I Survived a Colombian Paramilitary Death Squad

African Americans and others should know something about the war in my country, Colombia. It's not about drugs. It's about greed and the struggle for local control.

Someone who tries to declare neutrality in that situation invites death, as my story shows.

You don't see black faces in seats of power in Colombia, even though we number 11 million. Social discrimination is strong -- it is still acceptable to make fun of those of African descent in the media -- and few blacks finish school. More than 82 percent of African Colombians live below the poverty line.

Choco, where I lived, is one of the country's biggest states, about the size of Costa Rica -- but among the least populated, with 600,000 persons, about 85 percent African Colombian. It is extremely rich in resources.

By the mid-1950s, I was known as a public official active in community issues in Choco and an administrator of Bogota's environmental protection agency.

I was named a candidate for governor by a coalition of independent liberals and the National African Colombian Movement, a political party. My platform was to defend our province against projects launched by the country's traditional economic elites -- huge infrastructure projects like highways, giant ports and even a proposed transoceanic canal. We get no benefit at all from such projects.

We wanted to represent new processes of thought in the black community. We also wanted to be visible in the national picture.

We won the election in l996, but there was fraud, and I was not inaugurated until January, l998.

In October, I introduced a plan called "Choco, Territory of Peace." We asked that the army, paramilitaries, and guerrillas leave our department, and permit us to exercise neutrality.

This was published all over the country and the army launched a smear campaign against us. But this was the only way to avoid more of the killing and abuses we had seen in Choco.

And it was a way of taking a position in the conflict -- not siding with any armed groups -- but a solely political position.

By January 1999, an election ruling by the State Council, which is controlled by traditional parties, forced me out of office.

I went to work as a consultant, and in June, I received a phone call from people who said they wanted advice about the environmental consequences of projects in Choco.

We were to meet on a central street patrolled by plenty of police and private guards in an exclusive Bogota neighborhood. I greeted the well-dressed man, but then noticed he was standing next to a red Toyota van with dark polarized windows -- the kind you can only have with army authorization.

I didn't want to get inside, but somebody opened the door and pulled me in and I thought, that's it, they're going to kill me right now. It was between 12:30 and 1:00 in the afternoon on a busy street. No one did anything.

The men in the van were armed with submachine guns. "Well, we're not investors," they said.

They blindfolded me, and made me squat on the floor as they threw a jacket over my head. The car took off fast. Five minutes later we stopped and went into an apartment. They took off my blindfold and I saw that black curtains covered the windows and there were about 10 men, heavily armed, without uniforms, wearing no masks.

They made me sit in a chair. They told me this was nothing personal, they were completing a mission for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group. They said the people they work with were connected to the government and economically powerful, and had to straighten out a problem.

Some of my decisions as governor had made these people lose money, they said. Now I had to pay them back. I told them "No," until they said, "If you are not going to pay, you'll work with us. We have financial resources. Many people work with us. We can finance your campaigns, and soon you'll be a political figure again in Choco."