"Chronicle of a Massacre Foretold"
By Scott Wilson

Washington Post, January 28, 2001; P 1

CHENGUE, Colombia -- In the cool hours before sunrise on Jan. 17, 50 members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia marched into this village of avocado farmers. Only the barking of dogs, unaccustomed to the blackness brought by a rare power outage, disturbed the mountain silence.

For an hour, under the direction of a woman known as Comandante Beatriz, the paramilitary troops pulled men from their homes, starting with 37-year-old Jaime Merino and his three field workers. They assembled them into two groups above the main square and across from the rudimentary health center.

Then, one by one, they killed the men by crushing their heads with heavy stones and a sledgehammer. When it was over, 24 men lay dead in pools of blood. Two more were found later in shallow graves. As the troops left, they set fire to the village.

The growing power and brutality of Colombia's paramilitary forces have become the chief concern of international human rights groups and, increasingly, Colombian and U.S. officials who say the 8,000-member private army might pose the biggest obstacle to peace in the country's decades-old civil conflict.

This massacre, the largest of 23 mass killings attributed to the paramilitaries this month, comes as international human rights groups push for the suspension of U.S. aid to the Colombian armed forces until the military shows progress on human rights. The armed forces, the chief beneficiary of the $1.3 billion U.S. anti-drug assistance package known as Plan Colombia, deny using the paramilitaries as a shadow army against leftist guerrillas, turning a blind eye to their crimes or supporting them with equipment, intelligence and troops.

But in Chengue (CHEN-gay), more than two dozen residents interviewed in their burned-out homes and temporary shelters said they believe the Colombian military helped carry out the massacre.

In dozens of interviews, conducted in small groups and individually over three days, survivors said military aircraft undertook surveillance of the village in the days preceding the massacre and in the hour immediately following it. The military, according to these accounts, provided safe passage to the paramilitary column and effectively sealed off the area by conducting what villagers described as a mock daylong battle with leftist guerrillas who dominate the area.

"There were no guerrillas," said one resident, who has also told his story to two investigators from the Colombian prosecutor general's human rights office. "Their motive was to keep us from leaving and anyone else from coming in until it was all clear. We hadn't seen guerrillas for weeks."

A 'Dirty War' The rutted mountain track to Chengue provides a vivid passage into the conflict consuming Colombia. Chengue, and hundreds of villages like it, are the neglected and forgotten arenas where illegal armed forces of the right and left, driven by a national tradition of settling political differences with violence, conduct what Colombians call their "dirty war."

^ page top ^

Despite peace talks between the government and the country's largest guerrilla insurgency, more than 25,600 Colombians died violently last year. Of those, 1,226 civilians -- a third more than the previous year -- died in 205 mass killings that have come to define the war. Leftist guerrillas killed 164 civilians last year in mass killings, according to government figures, compared with 507 civilians killed in paramilitary massacres. More than 2 million Colombians have fled their homes to escape the violence.

In this northern coastal mountain range, strategic for its proximity to major transportation routes, all of Colombia's armed actors are present. Two fronts of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's oldest and largest leftist guerrilla insurgency with about 17,000 armed members, control the lush hills they use to hide stolen cattle and victims of kidnappings-for-profit.

The privately funded United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known by the initials AUC in Spanish, patrols the rolling pastures and menaces the villages that provide the FARC with supplies. Paramilitary groups across Colombia have grown in political popularity and military strength in recent years as a counterweight to the guerrillas, and obtain much of their funding from relations with drug traffickers. Here in Sucre province, ranchers who are the targets of the kidnappings and cattle theft allegedly finance the paramilitary operations.

AUC commander Carlos Castano, who has condemned the massacre here and plans his own investigation, lives a few hours away in neighboring Cordoba province.

The armed forces, who are outnumbered by the leftist guerrillas in a security zone that covers 9,000 square miles and includes more than 200 villages, are responsible for confronting both armed groups. Col. Alejandro Parra, head of the navy's 1st Brigade, with responsibility for much of Colombia's northern coast, said the military would need at least 1,000 more troops to effectively control the zone.

The military has prepared its own account of the events surrounding the massacre at Chengue, which emptied this village of all but 100 of its 1,200 residents. Parra confirmed elements of survivor accounts, but denied that military aircraft were in the area before or immediately after the killings. He said his troops' quick response may have averted a broader massacre involving neighboring villages.

"They must have been confused about the time" the first helicopters arrived, Parra said. "If there were any helicopters there that soon after the massacre, they weren't ours."

^ page top ^

Strategic Location

Three families have flourished in Chengue for generations, tending small orchards of avocados renowned for their size and sweetness. The only residents not related to the Oviedo, Lopez or Merino families are the farm workers who travel the lone dirt road that dips through town. The longest trip most inhabitants ever make is the two-hour drive by jeep to Ovejas, the local government seat.

But in recent years the village, set in the Montes de Maria range, has become a target on battle maps because of its strategic perch between the Caribbean Sea and the Magdalena River. Whoever controls the mountains also threatens the most important transportation routes in the north.

Villagers say FARC guerrillas frequently pass through seeking supplies. Any support, many villagers say, is given mostly out of fear. As one 34-year-old farmer who survived the massacre by scrambling out his back window said, "When a man with a gun knocks on your door at 11 at night wanting food and a place to sleep, he becomes your landlord."

The AUC's Heroes of the Montes de Maria Front announced its arrival in Chengue last spring with pamphlets and word-of-mouth warnings of a pending strike. The paramilitaries apparently identified Chengue as a guerrilla stronghold -- a town to be emptied. The AUC's local commander, Beatriz, was once a member of the FARC's 35th Front, which operates in the zone, military officials said. Ten months ago she quarreled with the FARC leadership for allegedly mishandling the group's finances and defected to the AUC for protection and perhaps a measure of revenge.

In April, community leaders in Chengue and 20 other villages sent President Andres Pastrana and the regional military command a letter outlining the threat. "We have nothing to do with this conflict," they wrote in asking for protection.

The letter was sent two months after the massacre of 36 civilians in El Salado, a village about 30 miles southeast of here in Bolivar province that is patrolled by the same military command and paramilitary forces. But according to villagers and municipal officials in Ovejas, the request for help brought no response from the central government or the navy's 1st Brigade, which is based in the city of Sincelejo 25 miles south of here.

In October, the villagers repeated their call for help in another letter to Pastrana, regional military leaders, international human rights groups and others. Municipal officials met with members of the 1st Brigade in November, but said no increased military presence materialized. In fact, municipal officials said, the 5th Marine Infantry Battalion seemed to stop patrolling the village.

Six Chengue residents who signed the letter died in the massacre. Col. Parra said the requests for help were among dozens received at brigade headquarters in the past year, but that manpower shortages made it impossible to respond to every one.

forward >