Mafia-style crime plagues Colombia's war refugees

BARRANQUILLA, Colombia (Reuters) - Hundreds of Colombians arrive every week in cities along the Caribbean coast like Barranquilla, pushed north by this country's cocaine-fueled guerrilla war.Left vulnerable by a government too weak to protect them, displaced families are greeted by poverty and growing exploitation that the United Nations says is compounding the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis outside Africa.

Illegal paramilitary militias, formed in the 1980s by landowners trying to protect their property from Marxist rebels, have discovered how easy it is to earn 20 percent on one-month loans to the growing number of displaced people desperate to get back on their feet.

"It's expensive, but what else can I do," a 39-year-old women living in Soledad, a dusty Barranquilla suburb, told Reuters, asking not to be named.