National Agenda : A Culture of Violence : Murderous ‘social cleansing’ does not even spare children in Colombia.

BOGOTA, Colombia —  The first time Calvo escaped death, he ducked to avoid bursts of machine gun fired by a passing motorist. The second time, shrapnel from a grenade hurled at him nicked his chest.

Death is nothing mysterious or distant for Calvo, who is 15, nor for millions of Colombians living in what may well be the most violent country in the Americas.

When Colombia’s war with cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar ended last December, the most savage “narco-terrorism”--in which bombs wiped out entire shopping malls and downed jetliners--also ended. But the violence that is an inexorable part of Colombian culture and history only seems to worsen. And with elections approaching in March and May, many Colombians fear that murders and kidnapings will continue to soar.

In just a single week’s time in January, the finance minister narrowly escaped an assassination attempt; two American missionaries were kidnaped, and 35 peasants sympathetic to a leftist political party were slaughtered in a regional power struggle.

Guerrillas continue to wage the longest war in South America, and the murders of street urchins by police, vigilantes and others in Colombia last year exceeded that of Brazil, which has nearly four times the population.

“What is happening in Colombia is that there are many forms of violence, all mixed up, crossed over and feeding on each other,” political scientist Alejandro Reyes said. “Violence has metastasized, like a cancer, leaving its original organism and invading all of society.”

It is into the category of slain street children that Calvo may one day fall. He belongs to one of the many gangs of children and teen-agers who roam Bogota’s roughest downtown streets. They mug and pick pockets, turn tricks as prostitutes and consume drugs, primarily glue sniffed from plastic bags.

In response, vigilante death squads roam the same streets, picking off young thugs and other street people in a campaign of “social cleansing.”

Police often form part of the death squads, according to human rights organizations, which estimate that one person is killed every two days through “social cleansing.” The real number is believed to be higher because many of these deaths are not reported.

Calvo says he has survived two attempts to kill him by what he believes was a death squad. In both the machine gun and grenade attacks, a car passed the corner where many of the young gangsters hang out, slowed down and then opened fire.

“I threw myself on the ground,” Calvo said, describing the attacks as he sucked on a glue-filled plastic bag.

A few feet away, two uniformed police officers gave chase to a girl who had apparently robbed a passer-by. One of the officers took off his helmet and began beating the girl as they ran.

The girl escaped, and, the chase over, the officers approached a reporter and launched into a vivid description of the street horrors they feel they confront every day.

“Seven muggings in the 10 minutes it took me to walk around the block!” one policeman complained. “The only thing you can do with these people . . .” He completed the sentence by slicing a finger across his neck.

“La limpieza social, “ his partner said. “Social cleansing.”

“These people . . . “ the first officer began.

“Are a lost cause,” his partner finished.

*

The vigilante killings by police, civilians and paramilitary hired guns, both in the cities and in the vast countryside, make up a large part of Colombia’s murder and mayhem--but only a part. Violence is also traced to leftist guerrillas, to drug traffickers, to army anti-insurgency campaigns, to large landholders trying to get rid of peasants.

Moreover, in a country where the judicial system is perceived as weak and ineffective, the violent resolution of conflicts has become a way of life, experts say.

There is a certain historical continuum to Colombia’s fratricide.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Colombia lived through a period known as “La Violencia,” where its two dominant political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, battled over land and political power. More than 200,000 people were killed.

A power-sharing pact, imposed by the military, ended the fighting in 1958 but excluded the Left. Remnants of the warring factions continued to operate in the countryside, joined in the 1960s by disaffected leftists who formed guerrilla armies.

Wealthy ranchers and farmers responded by organizing paramilitary bands to fight the rebels and to protect their properties, often by eliminating peasants who may or may not have sympathized with the guerrillas. The violence swelled as cocaine traffickers entered the picture in the 1970s, reaching its most pitched savagery with drug lord Escobar’s declaration of war on the Colombian state in 1989.

The henchmen employed by Escobar and his Medellin cartel assassinated hundreds of judges and police, three presidential candidates in the 1989 elections, and a justice minister; an Escobar bomb destroyed a commercial airliner in midair, killing all 107 passengers aboard.

Escobar was killed last Dec. 2 in a shootout with police, after 16 months on the run. Most of Colombia was relieved, but the relief was short-lived as the reality of Colombian violence quickly re-emerged.

While drug-related violence captures the headlines, it accounts for a fraction of the total bloodshed, experts say. And political murder accounts for an estimated 10% of all homicides. Common crime, private score-settling, social cleansing and every other imaginable reason-to-kill make up the rest.

The number of murders in Colombia in the last several years has routinely surpassed that of the United States, which has about eight times the population. In 1992, 10 people were killed per 100,000 in the United States; it was 82 per 100,000 in Colombia.

In the capital city of Bogota, a person is killed, on the average, every hour, every day. Bogota has just under twice the population of Los Angeles, and more than eight times the number of homicides.

In a particularly dizzying week in January, Finance Minister Rudolf Hommes barely avoided a bomb blast detonated by remote control. His bodyguard was injured. Days before, a 65-pound dynamite bomb meant for the national prisons chief was found and deactivated. Two American missionaries were kidnaped by leftist guerrillas in apparent protest of the presence of U.S. troops in Colombia.

And then came the deadliest single massacre in Colombia in more than five years.

Masked gunmen thought to be Marxist guerrillas opened fire on supporters of a political party formed by former rebels who accepted a government amnesty three years ago. A total of 35 supporters of the Hope, Peace and Freedom Party were killed in the Jan. 23 slaughter in the tropical banana-growing region of Uraba.

In a deadly, ongoing power struggle, the armed guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia have declared war on the Hope, Peace and Freedom Party in hopes of intimidating its supporters and controlling the region. At least 300 former rebels have been killed since laying down their weapons in 1991.

Colombians will vote for congress and the president this month and in May, respectively. The guerrillas have vowed to disrupt the elections, and the Uraba killings sent a chill over an already tempestuous campaign.

*

Colombia’s experts in violence--the legion of sociologists and political scientists called “violentologists”--say the weakness of state institutions and the judiciary, both of which have been corrupted by drug money, has encouraged many Colombians to take justice into their own hands. And that in turn further generalizes violence.

While the government improved its intelligence-gathering operations and has deployed military campaigns to go after guerrillas, the basic ability to investigate and prosecute crimes remains ineffective, the experts said.

According to Eduardo Pizarro of the National University, of about 17,000 homicides in 1987, only 3% were punished; of an estimated 27,000 homicides last year, only 3% to 5% are likely to be solved.

“The rampant impunity makes it very cheap to commit a crime,” said Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, director of International Studies at the University of the Andes.

“People begin to take justice into their own hands (and) to resolve their own problems with violence. . . . There are car wrecks where both parties draw guns. The most mundane incident is a spark, a fuse that detonates the bomb.”

The phenomenon stretches from upstanding citizens who bullet-proof their cars and arm themselves--as many as a quarter of Colombia’s adults may be armed--to the cocaine barons who set up paramilitary squads to protect their vast and expanding properties.

Reyes, in a study, estimated that 375 paramilitary squads were active at one point. In recent years, drug traffickers are believed to have bought up to 3 million hectares of land, including a substantial portion of Colombia’s best farmland. As they build these empires, they organize the paramilitary groups to remove peasants, intimidate workers or fight off guerrillas.

But perhaps no violence encapsulates the desperation, frustration and sense of lost justice as does the social cleansing, which began in the late 1980s in the Colombian cities of Cali and Barranquilla and now claims hundreds of lives annually.

Designed originally to eradicate male and female prostitutes, social cleansing now targets all types of destitute street people, including muggers, beggars and junkies--people referred to in Bogota as the “throwaways” of society.

Increasingly, business owners in major cities, frustrated by a shortage of police and lack of law and order, condone “social cleansing” to restore safety to the streets, human rights activists say.

“Social cleansing is not accidental,” social worker Carlos Rojas said in a human rights report prepared by the Latin American Institute of Alternative Legal Services. “There are prior threats, the victims are chosen, and there is an M.O. that is repeated. . . . The idea that these people might die in a violent way is now accepted as something normal in Colombia.”

Frankie is another of the street people for whom a violent death seems inevitable.

Homeless for 14 of his 22 years, Frankie ended up on the streets after his mother died during an illegal abortion. His father, a bodyguard for a major cocaine trafficker, was already dead.

Frankie sleeps on a piece of cardboard in Independence Park in central Bogota, where he is recovering from his latest wound, a bullet to the throat. A convicted killer who served time in jail, Frankie says he has been shot two or three times by the vigilantes. He has somehow survived, like a cat, he says, with many lives.

“The problem with la limpieza ,” Frankie said, “is the innocent fall with the sinners.”