Displaced Colombians Fear Effort to Send Them Home

Five months of nights tossing on the concrete floor of a brightly lighted auditorium and days playing in a makeshift refugee camp’s mud and open sewers left Alejandro Perez’s 2-year-old daughter shaking with fever. Desperate for money to take her to a big-city hospital, Perez defied Colombia’s brutal private militias. Last month, he and his 16-year-old nephew returned to his farm near the Panama border to harvest timber.

When their bodies floated down the Perancho River two days later, the 1,200 refugees at this camp, improvised from a sports complex, knew that, despite subhuman conditions here, they had made the right choice by staying.

But the Colombian government now wants them--like the rest of the 14,000 refugees who poured out of the jungles this spring in the northwestern province of Choco--to go home. The refugees, however, are terrified. They say the government cannot protect their remote farms and villages from attack by the private militias that ordered them to leave.

The Choco dislocation--the first such mass movement of Colombians in more than three decades of fighting among the armed forces, guerrillas and private militias--has embarrassed the government by calling attention to the growing problem of refugees from Colombia’s prolonged civil war. Colombian human rights groups estimate that the fighting has forced 920,000 people from their homes since 1985--one in every 40 Colombians.

Cesar Garcia, the presidential counselor on the refugees, estimates that 220,000 people have been displaced in the past two years alone. “It has accelerated since the last half of 1996,” he said, adding, “We really do not know how many there are.”

A further cause for concern is that once, families and small communities were singled out and threatened because of their supposed support for one side or the other. Now the private militias, apparently emboldened by the success of their war against the guerrillas, have evacuated an entire province.

“We have entered the phase of mass displacements,” said Juan Manuel Bustillo, executive director of the Support Group for the Displaced, an umbrella group of six Colombian organizations that work with refugees. “The private militias are occupying these zones because they think that the way to get rid of the guerrillas is through the civilian population.”

Militia Drive on Rebels

Those tactics have proved successful. While the Colombian armed forces have lost ground to the insurgents, the Peasant Self-Defense Forces--the most powerful of Colombia’s militias, private armies hired by large landowners and merchants to fight the rebels--have driven the guerrillas from township after township in northern Colombia over the past decade.

But the price of the militias’ triumphs has been high. In 1995 and 1996--when the Peasant Self-Defense Forces were moving southwest from their stronghold in cattle country into this rich banana-producing region--the homicide rate here rose to 254 per 100,000, the highest in Colombia, which in turn is among the highest in the world.

Refugees like Alberto are still streaming into Bogota, the capital, from the region known as Uraba. On May Day, he and his brother were stopped at a private militia roadblock on the way back to their farm after shopping in the nearby town of Apartado. They were told they were carrying too much--more than 25 pounds of goods; they must be planning to give some to the remnants of the guerrillas still believed to be hiding out in the hills, the militia soldiers told them.

“They told us to evacuate,” said Alberto, a wiry man who told the story in a flat voice. The brothers began harvesting crops to raise money for the move. When they returned home from selling a truckload of corn May 15, militia soldiers were waiting.

“They ordered us to sit on chairs,” he said. “My brother sat down, but I ran for the banana field.”

The militias fired and missed. He ran to the hills, where a friend hid him. His brother’s body was found the next day in a chicken coop. Alberto’s friend contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross, and it moved Alberto and his family to Bogota the same day.

From Uraba, the private militias chased the guerrillas across the gulf into Choco, where they are now pursuing them. Choco is a sparsely settled, mountainous province where rivers are the highways. Over the past 20 years, settlers have cleared jungle to make way for large, subsistence farms, with orchards, vegetables and livestock. Few have title to their land, and most are part of Colombia’s black minority, whose rights are not always as well protected as those of other ethnic groups.

Choco has taken on increased strategic importance in recent years because of plans for electricity-producing dams and talk of a canal to connect this nation’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

“This was a rear-guard zone for the guerrilla,” Bustillo said. Insurgents, he said, could hide in the mountains and use the maze of unpatrolled rivers to smuggle arms into Colombia and smuggle out drugs produced in other regions, using the narcotics profits to pay for the guns.

But the refugees insist that they are not guerrilla supporters. “You knew that they were there, but we never had contact,” said Abrahan, 42, a farmer, who, like many of the refugees interviewed, asked not to be further identified.

Unlike previous operations, in which the Peasant Self-Defense Forces singled out alleged guerrilla supporters and killed them or drove them from the region, in Choco they forced out everyone. Further, the way they did it has reinforced accusations by human rights groups and a former army general that the armed forces are collaborating with the private militias.

Gloria, a mother of six, was out in her cornfield--scaring away birds--when helicopters flew over her village on the Rayo River on Feb. 24. Blasts shook the ground and she fell down, trembling, unable to move, she said. She finally managed to crawl to a bush, where she hid, unable to move further. She could not even speak when, hours later, her husband came looking for her. He saw a corner of her skirt under the bush and carried her home, still trembling.

Refugees from different regions of Choco tell stories of a strafing and bombing that week; air force officials have admitted that they bombed the area in February. Then bodies began floating down the rivers.

Next, militias visited riverside villages. “They held a meeting and explained that we had to evacuate because this was going to be a combat zone,” recalled Jesus Alberto, 71, who was forced to abandon a 250-acre farm near Riosucio on the Perancho River.

They were given three days to leave. Farmers inland often got word days later and had even less time to evacuate. Abrahan’s 17-year-old daughter got lost in the panic. “I thought she was with my brother,” he said, but when he located his brother at another refugee camp, his daughter was not there. He did not see her for six months; she had escaped alone.

Refugees went where the rivers took them, usually to port towns like this one on the Gulf of Uraba where they had sold their excess fruit and vegetables in better times. For a few, Panama was the closest exit, and they crossed the border.

On April 18, 295 of those who had fled to Panama were returned under an informal agreement between their two governments, causing an international furor.

“We strongly insist that the Panamanian government respect its international legal obligations toward refugees, permitting [United Nations] representatives to interview Colombian refugees in Panama to determine their needs and to oversee any repatriation,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch / Americas, wrote in an angry letter to Panamanian President Ernesto Perez Balladares.

Conditions in Camp

Choco refugees here and at two other camps cook rations of beans and rice--no meat--in lean-tos they have improvised from tree branches and plastic sheets. Rain turns the ground to mud, then runs off into fetid ditches. Latrines were removed in the first few days because they flooded.

Conditions at the camps are tearing apart families, said Geronimo Perez, whose brother and son were killed when they went back to Choco for timber. “My wife cannot be here because she has allergies,” so she lives with her sister in Chigorodo, a town an hour away, he said. “I have to stay here so they will give us food.”

“I miss her warmth,” he said of the woman who as a bride 23 years ago helped him settle a farm on the Peranchito River, a tributary of the Perancho. Their three surviving children--accustomed to playing only with each other--have become disobedient because of the influence of children in the camp.

“When it rains, you cannot walk through the mud,” he said. “We’re all getting sick from the inactivity. Then, on top of everything else, I lose my son and my brother.”

“The government is waiting for them to get bored and leave,” Bustillo charged. “But it is not safe in the zone they come from. The private militias are still there.”

Presidential counselor Garcia strongly denied that accusation. But he added, “No country can guarantee absolute safety.”

The government plans to start returning the Choco residents to their homes this month, he said. He has until September to develop a national plan of action to prevent displacement, he said.

Still, refugees are skeptical about the government’s plans to return them. “There is nothing we miss more than our land,” Abrahan said. “Conditions here are inhuman. But we are not going back until the conditions are adequate and we feel safe.”