By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA, Feb 27 (Reuters) - More than 300,000 Colombians were forced from their homes by cocaine trade violence last year, pushing several indigenous tribes to the brink of extinction, a top human rights group said on Wednesday.

Displacements in 2007 rose 38 percent versus 2006 and pushed the total number of displaced Colombians to more than 4 million, said Jorge Rojas, head of the Codhes rights group, whose statistics are among those cited by the United Nations.

Families are fleeing their villages to avoid recruitment of children by a cocaine-funded leftist rebels whose ranks have been thinned by desertions and casualties under conservative President Alvaro Uribe's tough security policies, Rojas said.

New crime gangs are battling with the decades-old Marxist guerrilla groups for lucrative cocaine producing land. Caught in the cross-fire are indigenous tribes such as the Awa in Narino province bordering Ecuador.

The Awa and six other tribes throughout the country are on their way toward being wiped out by the violence, Rojas said.

"Narino is now the center of Colombia's humanitarian crisis. All the country's armed actors are operating in the province," Rojas said. "Any civilian suspected of cooperating with one armed group becomes a military target of the others."

Five Awa members were killed in 2007 by land mines planted by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which uses the devices to protect coca crops used to make cocaine.

And eight Awa leaders were assassinated last year the militias turn away from massacres in favor of selective killings, according to an annual report issued by Codhes.

Violence spread to the southern provinces of Amazonas and Vaupes as state forces tried to retake land from the FARC and gangs formed in part by disbanded right-wing paramilitaries.

More than 30,000 "paras" have turned in their guns over the last four years as part of a peace deal, but thousands of former paramilitaries have joined new crime gangs.

The United States has spent $5.5 billion since 2001 in mostly military and anti-narcotics aid to Colombia. But the Andean country remains the world's biggest cocaine producer, with exports holding steady at more than 600 tonnes per year.

About 30,000 people were directly or indirectly displaced in 2007 by U.S.-funded aerial fumigation of coca crops, which can ruin legal crops and prompt coca growers to take over neighboring farms at gunpoint, the Codhes report said. (Editing by David Wiessler)

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