Colombian Peasants Are Often Caught in Factional Cross-Fire

Victims of the Uraba St. Valentine’s Day massacre were not mobsters but guerrillas-turned-farm-workers. They were bumping down a rutted road in a bus carrying 46 people to work on a banana plantation when a dozen armed fighters stepped from between the rows of broad-leafed trees into the dawn twilight, blocking the way.

A dozen names were called out. The 11 men and one woman who answered were lined up and sprayed with AK-47 and R-15 gunfire. Only one man survived; the bodies of his companions shielded him.

At the funeral for Uraba’s first massacre of 1996, here in the region’s largest town, a mourner cried, “The greatest sin today is to be a banana worker.”

Last year in this region, 124 people died in 13 massacres, and even more were killed singly or in pairs.

On Thursday, 10 people were slain in a billiard hall shooting in which the motive is still unclear.

Uraba has an annual homicide rate of 254 per 100,000 people, the highest in Colombia, which, in turn, has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

The situation has gotten so bad that local politicians are demanding that the country ask for international peacekeeping forces to restore order.

Located near the Panama border, around a bay fed by endless swampy waterways and jungle-covered foothills, Colombia’s richest banana-growing region is a magnet for drug traffickers, guerrillas, army troops and paramilitary units. Their feuds are blamed for the constant bloodletting.

The victims are nearly always peasants and workers whom their killers believe are allies of rivals.

Banana workers are particularly vulnerable because their unions were organized by guerrillas and maintain close ties to them.

“Uraba is a microcosm of all the problems that exist in Colombia,” said Enrique Santos Calderon, managing editor of El Tiempo, a Bogota-based national newspaper.

And like many other Colombians, he worries that Uraba foreshadows what this country might become.

As many drug-trafficking countries fret about becoming another Colombia, with narcotics-dominated politics, Colombians worry that their country will become another Somalia, run by warlords.

Fragmented guerrilla groups have given up the possibility of taking over the country by armed struggle. They have settled for local control, turning into armed gangs that collect “taxes” and impart a primitive form of justice.

Landowners tired of kidnappings--an average of four a day--by guerrillas and criminals have set up their own private armies for protection. These are replacing the government in many parts of Colombia, analysts said.

That has already happened in Uraba.

The private army of Fidel and Carlos Castano--Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary leaders--runs the northern seven of Uraba’s 11 counties, openly patrolling country roads and dirt streets of the towns.

The Castanos are known for ruling like feudal lords--driving out or killing peasants who resist them and turning the abandoned ranches over to their followers.

They became internationally known as the founders of “The People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar,” a group that helped authorities capture the late leader of the Medellin cartel.

“I should not have contact with them, according to the federal government,” said one mayor who arranged an interview with Carlos Castano, “but I’m the one who lives in the war zone, while the president is behind a desk in the palace.”

This is cattle country with the bonus of being at the mouth of the long, narrow bay, the place where barges bring cargo out to ships that cannot navigate the shallow waters. The Castanos control the bay.

At his training camp at an old ranch called El Tomate, accessible only by horseback, Carlos Castano said his only motive is revenge against guerrillas who kidnapped and killed his father in 1981 because he could raise only part of the multimillion-dollar ransom.

But army and government sources said the Castanos are in a desperate grab for territory as part of their bargain with drug lords who allegedly finance them, an accusation that paramilitary leaders vigorously deny.

In fact, Castano said, “if the U.S. is serious about fighting drug trafficking, why don’t you send us help to fight the guerrillas?”

The guerrillas, he said, are the source of drugs.

In Uraba, the guerrillas are in the south, where the bay meets a delta that is formed by a river. The waterways are used to carry out cocaine paste processed in the swamp and to bring in arms that find their way to fighters in the hills set back from the coast.

The guerrillas turned to cocaine for financing when the Soviet Union collapsed and the defeat of the sympathetic Sandinista government in Nicaragua left them without outside funding, analysts said.

“Guerrillas work with whoever supports them,” said Col. Carlos Alfonso Velasquez, second in command at the Uraba army base.

He estimated that 60% of Colombia’s illegal arms flow through the river system that flows into Uraba Bay. “We have not had means to control this portion,” he said. “We would have to control the river.”

He does not have enough troops to do that, he said, adding: “Troops cannot work here. It’s all swamps.”

Instead, the army is positioned in the lowlands, protecting the banana plantations and the towns where workers live.

This area, in which neither guerrillas nor paramilitary units are clearly in charge, is where most killings occur.

“The guerrillas come and want some panela [sweetener], so you give it to them. You can’t say no. They are armed,” said Efrain Salgado, 50, a worker at Finca La Huerta, which sells bananas to Chiquita. “Then the paramilitaries come and shoot you for helping the guerrillas.”

Every month, paramilitary units, drug dealers, soldiers or guerrillas kill three or four people in his hometown of Currulao, he said.

The latest victim was a teacher, whose body was found in a chicken coop. Villagers said the paramilitary troops believed that he was a guerrilla.

“They are enemies, but they do not fight each other,” Salgado said. “We are the ones who suffer.”

Ironically, the suffering has gotten worse since the guerrilla band that dominated the area with about 2,800 armed troops demobilized five years ago: The Popular Liberation Army kept its initials, EPL, but changed the name to Esperanza, Paz y Libertad, or Hope, Peace and Freedom.

In the first years after demobilization, the new name seemed apt.

Without guerrillas in the region, the Castano brothers also temporarily laid down their arms. Other guerrilla groups even applauded their decision.

But unlike other guerrillas who have negotiated peace with the Colombian government, Hope, Peace and Freedom did not disperse and move back into cities.

It stayed in Uraba, turning its longtime efforts at union organizing among banana workers into the base for a local political party.

And the government, for its part, did not move quickly to restore order in the areas the guerrillas had previously occupied.

As a result, the Colombia Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), Colombia’s largest guerrilla movement with an estimated 10,000 troops, moved into the areas that the EPL abandoned, and the Castano brothers took up arms again.

The full implications of trading one group of guerrillas for another became clear on Jan. 23, 1994, when Hope, Peace and Freedom organized a fund-raiser on the outskirts of Apartado.

About 2 a.m., as the tipsy revelers were dancing, armed people in camouflage began moving through the neighboring banana plantation.

“People shouted, ‘Entro la guerrilla!’ ” one witness recalled. “They opened fire on the dance floor. Everyone ran.”

In all, 35 people were killed.

Hope, Peace and Freedom leaders claim that the massacre was FARC’s revenge for EPL’s success at the polls.

They were gaining ground on Popular Unity, the Communist party generally linked to FARC, said Jairo Suarez, a Hope, Peace and Freedom city council member.

Two former Popular Unity mayors are in jail, facing charges that they masterminded the massacre.