Down the River in Colombia.

It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad

My first day off the plane, I see why the Magdalena River Valley of Colombia is considered ,one of the most dangerous places in the hemispheres most violent country. Near the central plaza of Barrancabermeja, the valley's major city, two national police officers are guarding a half-acre of grass and concrete surrounded by a twelve-foot wall. Inside, 150 peasants have been trying to make do since arriving ten days ago, when the Colombian civil war shook their fishing village on a Magdalena tributary called the Cimitarra. They say they ran into the hills to escape bombing and machine-gun fire from a navy flotilla and airborne army troops.

"It was raining bullets," says Ana Garcia, an elderly woman. "We left everything we had. We don't know whether our homes are ruined."

In Bogota, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Curtis Kamman hears of the attack and deflects blame. "It's not always clear it's the army," he tells me. "Apparently, the paramilitaries have helicopters."

That's cold comfort for the peasants, including forty children, who walked for five hours to get here. There's little hope the government will provide shelter or protection if they return home, and Barrancabermeja's churches are already overflowing with refugees. It's an all-too-familiar story for the nearly two million Colombians displaced by the war, which has been raging now for almost four decades.

"We don't know of any actions by the military to stop the assassinations and massacres behind the displacements," says Jorge Rojas, executive director of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement in Colombia.

Since the 1980s, rightist paramilitary groups have worked for cattle ranchers, drug traffickers, transnational oil firms, mining companies, and other vested interests. The private armies committed 63 percent of the nation's 219 massacres last year, according to the Permanent Committee for Defense of Human Rights in Colombia. A December report by New York-based Human Rights Watch blames the paramilitaries for three quarters of all abuses, and a February report by the group cites collaboration between the Colombian army and the paramilitaries. Together, they are behind most of the 35,000 political slayings over the last decade.

Last year, the United States sent military and police aid to Colombia totaling nearly $300 million, making it the third largest recipient, behind only Israel and Egypt. The Administration is pushing Congress to increase the sum to $1.6 billion over the next two years. Nearly 85 percent is slated for the nation's armed forces. Three army battalions would get U.S. Special Forces training, radar bases, intelligence assistance, thirty-three Huey helicopters, and thirty sophisticated Blackhawk choppers.

It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in Colombia. The leftist guerrillas kidnap for ransom and squeeze protection taxes from a peasantry that cultivates the raw material for cocaine. Three North Americans disappeared last year as they worked with a Colombian indigenous community that was fighting proposed drilling by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum. After their bodies turned up across the Venezuelan border, it wasn't rightist paramilitaries taking responsibility, but the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest leftist army.

"No matter whether it's the army, the guerrillas, or the paramilitaries occupying your town, you have to obey them or you become a target," says Regulo Madero Fernandez, president of the Barrancabermeja-based Regional Corporation for the Defense of Human Rights.

In the Middle Magdalena, as this part of the valley is known, the paramilitaries are particularly vicious.

On May 16, 1998, during a party on a Barrancabermeja soccer field, a hooded group slaughtered a dozen people and hauled away dozens more in trucks. Neither an army unit within earshot nor the national police did anything to pursue the killers.

"If we had known about it, of course we would have stopped it," says Captain Victor Gutierrez, the area police commander. "We would have shut down the city, but we also have banks and other businesses to protect."

Much of the paramilitary violence aims to clear away peasants from farmland. As many as 40,000 Middle Magdalena residents, most lacking titles for their plots, have been displaced in recent years. In November, a wave of attacks uprooted more than 3,000. About half of the refugees have ended up in shacks on the outskirts of Barrancabermeja.

Paramilitaries also target organizers such as Workers Trade Union leader Alvaro Remolina, who has called attention to the labor practices of Texaco and Occidental. On January 11, his nephew was murdered near the city of Bucaramanga, while his brother and a friend disappeared in the town of Giron. He lost another brother to assassins in 1996, and uniformed soldiers killed his sister-in-law last July.

In the nearby San Lucas highlands, the site of plentiful gold deposits, U.S. and Canadian conglomerates such as the California-based Conquistador Mines have been moving in over the last few years. Small, independent miners are in the way. On April 25, 1997, according to written accounts, paramilitaries entered the town of Rio Viejo, decapitated local miner Juan Camacho, played soccer with his head, and mounted it on a stick.

Fiberglass river taxis known as chalupas are a primary mode of transit in these parts. With the temperature approaching 100 degrees on the Magdalena, my chalupa passes thousands of egrets and cormorants drawn to an annual fish run.

The Middle Magdalena covers 12,000 square miles and twenty-nine municipalities. Besides oil and gold, its resources include fertile land, timber, platinum, and precious stones. Nearly all of the wealth generated from these resources leaves the area. Colombia's oil industry generates $3 billion a year in profits for the government oil company, Ecopetrol, and such firms as BP Amoco, Occidental, and Texaco. Yet more than 70 percent of the Middle Magdalena's 750,000 inhabitants live in poverty and nearly 40 percent are unemployed, double the official national rate.

Making matters worse are Colombia's economic policies that prioritize free trade over the welfare of small-scale farmers. Without the tariffs, subsidies, and credit necessary to sustain legal crops, most Middle Magdalena peasants have turned to growing coca, the shiny leaf processed into cocaine. Armed groups are constantly fighting for control of these producers.

The paramilitary groups exact taxes from growers and run the country's major cocaine processing and trafficking facilities.

The Middle Magdalena has also seen concerted activity by most of the country's leftist guerrilla groups, especially the National Liberation Army (ELN). Formed in 1964 and inspired by the Cuban revolution, the ELN has grown into the nation's second largest rebel force. In recent years, with as many as 6,000 combatants, it has targeted transnational mining firms and the privatization of Colombia's energy sector. Hundreds of ELN bombings have ruptured oil pipelines and disabled electricity pylons. To finance its operations, the group taxes coca growers and kidnaps for ransom. The hostages, often herded by the dozen, range from airline passengers to wealthy churchgoers to foreign executives.

One of the most deadly Middle Magdalena battlegrounds is a 2,300-square-mile area in the department of Bolivar. The ELN has proposed that the government cede control over this territory as a condition for peace negotiations, a prospect bitterly opposed by area cattle ranchers and other economic powers. On January 31, according to local accounts, paramilitaries in the town of Morales suppressed a peasant march in support of the demilitarization zone. A week later, paramilitary leaders went house to house in Morales, ordering at least one person from each home to participate in blocking six roads through the region until the government agreed to include them in the peace talks.

When Bogota officials announced on February 17 that they were prepared to hand over the area to the ELN, paramilitary groups responded with a drunken spree through nearby villages, killing forty-five peasants. Many were hacked to death; some were beheaded.

The demilitarization area includes San Pablo, a river town of 12,000 people, where paramilitaries started taking over a year ago. Since then, they've murdered more than forty residents. That's where I'm going.

It's ninety minutes to San Pablo by chalupa from Barrancabermeja. The paramilitaries ride around on motor scooters, carrying two-way radios and pistols. They call their presence invisible, but the only folks who don't seem to notice are army and national police officers.

The paramilitaries get no resistance from police chief Jose Ignacio Leon, a twenty-two-year-old from Bogota, who commands twenty-nine people here. At a headquarters that could pass for a fraternity house, his shirtless subordinates watch soap operas and play cards. Leon's boss is not the San Pablo mayor, but a national police officer, hours away in Bucaramanga.

"In a world where many young people have nothing to do," Leon says, "I'm happy to have this life."

The mayor, Danuil Mancera Polo, has been in office both during the paramilitaries' control and, previously, during the ELN occupation. He doesn't pretend to have any power over the armed groups. "One of the conditions on U.S. aid should be cutting ties between the army and the paramilitaries," he says. "There's no difference between them."

Guiding me around town is Artemio Mejia, the local delegate of the Barrancabermeja-based Program for Development and Peace in the Middle Magdalena. Mejia's group is one of the town's last humanitarian outfits--the rest have shut down due to attacks and threats. Whether we're having a meal or walking outside, he keeps his eyes on doorways and windows.

San Pablo's casualties include two city council members and seven others arrested in a November 21 predawn federal raid for their alleged role in an airliner hijacking. Now jailed in Bogota, they face possible sentences of sixty-five years each.

The ELN forced down the twin-engine Avianca on April 12 last year near San Pablo. The guerrillas used two vehicles owned by a local resident to transport some of the forty-one passengers and crew.

"when one of these armed groups needs a vehicle, they just steal it," says Mayor Mancera.

The raid occurred as the White House was negotiating with President Andres Pastrana over the aid package. The evidence against the San Pablo nine consists of hearsay by "faceless witnesses." (Colombia does not guarantee suspected terrorists the right to face their accusers.) And many here believe that those charged in the hijacking have been set up.

"The government is using people who have nothing to do with the armed conflict," says Luis Alfredo Castillo, an attorney in Colombia's official human rights office.

Kamman, the U.S. ambassador, denies pressuring Pastrana to show results in the case. "There's no shred of evidence" for such a claim, he says.

After another chalupa ride, I ravel in the back of a pickup truck along a bumpy dirt road that leads through cattle pastures and thick forests. I arrive at a tiny village where leaders of the Cimitarra River Valley Peasant Association have agreed to appear.

The association, known for its independence from both paramilitary and guerrilla forces, has been taking extra precautions lately. On November 28, soldiers wearing army insignias beat up peasant leaders Edgar Quiroga and Gildardo Fuentes near San Pablo and loaded them into a helicopter. Carlos Castano, the nation's top paramilitary boss, has claimed responsibility for their disappearance.

An hour after we were scheduled to meet, spokesperson Gilberto Guerra and President Ramiro Ortega paddle up in a canoe. They say they're looking for funds so the 2,500 families they represent can reduce their dependency on illicit crops. "The U.S. embassy directly rejected our plan," Guerra says.

U.S. officials have other priorities. They assembled their $1.6 billion aid plan not to help the peasants, and not to take on the paramilitaries. Instead, it is aimed at helping the army penetrate guerrilla strongholds in two southern provinces. "We think it's a lot harder to operate in the Middle Magdalena than in the areas where we're focusing," Ambassador Kamman says.

To the peasants of the Middle Magdalena, that sounds like a poor excuse. "The landowners and cattle ranchers get away with huge coca fields and laboratories, and they take our land," Guerra says. "Some adults in the valley have been displaced and lost their farms fifteen times, and there's no one who hasn't lost two or three family members."

Chip Mitchell is the editor of Connection to the Americas, published monthly by the Minneapolis-based Resource Center of the Americas. Its web site is www.americas.org.