Terror stalks a Colombian town.

• Author: Conklin, Melanie
• Position: Apartado, Colombia - Escalating The Drug War - Cover Story

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...