Forgotten Land Where Only Rebels Dare to Roam

It is late on a Monday afternoon, and there is nobody in sight. The whitewashed health clinic is shuttered. Weeds and wildflowers swarm over a row of crumbling homes. The cheery signs plastered across the front of the school--”Honor,” “Respect,” “Love”--hang over shattered windows.

La Quiebra is a ghost town, one of about a dozen hamlets deserted after violence descended like a scythe on eastern Antioquia state in recent months and cleared the remote and mountainous region of much of its population.

In this forgotten and eerie corner of Colombia’s bloody conflict, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the army are waging a low-intensity war that has left hundreds dead and thousands displaced. And nobody seems to be paying much attention.

“Things are bad here, very, very bad,” said one man, a farmer too scared to give his name. “We are abandoned.”

The ghost towns of eastern Antioquia are perhaps the most striking example of the unintended consequences of Plan Colombia, the U.S.-backed effort to strengthen democracy and drastically cut cocaine production.

As the U.S. and Europe have raced to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in development aid to high-profile southern Colombia, source of nearly half the world’s cocaine, other war-torn regions have been ignored, leaving residents jobless, angry and vulnerable.

Coca leaf farmers in northeastern Colombia, for instance, began rioting recently after fumigations left them with no source of income and no alternative development plans. In the jungles of far eastern Colombia, army leaders worry about the fate of thousands of residents after military operations nearly wiped out drug production in the inaccessible area.

And here in this region, just east of Medellin, legitimate farmers live under constant threat, their roads crumbling and their access to markets vanished, while thousands of coca leaf growers in southern Colombia benefit from new roads, new sewers and alternative development aid worth as much as $2,500 a year for their families.

There are no massive plantations of coca leaf or bright red poppy flowers here. Instead, the battle is over the everyday stuff of warfare, things such as access to roads and control of territory.

Local government leaders say they have tried to gain national and international attention but have not been successful.

“There is almost no cocaine in this part of the country, Antioquia. If there’s no cocaine, there’s no money from the U.S.,” explained Gilberto Echeverri, a former governor of Antioquia and current head of a commission seeking peace in the area. “We’re hoping for help from Europe and the government. But nothing of significance has arrived.”

As with nearly all of Colombia’s conflicts, the roots of the violence here are hardly new. More than two decades ago, the state began constructing a series of enormous dams to take advantage of the region’s many rivers for hydroelectricity.

Whole towns were uprooted as artificial lakes began filling in valleys. Residents organized to demand better compensation for seized land, as well as more government investment.

The organizing attracted the National Liberation Army, or ELN, the Cuban-inspired leftist guerrilla group, which supported local efforts to win more political control.

That, in turn, attracted right-wing paramilitaries, supported by large landowners, who moved in during the mid-1980s and began selectively killing dozens of local political leaders.

The two sides remained the primary combatants until a few years ago, when guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, entered in force to take advantage of the region’s access to Colombia’s main river, Medio Magdalena, and to the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

The FARC, Colombia’s largest leftist guerrilla group, had become increasingly involved in the drug trade and sought to secure corridors in which to move arms and drugs. The rebels’ incursion brought in the Colombian army, which created a special unit last fall to restore order to the zone.

The single new battalion stands in contrast to the government’s attempt to fight drugs and restore order in southern Colombia. There, three battalions equipped and trained by U.S. special forces will receive more than one-quarter of the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. has pledged to Plan Colombia.

“It’s a terrible war between all the different groups,” said Antonio Picon, a member of the local peace commission and head of the Federation of National Businessmen. “It’s a regional problem that affects the entire country.”

Since late last year, the four sides have clashed repeatedly in the 2,000-square-mile zone, with no one able to maintain control of an area for long. Those most affected have been civilians and local leaders.

In November, for instance, paramilitaries killed 17 people in Granada, a small town in the center of eastern Antioquia. A month later, FARC rebels set off a car bomb outside the town’s police station, leveling it and leaving 16 more dead.

Although totals are hard to come by, the number of killings in small towns in the region has soared. In 1998, San Rafael, population 5,000, reported 18 homicides. Last year, there were 116.

Col. Alberto Novoa, head of the new army battalion, said he simply does not have enough troops to control the entire mountainous region. Although the troops have taken control of the dams and some of the cities, the rural areas remain anarchic zones where the state functions haphazardly if at all.

Novoa said military control would be ineffective without a more concerted effort to address social problems in the region, where more than 55% of the population lives in poverty and unemployment is 40%.

“This is not a military problem,” Novoa said. “The problem there is hunger. It’s a political, economic and social problem.”

Novoa’s military crackdown has prompted complaints from human rights groups and some residents, who accuse the army of cooperating with the paramilitaries.

The groups cite the proximity of paramilitary bases in the area to military units, as well as the entry of paramilitaries shortly after soldiers leave an area. The Colombian army has a long history of such collaboration, although top commanders recently have taken steps to halt it.

Novoa acknowledged that a paramilitary base exists near an army outpost guarding a dam. But he said the soldiers could not leave their post. And he pointed to a neat chart as proof of his commitment to fight paramilitaries. It listed the body count for the battalion’s operations since December: 14 FARC rebels, three ELN guerrillas and three paramilitary members.

“I combat the paramilitaries and the FARC and the ELN,” Novoa said. “I don’t have enough troops to fight everybody all at once.”

A recent trip through the area demonstrated its instability, as well as the effects of the violence. A Times reporter accompanied a human rights group on the condition that the group not be identified by name. The group provides instruction on human rights and community organizing to residents, who gather for daylong classes every month or two at secret locations.

The first stop was Granada, its police station and several nearby apartments still in rubble from the bombing seven months ago. President Andres Pastrana had visited the site and promised a new station, but the building never materialized.

The rights group passed through a military roadblock where soldiers were stopping and searching local buses. A week before, paramilitaries blocked the sale of gas in the town, and members of the army’s 4th Brigade from nearby Medellin were on guard for guerrilla retaliations.

A few miles outside Granada, the thin line of the state evaporated.

An hour outside the town, along a dirt road, FARC guerrillas had set up their own roadblock. A sign announced: “Welcome to the 9th Front of the FARC. Making Peace.”

One hour beyond that, along the same road, ELN guerrillas had downed a series of 500-kilowatt electrical towers, which lay strewn across the steep green mountainsides like giant crumpled tin soldiers.

“Nobody has control,” one of the rights workers said after a long talk with the FARC guerrillas, one of whom appeared to be about 14 years old. The teen smoked a cigarette and toted an AK-47 rifle that stretched the length of his thin torso.

After passing through La Quiebra, the abandoned hamlet, the rights workers arrived at another small village with a two-story schoolhouse. Gathered inside were about two dozen community leaders, many of whom had walked for hours to get there. The men were farmers, with calloused hands and mud-covered boots. Several had on wet clothing, soaked from fording a river.

The class covered basic issues such as rights guaranteed in the Colombian Constitution and international treaties, things such as the right to life, education and health care.

“You all have rights,” a worker said as he scratched out a list with chalk against a plain wooden board. “A right is different than a favor. You don’t have to ask for your rights. You just have them.”

“Those don’t exist here,” objected one of the farmers. “There are no rights.”

That objection seemed confirmed a day later, when a small squad of ELN guerrillas passed by the school. One of them, a local commander known as Eder, noticed the group in the classroom and strode inside, an AK-47 slung across his back.

Some of the farmers tensed, while others greeted Eder with handshakes. The rights worker continued for an hour longer, but as he wound up his speech, Eder asked if he could address the group. The worker left, and Eder picked up on the theme of rights. He told the men that the Colombian state was attacking them, and he asked them to join in the cause.

Eder later explained that he was hoping to organize residents into “guard committees,” to be on the lookout for paramilitaries, and to call guerrillas in case of attack.

“You are leaders who have a certain respect in the community--you have to realize who you are and what your role is,” Eder said. “The only option we have is to defend ourselves.”