Colombia's unconquered countryside

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By Jeremy McDermott BBC News, Colombia

Soldiers work to counter rebel forces in remote parts of the country

Visit any of the big cities in the Latin American state of Colombia and you might well think that the country's long and debilitating civil war is over.

But in the countryside it is a completely different story.

Medellin is President Alvaro Uribe's home town, the second largest city in Colombia.

Its party district, known as Parque Lleras, is heaving on Fridays and Saturdays.

Luxury cars and four-wheel drive vehicles circle looking for a place to park. Women drip jewellery and sport cosmetic surgery. The place oozes wealth and prosperity.

There are still a few mafia shootings, but the good times seem to be here.

Rebel territory

The town of Nariño is just over 60 miles (100km) away, but belongs to another world.

It calls itself the Balcony of Antioquia, the mountainous province of which Medellin is the capital.

In the central square there is a police station, a bunker apparently carved out of a single block of concrete, with slits through which the policemen point the barrels of their rifles.

Elite counter-guerrilla troops have recently been moving along the valley floors around Nariño, clearing the ground for helicopter gunships and spray planes.

They are destroying isolated drug plantations, fumigating them from the air, seeking to undermine the finances of the guerrillas of the Farc or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The valleys and mountain sides all around are Farc territory.

I came to the town to find out about the fierce fighting in the zone and about the 3,000 people who have been displaced thanks to the aerial spraying that destroyed not just the coca crops, the raw material for cocaine, but all their food crops as well.

Army patrols

The local school was home to many of the displaced families.

Their lament was that the fumigation of drugs crops was destroying their lives and that some of them did indeed have small plantations of coca, but that these were simply a cash crop as their hamlets were so far away, that moving legal crops like corn and plantain cost more in transport than they were worth in the marketplace.

Many had tales of abuse by the military.

Carlos Agudelo said that the guerrillas had laid some mines in one of his fields.

An army patrol had passed and a soldier had stepped on a mine.

Mr Agudelo said that the army blamed him, that he was abused and that the soldiers got his dog, put a boot on its head and fired their rifles into the animal, warning that he would be next.

We are caught in the middle, our crops destroyed by the army, our children pressured into joining the rebels Nariño woman

However nothing is as it seems in Colombia.

One of the spokesmen for the displaced was an eloquent young man sporting a thick gold chain around his neck.

His rhetoric was radical and fluent and he blamed everything on the fumigation of drugs crops and the security forces.

However his hands were not calloused like the other farmers, his skin not as battered by the sun as those who clearly spent all day toiling in the fields.

He had soft hands but hard eyes and many of the displaced deferred to him whilst others looked at him with what could only be described as fear.

He was almost certainly a Farc militiaman, here to ensure that the displaced were unified in their lament against the fumigation and the army.

'Caught in the middle'

Outside the school a group of women were preparing a communal meal for the displaced.

They were unwilling to speak, but couldn't hide their curiosity about a foreigner, perhaps the first they had seen.

After a while one of the women admitted that the Farc had ordered them from their homes and told them to present themselves at the town as refugees.

Everything about the fumigation was true, she said, but there was no point in whining, rather she wanted to get back to her land as soon as possible, uproot the crops poisoned by the fumigation and start sowing again so that the family would have something to eat.

"We don't like the guerrillas any more than we like the soldiers who come round our houses abusing us and making lewd comments to my daughter," she said.

Coca is seen to be more profitable than legal crops

"We are caught in the middle, our crops destroyed by the army, our children pressured into joining the rebels. We are abandoned by the government, totally abandoned."

Later that night, back in Medellin, enjoying a good meal in Parque Lleras I asked some of my Colombian colleagues what they knew about Nariño and the situation there.

"Oh that is a guerrilla area," said one. Another said: "I've heard it is very beautiful but I've never been and will never go. It is too dangerous."

Seventy per cent of Colombians live in urban areas, and it was they who handed President Uribe the overwhelming vote that gave him his second term in office which began last month.

They voted for him because he has succeeded in isolating the cities from the war.

But it is still raging in the countryside, where the lady who spoke to me is not registered to vote and does not even have a state identity card. So for the Colombian government she doesn't exist.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 14 September, 2006 at 1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.