COLOMBIA IN CRISIS.

• Author: Rohter, Larry

RAMPANT DEATH SQUADS HAVE CREATED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF REFUGEES--TURNING COLOMBIA INTO A HUMAN DISASTER.

For Jose Moreno, his family of six, and his neighbors, life as refugees began suddenly in mid-July with the arrival of a group of armed men at their small village north of here.

"We are going to do a cleanup in this area, so it is best you go away for a time if you don't want to get hurt," Moreno remembers the masked strangers announcing.

Because members of a right-wing paramilitary death squad had killed 11 people in a nearby settlement just a few days earlier, the residents of the Morenos' village took the warning seriously. Leaving their animals and belongings behind, they fled across the border into Venezuela, beginning an odyssey that brought them to a makeshift camp in an open-air coliseum in Cucuta. Here they are officially classified as "internally displaced people" and have little prospect of ever returning home.

"We want to go back to our homes and our yucca and banana fields, but we are afraid the paras will kill us," says Luis Mariano, another resident of the area.

"And so here we are," he says, "without a peso to our name, without jobs or hope, depending on the charity of others and sleeping on the ground and waiting for someone to bring us our next meal."

As Colombia's long-standing civil conflict intensifies, the fighting is inflicting a major social crisis on a country that is already deeply fractured. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are being forcibly uprooted and turned into fearful, persecuted migrants. The vast majority are peasants caught in the crossfire between Marxist guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitary forces that seek to wipe them out.

Fernando Medellin, director of the Solidarity Network, a Colombian government agency that deals with refugees, estimates that fighting has displaced 1.5 million of Colombia's 40 million people since 1985. Human rights groups say half of these people have been made homeless since 1996, with their number expected to swell by at least 300,000 this year.

MISERY ON THE RISE

"Even more important than the total is the fact that the numbers are still increasing, not holding steady or declining," says Leila Lima, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' delegate to Colombia.

The current political violence in Colombia dates to the mid-1960s, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, today the country's largest left-wing guerrilla organization, was formed from...