Oil inflames Colombia's civil war

Bush seeks $98 million to help Bogotá battle guerrilla pipeline saboteurs.

By Martin Hodgson | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

ARAUCA, COLOMBIA - From the air, the Caño Limón pipeline is invisible. The 480-mile tube is buried 6 feet below ground, but its route through the rolling Colombian prairie is marked by a swathe of black oil slicks and burned ground, the result of repeated bomb attacks by leftist rebels.
The pipeline, which links the oil field near the border with Venezuela to a port on Colombia's Caribbean coast, has been punctured so many times in the last 16 years that locals call it "the flute." Some 2.9 million barrels of crude oil have leaked into the soil and rivers - about 11 times the amount spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.