To many Colombians, this plan is one of war and death through which Uribe has militarized the country and, through the close relationship between military and paramilitary, terrorized thousands and helped displace millions. I heard from displaced families over and over again who would not hail Uribe or Plan Colombia. Yet Bush declared that he will ask Congress for renewal.

Aurora, a soft-spoken young woman, told our Witness for Peace group about the day she fled the Pacific Coast community in Narino, terrifying moments after the masked men arrived. Like many unsuspecting Colombians, her family had heard about their tactics - mass killings, chain saws cutting up the living, and other horrors meant to force people from their ancestral lands. These stories alone were enough to provoke Aurora's flight.

"They gave us 24 hours to vacate our house, or we could stay without any later options to flee. I took my two kids by the hands, and we all ran."

U.S. foreign policy in Colombia is further militarizing an already explosive political situation. Both military and "contractor" personnel have been sent to lead more than 20,000 Colombian soldiers in a scorched-earth policy. The idea is to eliminate the guerrillas and destroy their support networks - narcotraffickers, political parties, students, campesinos, co-ops, academics and unionists. Survivors flee for their lives.

When Plan Colombia was presented to Congress in 2000, it authorized more than $1 billion. The figure now exceeds $3 billion, most of it to support police and the Colombian military.

No sooner had the masked men appeared than Aurora and her family fled their home. She told of her husband's bidding good-bye to his mother and siblings, who by staying behind, risked losing their land and possibly their lives. Aurora said her husband spotted a truck beside the road. "We jumped on the back and hid among the goods without the driver's knowledge, and when we jumped out in Bogota he was shocked."

In 2000, the Clinton administration had faced opposition about sending too many soldiers and contractors to Colombia, so the maximum was set at 800. But less than two months ago, President Bush, now coupling the war on drugs with the war on terror, wasted little time in signing a national defense authorization act that increases the military/contractor cap to 1,400.

While the volume of drugs reaching this country remains unchanged, refugees live in a limbo. Colombia is further impoverished because 70 percent of its gross domestic product is used to pay its external debt. That, coupled with Colombia's expenditures of only 5 percent on social services, means hospitals closings, children being denied an education and poverty spreading. Yet Colombia fritters away its wealth by negotiating trade and oil agreements detrimental to its future, and catering to pharmaceutical interests in Amazonia's biodiversity.

When President Bush spoke in Cartagena, he gave the same rosy picture that I had heard at the U.S. Embassy days before: reductions in murders, kidnappings, coca production, human-rights complaints and illegally armed groups on the run. As I listened to Bush on TV back home, I wondered if Aurora would see such a rosy picture.

"We're afraid to call back," she answered when I'd asked whether anything was heard from her husband's family. She said that even from her presumed refuge, she feared being traced or her husband losing his construction job at a building site nearby. Five years have passed without a word.

Brenda Humphrey (brenhump@infionline.net) is a board member of Peace Brigades International. She lives in Winston-Salem.

© Winston-Salem Journal