By Steven Dudley
Special to The Washington Post

BOGOTA, Colombia –– As Deysiviviana Cortez told her story, she shuffled back and forth and avoided eye contact. It was a difficult story to tell, especially for a
curly-haired 11-year-old who is just starting sixth grade.

"The guerrillas came," she said, laughing to herself and smiling at her older sister. "And my father said they couldn't take us, so they shot at him and--vroom--the
bullet went right by him."

The rebels left the girl's farmhouse that day, but they vowed to return to enlist Deysiviviana and her two 13-year-old sisters in their ranks. Their father did not wait.
He told his eight children and pregnant wife to pack whatever they could carry because they were leaving their yucca fields and livestock to join the more than 1.5
million Colombians who have been turned into internal refugees by a civil war that has torn this country apart over the last decade.

Nearly a million of the refugees are children, displaced with their families by the merciless fighting between Marxist rebels on one side, and the government and their
unofficial allies, right-wing paramilitary groups, on the other. More than 35,000 people have lost their lives.

Most of the civilians killed have been from rural areas, where the warring factions compete for strategic passageways through the rugged terrain and for control of
fields that produce the raw material for illicit drugs. Those who survive the armed groups' deadly visits to their towns often flee in fear they may be next. Many end up
in big cities, such as Bogota, the capital, where public facilities are scarce and the traumatized children have little access to schools and health care.

The process can scar the children for life, according to UNICEF-Colombia spokeswoman Clara Barona. "They have nightmares, and some of them wet their beds,"
she said. "They regress to an infantile stage."

Deysiviviana said rebels in her home province of Putumayo, along the Ecuadoran border, killed some of her relatives because they refused to enlist their children in
the guerrilla force. "When I watch the news, and they say 'guerrillas this and guerrillas that,' I think of what happened to us," the young girl said.

Other young refugees, such as 18-year-old Patricia Largacha and her four brothers and sisters, were targeted by right-wing militiamen--the faction blamed for the
majority of civilian displacements in Colombia--as suspected rebel collaborators. Largacha and her family fled five years ago from Uraba, a banana-growing region
near the Panamanian border, when two masked men told them they had 24 hours to leave.

"If we didn't go, they would have killed us," Largacha said matter-of-factly.

Largacha and four other families hitchhiked to Bogota, persuading bus drivers to let them ride free because they had no money. Now all 26 of them live in a small,
two-story house in Usme, a slum on the outskirts of Bogota.

Thirty years ago, Usme was a military firing range. Today, the mountains surrounding the neighborhood are covered with metal shacks that shelter desperate families
instead of army personnel. Usme is a prime destination for displaced people because they can slip into it anonymously, but it is hardly a haven. The neighborhood is
one of the rebels' principal points of entry to Bogota from the south. Last year, clashes erupted there between guerrillas and government troops as the rebels tried to
attack a local army battalion.

Neither Largacha nor Deysiviviana, who also lives in Usme, talks openly with their neighbors about being refugees, because that can get them into trouble. Largacha's
father has been jailed as a rebel, and she visits him every Sunday at a prison not far from her house. "We tell [the neighbors] that we came [to Usme] because we
wanted to come," Largacha said, "Because my mom says we should never speak of that stuff."

Crime also shocks Usme's newest arrivals. Thieves took the Largacha family's stereo and television within hours of their arrival. And the Rev. Rodrigo Betancur, a
local priest who works with teenagers, said street gangs fight turf wars with each other, leaving "a boy dead about every eight days."

According to Betancur, many displaced teens turn to drugs and violence as they become frustrated over their bleak prospects. "When they don't get jobs or can't get
it together with school, some of them become delinquents, and their situation gets worse--and the neighborhood gets worse," Betancur said.

Largacha's problems have multiplied since she arrived. Four months ago, she gave birth to her first child, a girl, but she has no job to support her. Nor does her
mother, who has spent the last six months sitting in with a few hundred other displaced people at Red Cross headquarters in Bogota to bring attention to their plight.
Largacha also has stopped attending school.

Deysiviviana still attends a school a few hundred yards up the dirt road from her family's one-bedroom house. All 10 of the Cortezes sleep in five single beds in an
8-by-10-foot area. When the children are not doing their homework in the tiny brick room, they take turns washing and hanging clothes in the patio or cooking in a
closet the family has converted to a kitchen.

"I wish we could go back where we had all our things," Deysiviviana said, looking at the empty bedroom.

Largacha also longs to return to Uraba, where fruit abounds and the money they had was enough to get by, but she realizes the prospects are slim. "We can't go
back," she said, laughing to herself. "It's too dangerous. Some of our friends have gone back and gotten killed."