DRUG CONFLICT DISPLACES EVER MORE COLOMBIANS

PEREIRA, Colombia - Armando Garces was reluctant to leave his
mountain village even after right-wing militia members had gone door
to door telling residents they had 48 hours to evacuate, or else. He
didn't like being ordered to abandon the only home he had ever known.

Then a daylong gun battle erupted between the paramilitary fighters
and leftist guerrillas over control of nearby coca crops and transit
routes. Garces' town -- Bajo Calima, nestled in Colombia's Pacific
coast rain forest -- was caught in the cross fire between the rebels
above the town and militia members below it.

"We hid under our beds all day, and the next morning we were gone,"
said Garces, recalling the terrifying day in June when his township
became a battleground in the nation's long-running drug wars.
"Everyone agreed it was time to look for some other future."

So the 25-year-old woodcutter, his wife, two children and 500 other
residents joined Colombia's swelling ranks of the internally
displaced. More than 3 million people have been driven from their
homes by the longstanding civil conflict between Colombian armed
groups vying for political dominance and control of crops related to
the nation's drug trade as well as of other agricultural products.

Only Sudan has more internally displaced citizens than Colombia,
according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, a human rights group that
has tracked the displaced around the globe for the Office of the U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees.

Although Colombia has had a large displaced population for two
decades, the numbers have accelerated in recent months, experts say,
and a disproportionate number are, like Garces, Afro-Colombians. They
are targeted because they lack political clout and sophistication at
a time when their rural homes have become economically attractive.

Ricardo Esquivia, general coordinator of Arvidas, an advocacy group
for the displaced in Sucre state, said most Afro-Colombians who own
such lands lack either full knowledge of their rights or the
political power to impose them. One factor working against
Afro-Colombians is the 80 percent illiteracy rate in the rural areas
where many of them live, said Esquivia, himself an Afro-Colombian.

"They are historically vulnerable and relegated because they have
never fully exercised their economic, social and cultural rights,"
said Jorge Rojas, a leading advocate for human rights and the
displaced in Bogota.

Those rights include a constitutional provision that guarantees land
title to Afro-Colombian rural communities that have organized loosely
as a group and have occupied their property for 10 years or more,
said Luis Murillo, a former governor of Colombia's Choco state.
Murillo, also an Afro-Colombian, estimates that 1 million
Afro-Colombians, or one-third of those living in rural areas, have
been forced from their lands.

The growing number of displaced has much to do with the changing
logistics of Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade. The
success of spraying programs sponsored by the U.S. government to
eradicate coca leaf production in Colombia's Amazon basin has caused
a shift in coca farming to more remote areas, including the Pacific
coastal zone surrounding Bajo Calima, where Afro-Colombians are concentrated.

The port city of Buenaventura near Garces' hometown and the estuaries
that drain into it have become the most important cocaine processing
and transshipment centers in Colombia, according to recent interviews
with U.S. law enforcement officials.

Garces and fellow residents were lucky to escape with their lives. In
past years, both paramilitary and guerrilla groups in towns such as
Bajo Calima have massacred thousands of people whom they suspected of
helping the other side, or just for being in the way. Since July,
Garces has lived in a shantytown here called Plumon. It is on the
outskirts of Pereira, built into the side of a river canyon, and has
no running water or electricity.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota say they fear that the
problem of Colombia's displaced is a humanitarian time bomb, adding
that the U.S. Agency for International Development's $30 million
annual aid package is being redesigned to focus more on the needs of
Afro-Colombians.

"It's a huge crisis for a country already dealing with a lot of other
crises at the same time," said a U.S. Embassy official who asked not
to be identified.

Control of the drug trade isn't the only motive causing armed groups
to push rural Afro-Americans off their land. In Sucre state, about
60,000 have fled the countryside for the state capital, Sincelejo, to
escape bloody fights over control of avocado and palm plantations or
simply for territorial dominance.