,” says one man in Marsella, “but we won’t accept them coming here in their loud cars making a lot of noise.”

BENEATH THE TRANQUILLITY OF MARSELLA, of the green plazas and bounteous coffee farms, lies a gagged tension, beneath the tension, deception. Those who live here, denying any connection to their country’s swelling violence, carry their own dark secret. Like many Colombian towns, Marsella shares the traffickers’ view that problems can be solved through violence. And like the northern valley criminals, the townspeople have built the illusion of peace on a soggy foundation of fresh graves belonging to those who were once their neighbors.

Although murders in the town’s poorer neighborhoods occur with some frequency, residents chalk up such violence to “run-of-the-mill” disagreements involving alcohol or “problems with skirts,” as Colombians refer to fights over women. Those are nothing like what happened in a “difficult period” when a gang of Marsella youths stepped way out of line. Residents remember how in a short time in the mid-1980s, the gang went from selling small bags of marijuana to robbing homes to boleteando , demanding money from coffee farmers in exchange for a promise not to kidnap or kill them and their families.

Suddenly la ley de silencio was working against Marsella. People knew instinctively that the delinquents would kill anybody who had the gall to denounce them in court. So, in a move common in Colombia, people took justice into their own hands.

Those few residents who will talk about it say that between mid-1988 and 1989, vigilante death squads shot as many as 60 suspected criminals, many of them in broad daylight in Marsella’s central plaza. The death squads roamed the street openly--apparently with the approval of many residents, whose exasperation with the gang had led them to accept the “acts of self-defense.”

Libardo Varela, a Marsella doctor, remembers five slayings in public places on a single Sunday, adding that he often saw sicarios , or professional killers, walk right past his office just off the main square. It was the death squad’s visibility, not their action, that worried one of the doctor’s patients.

“She told me she didn’t understand why they had to kill (the criminals) in the doors of houses instead of somewhere far away where nobody could see it,” Varela said.

Although Varela protested the killings in a column in the town’s weekly newspaper, his lone voice of outrage had no effect. Mario Salazar, the former mayor’s nephew and owner of the newspaper, says he decided not to print more about the killings because most of his readers, realizing they couldn’t prosecute the criminals legally, saw vigilante justice as the only alternative. Many of them shared the opinion expressed by Gilberto Lopez, the director of Marsella’s community center: “If the state doesn’t have the ability to defend a person, that person has to seek the resources to defend himself. These criminals were entering the homes of people and assaulting them. You can’t just let it happen.”

He and others further defend the string of “social cleansing” killings by saying that vigilante justice is not particular to Marsella. In its latest report, the independent human-rights group Americas Watch notes that killings targeting petty thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts and other undesirables have become common in Colombia. Local human-rights groups identified 389 social cleansing murders nationwide in 1991; the actual number is much higher since many such killings are reported as common homicides. Convictions are as rare as someone willing to testify in court.

In the case of Marsella, Arquimedes Echeverry, the regional attorney general for Risaralda state, says he became aware of the problem in the town shortly after accepting his job in 1989. He had heard what some courageous residents will still confirm--that the town’s drug-trafficking landowners were carrying out the murders in alliance with several police officers. Yet Echeverry did not pursue an investigation because nobody would come forward to testify.

“The problem is that we live in a country of impunity,” he says curtly, adding that even someone as dangerous as Ivan Urdinola might not stay in jail long because of a lack of witnesses.

The Gaviria administration is trying to rip open the frustrating pall of silence with a new national jurisdiction of 102 “invisible” judges as well as voice distorters, two-way mirrors and other technology meant to protect the identities of judges and witnesses. Officials say the conviction rate under the system, put in place last year, is up substantially from the paltry 5 percent to 10 percent of criminal cases heard in regular courts. But the new protection techniques will obviously make little difference if criminals like Escobar and his cartel cohorts are allowed to dictate the terms of their imprisonment and then walk away whenever they want.

Even if judges and witnesses manage someday to convict and effectively imprison major criminals without losing their lives, experts say that years may pass before the new system has any impact on the thinking of people in small towns like Marsella. So the town’s residents may have a long wait before they get the chance to confront violence, not only in their courts, but also in their hearts. That probably won’t worry those convinced that the vigilante campaign restored a lasting calm by setting a precedent for any other criminal with designs on Marsella.

The insurance come at a heavy cost, paid as much by the living as the dead. A teen-age boy used to run a fruit stand near the central plaza. One sunny day in 1989, he sold a piece of fruit to a passing man, who just 10 feet farther on, pulled out a gun and shot another young man dead. The killer returned to the roadside stand, bit into his fruit, and still chewing, asked the boy, “What did you think of that?”

There was no answer.

On Christmas Eve, 1989, a young girl, not even out of high school, was walking hand-in-hand with her boyfriend, a suspected member of the extortion gang, in Marsella’s central plaza. She felt his grip loosen at the same time she heard the gunshot that killed him. Long after the arrival of the new year, the girl was still unable to make a sound.