The Albany Gazette - 'We want peace' say Colombians displaced by fresh guerrilla violence

She had no time to pack, escaping with little more than the clothes on her back and her asthma medication.

"There was a lot of shooting," Angarita told AFP in the town of Tibu, on the border with Venezuela, where she found refuge at a community center with about 500 others -- including many children and elderly people.

"Out of fear, we left everything" behind, she lamented, sitting on a log and sucking on her inhaler. "I don't even have any pajamas."

Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN) -- the largest guerrilla group still active in the conflict-riddled South American country -- launched a bloody attack last Thursday in the northeastern Catatumbo region.

It targeted civilians and dissident fighters of a rival formation comprised of ex-members of the now-defunct FARC guerrilla force who kept fighting after it disarmed in 2017.

Authorities report at least 80 people killed by Sunday, some two dozen injured and 5,000 displaced in an upheaval reminiscent of the bloody 1990s, when Colombia endured the worst period in its six-decade-old armed conflict.

Nine people were also killed in clashes in recent days between the ELN and the Gulf Clan, Colombia's biggest drug cartel, in another northern region of the country.

The violence prompted President Gustavo Petro Friday to call off negotiations with the ELN that had been part of his stated quest for "total peace."

- 'We want peace' -

"We want peace!" Angarita said shortly after arriving in Tibu, a town in the Colombian region with the world's biggest drug plantations, according to the UN.

"The war has to end," she sighed.

A 2016 peace pact with FARC had sought to end the longest-running war in the Americas.

But leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug gangs and state forces remain in open conflict in parts of the country as fighting rages over illegal mining and drug resources and trafficking routes.

The ELN, which has roughly 5,800 fighters and a major stake in the drug business, has taken part in failed negotiations with Colombia's last five governments.

Since 1964, the conflict is estimated to have resulted in some nine million Colombians either killed, disappeared or forced to leave their homes, according to authorities.

Last November, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a humanitarian organization, said at least 1.5 million people have been displaced since the deal with the FARC in 2016.

- Worse than Venezuela -

On Saturday, Tibu was a hive of frantic activity, its bus terminal bursting with people desperate to flee to other parts of Colombia, or further afield.

"My heart aches for Catatumbo... for the whole country. There are many innocent people paying the price for war," sobbed Carmelina Perez, also 62, as she used a piece of cardboard to shield herself from the harsh sun.

Perez said she fled with her husband and the grandchildren to Tibu "in panic." She worries desperately about her daughters who stayed behind in their village.

Around Perez at the shelter, hammocks hang from trees for people to sleep in and children run around while women prepare a collective soup in a large pot over a fire.

Fellow refugee Luis Alberto Urrutia, a 39-year-old Venezuelan, said he had fled the economic and political crisis in his own country seven years ago to work in the coca plantations of Catatumbo.

Now he is on the move again, and contemplating a return home.

"This is more difficult than even in Venezuela," Urrutia told AFP in Tibu.

"There is danger everywhere, but more even here. There are many dead," he said of the events of the last few days.

(T.Brown--TAG)