August 2001
Page 1 of 11

The kids who run barefoot down "Hope Street" have bloated bellies from malnourishment and are covered in sores. It’s the same on "Victory Street" and all the other dirt tracks that criss-cross a sprawling shantytown known as Nelson Mandela City, on the outskirts of fabled Cartagena de Indias. Downtown Cartagena, a Spanish colonial-era walled city, is the jewel in Colombia’s tourism crown. But none of the Europeans and North Americans who still come to the region’s sun-soaked beaches, or the handful that fuel the booming trade in child prostitution, ever venture into the shanties.

Almost all of Nelson Mandela City’s 50,000 inhabitants have been forced to flee from their homes in rural backwaters for fear of being caught in the crossfire of Colombia’s increasingly dirty war. Nobody here cares too much about the politics of the conflict. Some have been driven out of their homes by right-wing paramilitary gangs, others have been forced out at gunpoint by one of the country’s two main Marxist guerrilla forces.

"When the gunmen arrive you feel defenseless and can do nothing but bury your dead. Afterwards, you feel fear and cowardice," said peasant José Vicente Ortiz, who has been displaced twice. Like his new neighbors, he now lives in a shack made of cardboard, black plastic, and a tin roof.

Colombia’s urban middle and upper classes are also prey to the country’s 37-year-old civil conflict, which has been complicated by drug mobs and professional criminals. Last year 282,000 Colombians left the country and did not return--fleeing economic stagnation, booming unemployment, and the intensifying guerrilla campaign of extorsive kidnap.

"This is like a mini-Chechnya, a war of the mad, the demented, and the psychopaths," said one policeman.

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