Terror stalks a Colombian town.

On August 21, Mayor Gloria Cuartas was speaking to an elementary-school class in Apartado, Colombia. As part of "peace week" in this war-torn town, the mayor was giving a lesson in conflict resolution. As she spoke, two men ran up to the playground outside and grabbed an eight-year-old boy, Cesar Augusto Rivera. Before anyone could react, one of the men seized Cesar Augusto by the hair and chopped off his head. The man then threw the severed head into the classroom at Cuartas and the children.

For years, paramilitary hit squads allied with the army and the police have targeted unionists and popular elected officials in this banana-producing region on the northern coast of Colombia. Cuartas took this latest ghastly act as a warning to stop talking about the violence.

"They were hoping to scare the children away from me. Instead, the children grabbed me and we all went into other rooms and hid," she says.

Gunfire erupted outside among Apartado's various armed factions--paramilitary soldiers, guerrillas, the army, and the police. Hours later, after Cuartas had sent the children home and was leaving the school herself, more shots rang out. Doors in the neighborhood began slamming shut.

But a twelve-year-old girl stepped out and called the mayor over to her house. She hid Cuartas under a bed, saying, "We'll take care of you and if they ask for you, we'll say you aren't here," Cuartas re calls. When Cuartas came out later, her municipal car was riddled with bullet holes.

Cuartas has been calling for international observers to monitor the situation in Apartado, where gruesome acts of violence designed to make citizens panic are on the rise. Things have deteriorated considerably since the Colombia Support Network, based in Madison, Wisconsin, sent its first sister-city delegation to Apartado [see "Colombia's Dirty War: Washington's Dirty Hands," March 1992 issue].

Last year, there were more than 300 political assassinations in Apartado, with the rate of killings steadily escalating throughout the year. On a city council made up of sixteen representatives, two members have been murdered and four--all from the leftwing Patriotic Union party--have fled to Medellin. In a city of 100,000 people, there are 500 widows who lost their husbands to the violence, rapidly growing groups of refugees forced off their land in the countryside, and 5,800 people living in shanty towns.

Violence throughout Colombia claims about 35,000 lives annually, making it one of the most dangerous places on Earth. The common perception, especially in the United States, is that the turmoil is rooted in drug trafficking. But a 1993 study by the Andean Commission of Jurists estimates that less than 2 percent of Colombia's violence has anything to do with drugs, while 70 percent is the work of Colombia's army, police, and paramilitary groups.

Cesar Augusto's savage death had nothing to do with drugs. Many residents of Apartado privately speculate that the murderers were paramilitary hit men, who have been terrorizing citizens with increasing frequency. Paramilitary death squads that work for large landowners, and sometimes the military, are waging a war against guerrillas that started decades before the war on drugs. In fact, in Apartado's hot climate, coca--the leaf used in making cocaine--cannot grow.

Yet both Colombia and the United States have good reason to focus on illegal narcotics. For Colombia, the emphasis on drugs means continued military aid: $322 million between 1989 and 1995, and the Clinton Administration recently decided to boost aid dramatically. Colombia uses much of that aid to wage war against political insurgents who seek radical agrarian reform. For the United States, the drug war justifies a continued presence in a country rich in such resources as oil and uranium.

As the United States contemplates sending another $40 million in weapons, including Blackhawk helicopters, to Colombia in the name of fighting a war on drugs that is politically popular at home, Cuartas tells our delegation that those guns may end up being pointed at labor leaders, peasants, human-rights workers, or anyone else the military pegs as a guerrilla sympathizer.

That includes Cuartas, a former social worker who was elected mayor as a consensus candidate because she had no political affiliations. "Because I have taken the stance of defending people's right to live, some people insist I am an auxiliary of the guerrillas," says Cuartas, who has heard there is a $50,000 contract out on her life. Cuartas has received numerous death threats. Speaking out against the violence is risky in a country where fourteen mayors were killed last year. Yet she refuses to have bodyguards between herself and the people: "I knew from the beginning that this would be a difficult job. This is a pact with life, and a pact with life does not preclude death."

In a small, open-air restaurant over a dinner of fresh fish, coconut rice, and fried bananas, Cuartas reflects on her time as mayor with our small sister-city delegation. People in Apartado had high hopes when she won. The Catholic church and a coalition of different political parties had persuaded her to run. But two years later, despite her efforts to bring warring parties together, strengthen neighborhood groups, and promote cultural activities, the violence has escalated.

On top of that, city-council members and some citizens criticize Cuartas, saying she ignores basic city issues like the budget and public works. "They want me not to talk about the problems, about the displaced, the massacres, the human-rights violations--they just want me to find money to build the aqueducts," says Cuartas.

But she sees her primary job as calling attention to the daily violence she describes as a civil war: "My experience in office is that every day I have to deal with deaths, disappearances, displaced refugees, women who ask me to find their husbands, and others who want me to help find money for funerals. This has disrupted city life and created profound distrust among people. The theme of human rights cannot be left unarticulated."

During our few days here, paramilitary soldiers shoot five people as they walk out of a local bar, guerrillas kill four peasants, the body of a city worker shows up in the dump, and ninety-five refugees from another region of Colombia are sent to Apartado after fleeing to Panama--all this at a time when an international presence acts as a restraint to even greater violence.

Guerrilla groups have long resided around Apartado, but as civil strife escalated during the last year, the guerrillas started using nastier tactics--forcing citizens to pay a "tax" to avoid violence. Citizens are caught in the middle--paramilitary soldiers suspect anyone who pays the tax of being a guerrilla.

People can't even wash graffiti off their homes. A few months ago, the city woke up to find buildings covered with paramilitary graffiti. To wash it off was a sign of support for guerrillas; to leave it showed allegiance to the paramilitaries. Cuartas had to plead with the national government to send in a clean-up crew so that city workers who washed the walls would not become targets.

"When our children go out in the streets, all they see is this graffiti and dead bodies," says Cuartas.

When a group of kids questions us about the United States, one of the first things a young girl asks is: "Do they kill children in your country?"

Cuartas is diplomatic when asked how the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs is connected to the violence in Apartado. "It's a topic worth investigating," she says.

Cecilia Zarate-Laun, head of the Colombia Support Network in Madison, Wisconsin, and the organizer of our delegation, is more direct: "No one questions the human-rights violations because everyone believes they're fighting a war on drugs," she says. "This is a better enemy than communism. That was ideological. This hits closer to home. But the United States doesn't want to ask the most important question: Why is U.S. society the biggest consumer of drugs in the world?" Zarate-Laun would like to see military aid replaced with economic aid--and conditioned on improving human rights.

Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, says human rights and the war on drugs are separate issues. He concedes that the Colombian army--which has received millions from the United States--has some "rotten apples." But he doesn't believe that U.S. aid--all of which is allocated for the drug war--should be contingent on improving human rights.

"The United States can provide pressure," says Frechette. "But the only aid we give to Colombia is for counter-narcotics, and it is going to the police."

That stance angers even some Colombian officials. "The worst problem is that U.S. policy doesn't comprehend our situation here," says Colombian Minister of the Interior Horacio Serpa. "The United States doesn't help us with development projects. It helps us for war, but not to achieve peace. We need to be fighting poverty" Serpa says the United States has turned down Colombia's requests for funding for programs that help replace illicit crops with other marketable commodities

"Here's the crude reality: This government has shown itself to be totally corrupt," says Ambassador Frechette. "We have no assurance that if we gave them money, it would be used for infrastructure. Providing help for peasants is their responsibility."

Military aid, apparently, is another story. He estimates that the United States has spent $1 billion over the last decade fighting the war on drugs in Colombia. What proof can he offer that interdiction efforts are effective? "That's a very hard question to answer," replies Frechette, adding later, "Our efforts are like the dough boy. You squeeze it in one place and it pops up in another."

Ambassador Frechette says the murders by the military and paramilitary squads are not the fault of the U.S. government. "Killing here would continue whether or not they got a penny of U.S. economic aid," he says. "It's a bum rap. We don't deserve to be blamed for that."

Human Rights Watch reported in November that U.S. money and CIA officials helped overhaul the Colombian military's intelligence apparatus, setting up "killer networks" of paramilitary soldiers to murder suspected leftists. Human Rights Watch documented that U.S. weapons went to one unit, the Palace Battalion, that has killed 120 civilians since 1990.

"The paramilitaries have increasingly become the chosen tool of the Colombian military for suppressing political dissent," wrote Robin Kirk and Anne Manuel of Human Rights Watch.

Days earlier, Amnesty International had called for an immediate halt to U.S. military aid, saying it had proof that these weapons were being used against civilians. "Documents leaked to Amnesty now confirm that almost every unit highlighted by Amnesty for murdering Colombian civilians was in fact receiving U.S.-supplied arms and other equipment," said Amnesty director William Schulz at a press conference. "U.S. weapons that were ostensibly to fight drugs instead may have equipped thugs in uniforms who murdered people inconvenient to the Colombian government."

In the United States, the war on drugs has served as the rationale for surrendering civil liberties--random searches, increased wiretapping, lengthy prison sentences. In Colombia, the stakes are higher.

In Apartado a little more than a year ago, paramilitary soldiers killed eleven civilians right in front of a police station--yet there was no police response. Leaders of a farming cooperative who organized for better wages were murdered in clear daylight in front of the other workers, but police apprehended no one. At a meeting our delegation attended with a women's group dedicated to promoting peace and counseling victims of violence, members were asked to raise their hands if they had lost an immediate family member to the violence--more than half of the fifty hands went up.

"There are very few of us who have not lost a husband, a child, or an uncle," explains one woman. "Even those who haven't, suffer--if nothing else, from fear of going out into the streets."

It's likely that no one will ever be imprisoned for any of these crimes. The U.S. State Department reports that 97 percent of all crime here goes unpunished and that courts have a backlog of more than a million cases.

"Our budget goes to defense, not justice," explains Colombia's chief prosecutor, Luis Eduardo Montoya. "Until we end these wars, we're going to have continued high levels of violence." But critics say impunity for the military is the real problem.

The war on drugs has also served as an excuse for such repressive measures as a continual state of emergency--which Colombia has had for thirty-five of the last forty-four years--during which the president can operate by decree and due process can be set aside.

A newer tool-brought about with considerable U.S. help--is Colombia's "faceless-justice" system. In regional courts, modeled after Italian courts used to convict Mafia bosses, the identities of judges, prosecutors, and even witnesses are kept secret from the defendant. Testimony from witnesses is sealed, so there's no chance for rebuttal.

The courts were designed to facilitate the conviction of drug traffickers, who are notorious for doing away with anyone testifying or ruling against them. But Faustino Alvarez Esquea, an attorney who works with political prisoners, says more guerrillas than drug lords are tried in the faceless courts: "It's been used as a means to criminalize social protest under the guise of combating drug trafficking. The entire goal of the penal system has become the elimination of opposition," says Alvarez.

Cuartas says the United States has ulterior motives for maintaining a presence in Colombia and for fueling an internal war that creates chaos. Apartado may not have coca, but it is a prime strategic location. "Here the armed actors are gaining strength because of the geopolitical region we're located in," says Cuartas. Just north of Apartado is the only spot in the hemisphere where a new canal--an alternative to the Panama Canal--could be built. There's also the expansion of the Pan American Highway going on in this region, and plans for a new international port. And in addition to exporting $400 million in bananas, the region also is rich in uranium and petroleum.

"People are being displaced to make room for these things," guesses Cuartas. "Banana-plantation owners [the main landowners in the region] are silent because only the poor are killed."

But Cuartas refuses to keep her mouth shut. Feeling abandoned by the national government, she's calling for international attention to help end Apartado's violence. When she received word last April that three notorious hit men were in Apartado on a mission to kill her, a letter-writing campaign launched by the Colombia Sup port Network via the Internet seemed to produce results--Cuartas wasn't harmed and violence declined for a while.

"At this moment in Colombia the armed forces have assumed control of our country," says Cuartas. "All the restrictive measures they've taken against the community prove this to be true. The best solution is international pressure. This community is very scared. We need outside help.

Melanie Conklin is a staff writer at Isthmus, the weekly newspaper of Madison, Wisconsin. She recently traveled to Colombia with a sister-city delegation from Madison. The Colombia Support Network can be reached at [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail]. To view the group's urgent-action web site, see: http://www.igc.apc.org/csn/.