A Family Undone by War

ARENAL, Colombia —  The five Arias brothers grew up here in this land of sorghum and gold. They played soccer together on the town’s dusty field. They made cards for their teachers in the four-room schoolhouse. They said their prayers in the whitewashed Catholic church.

Then, on a day burned in their minds like a brand, leftist guerrillas killed their father. The rebels tied Plutarco Arias to a tree and shot him twice in the chest and once in the head, punishment for what they called collaboration with the Colombian army.

Their father’s execution on that day 16 years ago ended the Arias boys’ childhood, tore the brothers apart and hurled their lives down different paths.

One joined the guerrillas. A second became a right-wing paramilitary fighter bent on vengeance. A third won election as president of the town council. A fourth began dealing drugs to escape the poverty that engulfed the family. And the fifth was bludgeoned by paramilitary fighters and buried alive.

The Arias story is Colombia’s tragedy in microcosm, chronicling how a spasm of violence turned children into soldiers, pitted brother against brother and destroyed a family.

Amid nearly 40 years of internal conflict, tens of thousands of Colombians have grown up in a world saturated by violence. Like a family business, generation after generation inherits the work of killing. Each death produces a new crop of recruits, many of them young like the Arias brothers, who ranged in age from 6 to 16 when their father was killed.

About 11,000 children fight for Colombia’s guerrilla or paramilitary groups -- one of the highest totals of child soldiers in the world, according to a recent a Human Rights Watch report.

The story of the Arias brothers -- William, Yubin, Herman, Jimmy and Elias -- also helps explain the savagery of the Colombian conflict, in which ideology has all but disappeared from the battlefield, replaced by motives such as profit, power and revenge.

The fighting flares in forgotten towns like Arenal, where guerrilla and paramilitary fighters clash over control of the lucrative drug crops that fund the war. The battles are small, brief and cruel, waged with AK-47s and homemade bombs, chainsaws and machetes.

Frequently, they are personal: The Arias brother who joined the paramilitary fighters once nearly assassinated his rebel brother. Now the two have deserted their respective groups and entered a government program that they hope will lead to new lives. They want to reunite one day with their brother the town council president.

“The only thing that violence brought us was more violence,” said Elias Arias, now 22, the youngest of the brothers. “It ruined us.”

Yubin Arias was 15 when he buried his father.

He remembers the day, May 6, 1987, clearly. A neighbor came to the family’s palm-thatched hut and whispered to his mother. She collapsed on her knees on the dirt floor and began sobbing.

“Now I have no one,” he remembers her crying. “Now I have no one.”

At the time, guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, a rebel group known as the ELN for its initials in Spanish, freely wandered the towns around Arenal, a remote region of central Colombia known as Sur de Bolivar.

Plutarco Arias had been hauling lumber with his mules when an army officer commandeered the animals to transport supplies for his troops fighting guerrillas in the hills.

Soon after, the guerrillas captured Plutarco, tried him and sentenced him to death for cooperating with their enemies -- even though Plutarco insisted that the mules had been stolen from him. They left him dead by the road as an example to other villagers.

“This was no-man’s land. The guerrillas killed whoever they wanted. They ruled here,” said Merly Fonseca, the mayor of Arenal, whose brother was also killed by guerrillas for allegedly helping the military.

Upon learning of his father’s death, Yubin and his mother borrowed a horse to retrieve the body, in a small town about four hours away.

There, villagers refused to help with the burial. In a country where people are afraid to do anything that will attract the attention of the men with guns, they thought that aiding the dead man’s family would make them targets. The local mortician refused to sell Yubin and his mother a coffin.

In the end, Yubin moved his father by himself. He found one of his father’s mules and tied the body behind it. The trip to the town cemetery stripped the skin from his father’s back.

The boy and his mother dug a 3-foot-deep hole in the cemetery, then lined the sides with three boards they had scavenged. Because they could not find a cover for the makeshift coffin, they had to fling the dirt on Plutarco’s face.

Yubin remembers muttering to himself over and over: “Damn the guerrillas. Damn this world.”

He spent the next few years twisted in fury. His father’s death plunged the family into poverty. His mother took to getting up early in the morning to scrape the intestines of butchered cows with boiling water to make a local dish called mondongo, work that burned her hands and made her sick.

The younger children sold the soup in the street. The older ones decided to abandon school and move to a nearby city to find jobs. It was the beginning of the end of the family. A year after Plutarco’s death, Colombia’s paramilitary fighters came looking for recruits. They took Yubin and three other boys whose fathers had been killed by guerrillas to a jungle camp.

There, the paramilitary members had captured a rebel. They had cut off his hands and feet and mutilated his genitals. The guerrilla was moaning, barely alive. One of the fighters handed Yubin a knife: “Cut him. The vengeance starts now.”

Yubin vomited.

“I was terrified. I said I wanted to fight the guerrillas, but not in this way,” he said.

Yubin credits the experience and his conversion to evangelical Christianity a few years later with convincing him that violence was not the way to seek revenge. Instead, he became involved in politics. He ran for a seat on the town council and won.

Now 31, Yubin is a man with a somber face and skin the color of a caramel. He is the president of Arenal’s council, the father of three, a man who seems to know everyone in town.

He takes pride in showing visitors Arenal, population 3,000, which lies three hours and two ferry crossings from the nearest paved road. Many of the mud-and-wattle homes have new zinc roofs. A U.S. program has installed septic toilets in some homes. Brilliant pink bougainvillea plants blossom on the dirt streets.

Still, the town has no phones or sewer system. The river is contaminated with runoff from nearly exhausted gold mines, whose trickle of wealth is extracted with ever greater quantities of chemicals.

Worse, the town is still in the middle of a conflict zone. Fields of bright green coca, the base for cocaine, blossom nearby. Paramilitary members shake down local merchants.

The guerrillas control surrounding towns. Both groups tax the coca farmers, and have crops of their own.

Yubin’s family has been torn apart by the conflict. He doesn’t want his town to suffer the same fate.

“It’s very difficult to explain our story to anyone,” he said. “Sometimes life doesn’t let you live like you want to. We were put in the middle of conflict. We took different paths. It’s not only us, a lot of people have done the same thing. It’s what happens in Colombia.”

*

Elias Arias doesn’t remember his father’s face.

He was 6 when Plutarco was murdered. Yubin told him the details when he was older. Like all the Arias boys, he habitually ran errands for the guerrillas for money.

But after hearing Yubin’s story, he walked up to a local guerrilla.

“You’re the ones who killed my father!” he screamed.

Elias’ mother, Fulvia, never fully recovered from the slaying. She wore black for much of the rest of her life. She wept frequently. She took to bed for long stretches of time.

When she died of cancer in 1998, her hands scarred by the early mornings of boiling water, Elias blamed the guerrillas.

“When I saw my mother die,” he said, “I decided that somebody had to pay.” At 16, he tried to enlist in the local army unit but was told he was too young. Instead, he ran off to join the circus -- a paramilitary circus.

The troupe traveled through rebel-held areas in Colombia. While putting on shows, the members would quiz locals about the location of guerrilla hide-outs and roadblocks, pretending to be concerned for their safety. Then they would relay the information back to commanders, who would plan and carry out massacres, which Elias says he never participated in.

“Who’s going to suspect a circus?” he said, smiling at the ruse.

Elias trained to become a high-wire expert. His grandmother has photos on her wall showing him on a unicycle, edging his way across a tightrope while clutching a balancing bar. Small for his age, he also played a clown called Nino Ninja -- Ninja Boy.

After two years in the circus, Elias was sent back to his home region to join the local paramilitary unit, known as the Central Bolivar Bloc. He made his name as a daring fighter, once leading a raid to rescue a commander’s girlfriend who had been kidnapped by rebels.

Even now he recounts those adventures with relish. Slender and boyish, he takes on the air of an excited teenager playing a video game. He flings out his arms, jumps in his chair and twists his baseball cap around and around on his head.

“I called the commander and said: ‘Poom! We cut their heads off. Poom! We filled them full of lead, and now I have your woman,’ ” Elias said. “He said, ‘Kid, no way, I don’t believe it.’ ”

In November 2000, the fighters handed Elias another mission: Kill his brother William. A nurse who had joined the guerrillas long ago, William was known throughout the region as a skilled medic.

Elias said he had no problem with the request. His brother was a guerrilla, and guerrillas were the enemy: “He was their doctor. If we killed him, it’d be a huge blow to the guerrillas,” he said.

So Elias planned to meet William in the town where his father had been slain years before, a hamlet called Micoahumada. William was organizing local coca farmers to protest a U.S.-backed aerial fumigation campaign that was wiping out the guerrillas’ primary source of income -- the taxes on coca leaves.

When Elias got to town, he arranged to meet William outside a local hotel. The idea was to shoot him when he arrived, then flee. But at the last moment, William canceled, saying he was too busy organizing the protest.

Until a few weeks ago, William thought the visit was an intelligence-sharing meeting to make sure the two brothers’ units did not accidentally clash.

But when he and his brother were describing their days as combatants, he learned the true nature of Elias’ mission.

“You tried to kill me?” he asked incredulously, tears welling in his eyes.

Elias looked to the floor and said, “I know that if I had killed you, it would have been a terrible mistake.”

*

A year later, another Arias brother paid the price for having a guerrilla brother. Jimmy Arias was 20 when he left Arenal to pick coca in Mejia, a nearby town dominated by the paramilitary groups.

The wife of a paramilitary commander accused him of stealing her gold chain. When troops investigated the charge, they discovered that Jimmy’s brother was a guerrilla. They declared him a collaborator and sentenced him to death.

Jimmy dug his own grave, then stood in front of it. A fighter smashed in the back of his head with a shovel. Jimmy fell in the hole, unconscious but still breathing. The fighters buried him alive. A villager from Arenal who was working in Mejia at the time later told the family the details.

Elias, the paramilitary fighter, decided he now had two scores to settle: He must kill the guerrillas who killed his father, and the paramilitary fighters who killed his brother.

He spent two fruitless years chasing the man he believed was responsible for his brother’s death before deciding to leave the paramilitary force this winter. His wife gave birth to their first child, and urged him to leave before he was killed.

It has not been an easy decision. Before, he had been paid about $400 a month, a good salary by Colombian standards. Now he makes nothing.

He had power and respect as a fighter. Now he must take a bus three hours from his home for government classes to train him to manage a corner drugstore.

The paramilitary fighters have called him several times, he said, and offered him his job back. So far, he has steadfastly refused. He said he has left behind his life and wants to start over.

“We would have been all right if my father hadn’t been killed. But the second my father died, we all went in different directions,” he said. “If we had remained together as a family, things would have been different.”

*

William Arias had a dream a few days before his father was killed.

He was in Brazil, his parents having sent him to live with family friends when he was 10. In the dream, his father was in a soccer field, doubled over. “My children,” he moaned. “My children.”

When William, the oldest of the brothers, got the news that his father had died, he immediately returned to Arenal.

He was 16 and suddenly the head of the family. He went with Yubin and their two sisters to find work in a nearby city on the border with Venezuela.

There, he held down three jobs while he struggled to continue his studies as a nurse. Not long after he earned his degree in 1991, an ELN guerrilla commander who knew him from Arenal asked him to examine several sick rebels.

William resisted. But the commander was insistent.

“The commander suggested that it would be better for me to join them,” said William, now 32. “If not, they wouldn’t take it well.”

Faced with the threat, William became a guerrilla. He justified his choice by deciding that he would act as a sort of double agent, treating those in need while searching for his father’s killer.

Eventually, however, he grew attracted to the rank-and-file guerrillas, often teenage peasants who believed that the rebels offered a way out of a life stooped in a field, picking beans and corn.

Even when he learned that the guerrilla who shot his father had been killed in a brawl with another rebel, he remained with the ELN, eventually moving up to become a regional commander in charge of social and health programs.

He lived in guerrilla camps in the high reaches of the San Lucas Mountains. He amputated limbs and extracted bullets from wounded rebels. He helped poor women deliver children. He set up youth soccer leagues where the children would sing the rebels’ revolutionary anthem before games.

“I discovered that there were some innocent kids, some of them illiterate, manipulated by revolutionary politics and convinced that they were going to see a social transformation, that they were going to see a change for their families and the future of the kids,” William said. “But the commanders were a bunch of businessmen, out for money, not political triumph.”

In 2001, faced with an offensive by Elias’ paramilitary group that nearly wiped out the ELN in the region, William fled and wound up joining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia’s largest and most powerful rebel group.

He was shocked when the local FARC commander ordered the execution of two teenage rebels, one 13 and one 14, for trying to desert with their weapons. The two were shot point blank in the head after a revolutionary trial.

But his decision to leave came only this spring, after FARC guerrillas in another part of Colombia killed a former peace negotiator during a botched rescue operation.

The peace commissioner’s killing “snuffed out the little light that I had shared with the guerrillas, this hope I had had, and revived the memory of the murder of my father,” he said.

William, an articulate, educated man with a round, gentle face, is now enrolled in the same government demobilization program as his brother, though the two are housed separately. William and Elias were interviewed both in the presence of government minders and independently, and their stories were consistent in each circumstance.

William lives in a dormitory-style house in Bogota, the capital. He hopes to have his nursing degree -- obtained in neighboring Venezuela -- recognized.

“I realized that what I had done was wrong,” he said of his decision to join the guerrillas. “I realized that I had always been wrong.”

He spends his days worrying about his son, a 14-year-old who lives in a small town in central Colombia. During his years with the guerrillas, William had little to do with the boy, who now has an alcohol problem.

The boy has been threatened by local paramilitary fighters, who conduct “social cleansings” in which they kill prostitutes, alcoholics and others they deem undesirable. William fears for the boy.

The cycle threatens to continue.

*

The Arias brothers had been planning to reunite this fall in a town near Arenal. But the fate of their brother Herman led them to cancel those plans.

Herman Arias avoided joining either the paramilitary or the guerrilla fighters. The third-oldest brother, he vowed to make enough money to lift him and the rest of the family from poverty.

He became a “mule,” transporting cocaine processed in Sur de Bolivar to a nearby city, where it was flown out of the country toward the United States. He would stack bricks of cocaine in a cooler hidden under stacks of fish.

In September 2001, he was caught with several pounds of cocaine in his home and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released in May and spoke with his brothers several times about a reunion.

Last month, he disappeared. William’s contacts told him the guerrillas had kidnapped Herman as punishment for William’s desertion. Elias’ friends said the paramilitary fighters seized him to settle an old drug debt.

For the Arias brothers, the mystery surrounding their brother’s fate is just another chapter in the chaos of their upbringing. It is just one more link in the same chain of events that long ago shattered their lives.

For the wider conflict in Colombia, Herman’s disappearance means little. The war will grind on undiminished and indifferent.

Another life has vanished into violence.

Another Arias brother has been swept away.