Strategic Location (cont.)

"What is clear is that the government and [the military] knew about the evidence of a possible massacre and did nothing," said a municipal official in Ovejas, who like many interviewed in the aftermath of the slaughter requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. "The military seemed to clear out of the zone."

After weeks of not seeing any sign of the military, villagers said a small, white propeller plane swooped low over the village on Jan. 14, three days before the massacre. They identified the aircraft as the same plane used to drop anti-guerrilla pamphlets three months earlier - a "psychological operation," Parra confirmed, although he denied knowledge of this particular flight. The low-altitude pass left the farmers uneasy.

Over the next two nights, as darkness fell on the village, residents said two green military helicopters passed over in slow circles. "They are the same ones I'd seen pass by before, but just coming and going, not circling," said a young mother. "We didn't know what they were doing."

Seven hours after the helicopters left the second time, the power went out in Chengue, Salitral and a series of neighboring villages that had warned of a pending paramilitary attack. Villagers noted the time somewhere between 1:30 and 2 a.m. because, as one woman remembered, "the dogs started barking when the house lights went out." Some villagers lit candles. Most remained asleep.

In the blackness, the paramilitary column dressed in Colombian army uniforms moved along the dirt road from the west, arriving between 4 and 4:30 a.m., villagers said. The column was led by Beatriz, whom military officials said is a nurse by training; witnesses said the men in her command addressed her as "doctora."

The column stopped at the gray concrete home of Jaime Merino, the first on the road, and kicked in the door. They seized him and three workers, including Luis Miguel Romero, who picked avocados to pay for medical treatment for his infant daughter.

They were led down the steep dirt road into the village, past the church and school, and to a small terrace above the square where they waited. Three brothers from the green house on the square, a father and two sons from the sky blue house across the square, and Nestor Merino, a mentally ill man who hadn't left his home in four months, all joined them in the flickering darkness.

When the men arrived for Rusbel Oviedo Barreto, 23, his father blocked the door. "They pushed me away," said Enrique al Alberto Oviedo Merino, 68. "I was yelling not to take him, and they were saying 'we'll check the computer.' There was no computer. They were mocking us. They took my identification card and said they would know me the next time."

Cesar Merino awoke on his farm above the village, and peering down, saw the town below lit by candles. His neighbors, 19-year-old Juan Carlos Martinez Oviedo and his younger brother Elkin, were also awake. The three men, who worked the same avocado farm, walked down the hillside into town. Elkin, 15, was the youngest to die.

On the far side of town, where the road bends up and out toward Ovejas, the paramilitaries gathered Cesar Merino's cousin, Andres Merino, and his 18-year-old son, Cristobal. One of them, father or son, watched the other die before his own execution.

Human rights workers and survivors speculated that the paramilitaries, who were armed with automatic rifles, used stones to kill the men to heighten the horror of the message to surrounding villages and to maintain a measure of silence in a guerrilla zone.

The work was over within an hour and a half. As the column prepared to leave, according to several witnesses, one militiaman used a portable radio to make a call. No transmission was intercepted that morning by military officials, although their log of the proceeding weeks showed numerous intercepts of FARC radio traffic. Then the men smashed the town's only telephone and set the village on fire.

The hillside was full of hiding villagers, many of whom say that between 15 and 30 minutes later two military helicopters arrived overhead and circled for several minutes. The sun was beginning to rise.

"They would have been able to see [the paramilitaries] clearly at that hour," said one survivor, who has fled to Ovejas. "Why didn't they catch anyone?"

Human rights officials say the described events resemble those surrounding the massacre last year in El Salado. Gen. Rodrigo Quinones was the officer in charge of the security zone for Chengue and El Salado at that time, and remained in that post in the months leading up to the Chengue massacre. He left the navy's 1st Brigade last month to run a special investigation at the Atlantic Command in Cartagena, from where military flights in the zone are directed.

In a report issued this month, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America called specifically for Quinones's removal. As a regional head of naval intelligence in the early 1990s, Quinones was linked to the killings of 57 trade unionists, human rights workers and activists. He was acquitted by a military court. According to the human rights report, a civilian judge who reviewed the case was "perplexed" by the verdict, saying he found the evidence of Quinones's guilt "irrefutable."

El Salado survivors said a military plane and helicopter flew over the village the day of the massacre, and that at least one wounded militiaman was transported from the site by military helicopter. Soldiers under Quinones's command sealed the village for days, barring even Red Cross workers from entering.

"We are very worried and very suspicious about the coincidences," said Anders Kompass, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative in Colombia. "This involves the same officer in charge, the same kind of military activity before and after the massacre, and the same lack of military presence while it was going on."

'There Is a Terror Here'

During the two hours following the killings, survivors emerged from hiding and into the shambles of their village. Eliecer Lopez Oviedo, a 66-year-old Chengue native, said his son arrived at his small farm at 9 a.m.

"He told me they had burned Chengue, killed my brothers, my sister and my niece," he said. "I arrived there to find that they hadn't killed the women. But my three brothers were above the square, dead."

What Oviedo and others found were two piles of bodies -- 17 on the dirt terrace above the square, seven in front of the health center. Cristobal Merino's Yankees hat, torn and bloody, lay near his body. The rocks used in the killings remained where they were dropped. The bodies of Videncio Quintana Barreto and Pedro Arias Barreto, killed along with fathers and brothers, were found later in shallow graves.

Ash from more than 20 burning houses floated in the hot, still air. Graffiti declaring "Get Out Marxist Communist Guerrillas," "AUC" and "Beatriz" was scrawled across the walls of vacant houses. "The bodies were all right there for us to see, and I knew all of them," said a 56-year Chengue resident whose brother and brother-in-law were among the dead. "Now there is a terror here."

Officials at the 1st Brigade said they were alerted at 8:45 a.m. when the National Police chief for Sucre reported a possible paramilitary "incursion" in Chengue. According to a military log, Parra dispatched two helicopters to the village at 9:30 a.m. and the Dragon company of 80 infantry soldiers based in nearby Pijiguay five minutes later. Villagers said the troops did not arrive for at least another two hours.

When they did arrive, according to logs and soldiers present that day, a gun battle erupted with guerrillas from the FARC's 35th Front. Parra said he sealed the roads into the zone "to prevent the paramilitaries from escaping." The battle lasted all day -- the air force sent in one Arpia and three Black Hawk helicopters at 2:10 p.m., according to the military - and village residents waved homemade white flags urging the military to stop shooting. No casualties were reported on either side. No paramilitary troops were captured.

Three days later, the 1st Brigade announced the arrest of eight people in connection with the killings. They were apprehended in San Onofre, a town 15 miles from Chengue known for a small paramilitary camp that patrols nearby ranches. Villagers say that, though they didn't see faces that morning because of the darkness, these "old names" are scapegoats and not the men who killed their families.

A steady flow of traffic now moves toward Ovejas, jeeps stuffed with everything from refrigerators to pool cues to family pictures. The marines have set up two base camps in Chengue -- one under a large shade tree behind the village, the other in the vacant school. The remaining residents do not mix with the soldiers.

"We have taken back this town," said Maj. Alvaro Jimenez, standing in the square two days after the massacre. "We are telling people we are here, that it is time to reclaim their village."

No one plans to. Marlena Lopez, 52, lost three brothers, a nephew, a brother-in-law and her pink house. Her brother, Cesar Lopez, was the town telephone operator. He fled, she said, "with nothing but his pants."

In the ashes of her home, she weeps about the pain she can't manage. "We are humble people," she said. "Why in the world are we paying for this?"

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February 9: Threats against international and Colombian human rights workers, from Amnesty International

Find out more about educational and activism/advocacy work related to the "Summit" meeting in Quebec City, a Rights Action sponsored SPEAKING TOUR, and CLAC (la CONVERGENCE DES LUTTES ANTI-CAPITALISTES).