BOGOTA, Colombia -- Yulie Farfan Chacon's presents are neatly tucked next to her frayed teddy bears on the bed she last slept in on Feb. 20, 1996. Her single mother, Florinda Farfan, has bought one gift for each birthday and Christmas her daughter has missed since she was abducted one block from her home at the age of 11. Her mother wrapped each with bows and multicolored paper, for the moment when "my baby comes home."

Across the street in this poor corner of northwest Bogota, Norberto Garcia's hands shake as he pulls from his wallet a dog-eared photo of his daughter, Andrea Garcia Lopez, who was 14 when she was kidnapped on Nov. 27, 1995. Like Yulie Chacon, she is thought to have been abducted by an organized crime ring and sold into a life of prostitution abroad.

Like a nightmarish fairy tale in which young girls are spirited away by monsters, five were abducted from this three-block stretch of 125th Street in Bogota's Miguelito neighborhood from November 1995 to July 1997. Not one has been found.

"You know, the neighbors are calling this place the `Street of the Damned,' " said Garcia. "But I think it's more than just this street. What has happened to us in Colombia when five girls are kidnapped on the same street and nobody can do anything about it?"

The kidnappings on 125th Street underscore the horrific problem of abductions of minors in Colombia, where violence against children and teenagers has reached startling proportions in the 1990s. Overall, five people are kidnapped in Colombia each day, the highest rate in the world.

Children of wealthy families long have been targets of Colombia's Marxist guerrillas and criminals looking to fatten their wallets by holding hostages for ransom. But now, experts say, criminals have branched out into "lower-end" abductions, targeting children and teenagers from families of lesser means.

Sometimes, the children are nabbed by small-time thieves in an attempt to extort a few hundred dollars from poor families too frightened to go to the police -- and unable to hire the private investigators often employed by rich families. In 1998, Colombia experienced a record high of 1,844 kidnappings for ransom, with 120 of the victims under 18, according to Control Risks Group, a London-based firm that investigates kidnapping cases. That number is likely to be low, however, since most poor families and many wealthy ones do not report kidnappings, especially of children.

Besides those who kidnap for profit, Marxist guerrillas are targeting older teens from poor families, especially in rural areas, for abduction and forced recruitment into their movements, experts say.

While authorities say they don't know what happened to the girls of 125th Street, anti-kidnapping activists say several of the cases are similar to others in which poor girls have been abducted and sent to brothels in Colombia and abroad. Since there is no request for ransom -- in fact, the lives of relatives are often threatened for their attempts to find missing children -- the cases do not go to the experienced, anti-kidnapping department of the National Police. Instead, these abductions are channeled into regular criminal divisions, where only 8 percent of reported crimes are even investigated, experts said.

"There is every indication to believe they were kidnapped for" prostitution, said Viviana Esguerra Villamizar, communications director for Pais Libre, a Bogota-based anti-kidnapping group, which has investigated the cases. "They were all pretty, young girls, and everything about the crimes indicate to us that they were sold into prostitution, probably somewhere in Europe."

Such crimes are among the most difficult to solve, authorities say. "The nature of the crimes makes it less likely to get the victims back," said Gen. Rafael Pardo Cortes, head of the National Police anti-kidnapping division. "For one, there is rarely any communication established with the abductors. They could have taken the minors anywhere."

There is also some suspicion that one or more of the 125th Street girls may be among the growing number of young sex crime victims. In January, a mass grave of 20 murdered, abused children was uncovered in western Bogota. But with only 1 percent of homicides resulting in prosecution in a country with a murder rate nine times that of the United States, there is little hope for justice for dead children.

The families on 125th Street have channeled their pain into an extraordinary will to fight for the rights of poor crime victims. They've brought the issue of child abductions in particular to the forefront of Colombian consciousness, staging marches in the center of Bogota every few months and launching a letter-writing campaign to everyone from local congressmen to U.N. officials.

As a result, the local police this past January -- 45 months after the first abduction -- put two full-time investigators on the cases.

That's a ray of hope for mothers like Florinda Farfan, 42, a cafeteria worker whose life has descended into unrelenting grief since the loss of her only child.

Farfan cried softly as she pointed out the pictures of Yulie covering most of the wall above her bed. A chubby toddler in front of a big cake on her first birthday. A proud girl in a white lace dress at her First Communion. A good student smiling with her sixth grade report card in hand. "She wanted to be a computer programmer," sobbed Farfan. "She had big dreams, my baby. She wasn't going to be working in a cafeteria like me, making [$133] a month. No, no."

The mother and daughter had slept in single beds nestled in this small room since Yulie was a toddler. Farfan, a slender woman with sharp features, walked over to the small wooden closet in the corner of the room and started pulling out her daughter's favorite dresses -- all of which Farfan had made for her on the sewing machine by the bed. Farfan still launders her daughter's clothing.

The day Yulie was kidnapped is burned into her brain. After Farfan's nine-hour shift, she arrived home at 5:30 p.m. and saw that her daughter's knapsack wasn't there. Farfan called her sister next door. No, she wasn't there, either. As Farfan went outside, a neighbor told her that one of Yulie's friends saw two men in a red Volkswagen grab her on their two-block walk home from school. It was the only time Yulie was allowed outside unaccompanied by her mother or aunt.

Farfan dashed to the police station, where she was told she would have to wait 24 hours to make a report. She spent that night, until 6 a.m., wandering the dangerous streets of Bogota, searching for Yulie. The next day, after taking a vivid description from the young witness and under nonstop pressure from Farfan, police detained one suspect, believed to be associated with a criminal gang. He was released the next day for lack of evidence. He was found dead a month later.

Farfan, along with the other mothers of the girls abducted on 125th Street, organized marches in their neighborhood and went house to house handing out missing-persons leaflets. Farfan even took out a loan to offer a $3,000 reward. The response was threatening phone calls. "They called up and said, `Stop looking for your daughter, old woman, or we're going to burn down your house -- with you in it,' " Farfan said.

More than a year went by without a clue. Then, one day in mid-1997, her sister received a brief, desperate phone call from Yulie while Farfan was at work. "She was crying, and she couldn't get out any information about where she was because someone there in the room with her hung up the phone," Farfan said.

What does she think happened to her daughter, who would have turned 15 this week? "Oh God," she sobbed. "They tell me she's been sold as a prostitute. No, no, no. My baby."

Later, she dismissed talk that Yulie may never return. "The police can stop looking, but it won't affect me. I will never give up hope. Never. My Yulie is coming home."

Cutline: The mothers of five girls who disappeared from a Bogota neighborhood display their daughters' pictures in the capital city's central Plaza Bolivar.