Villagers in Cross Hairs When Paramilitary Groups Attack Rebels

Occupied by guerrillas and surrounded by the army, this village in the foothills of the Andes waits in terror.

Members of the illegal, anti-insurgent “self-defense forces” that now operate in much of Colombia marched in briefly four months ago. The mercenaries--part of a movement whose operations were paid for originally by merchants and ranchers looking for protection against rebel extortion--announced that they intended to take control of this well-known rebel stronghold.

Then, last month, two traveling merchants were decapitated as they drove the 22 miles from the main highway into Medellin del Ariari.

And three weeks ago, the army began operations in the region, drawing a tighter and tighter circle around the insurgents until about 50 of them were trapped inside the village.

Human rights activists agree with villagers that they are seeing a pattern already established in Puerto Alvira, Mapiripan and other points along the routes of conflict in Colombia’s civil war.

Medellin del Ariari, they fear, is living the chronicle of a massacre foretold.

“We know quite well that when the army moves in, the paramilitary groups [self-defense forces] follow,” Luis Alberto Funes, a 43-year-old day laborer who has lived here for 15 years, said this month. “We know that is what happened in Mapiripan. That was a totally militarized zone. They did what they did and left.”

Almost a year ago, dozens of armed, uniformed men inflicted four days of terror on Mapiripan, another village in this central province of Meta. When they withdrew, 35 suspected guerrilla sympathizers had been decapitated and their bodies thrown in the nearby Guaviare River.

Despite reports that the massacre was occurring, no army troops or police were sent into the area. A local judge called federal authorities for help half a dozen times, on at least one occasion with screaming in the background, but soldiers did not arrive until the killers had left.

Nor did rebels defend the village. Instead, they attacked suspected paramilitary sympathizers a week later.

Nearby Puerto Alvira suffered a similar massacre in May. Shortly afterward, a paramilitary unit invaded the oil town of Barrancabermeja, killing 11 residents and kidnapping 25 more, whose bodies were burned early this month, their captors announced.

Such brutal tactics have allowed illegal self-defense forces to succeed where the army has failed: They are driving back the guerrillas by scaring away civilians thought to support them. They have become a major factor in Colombia’s prolonged civil war.

Terror is their most effective tactic. “The government took no significant action to restrain these powerful paramilitary groups,” a recent U.S. State Department report found.

“There is a definite pattern,” said Robin Kirk, who covers Colombia for Human Rights Watch. “It starts with rumors. . . . Then, there is evidence of paramilitary activity: Bodies start appearing.”

Finally, one day, local paramilitaries appear in a village reinforced by “shock troops,” the highly mobile, pitiless elite of the self-defense forces.

They pull out a list, sometimes from a laptop computer, and begin reading names. A heavily masked person with the group points out the people listed, witnesses have said.

Then the killing begins.

“Even though the local authorities may call police, the government does not react until the paramilitaries are gone,” Kirk said. “They just come to collect the bodies.”

Colombian law enforcement officials reply that they simply cannot protect remote villages.

“We make a great effort, but there are 35,000 villages and hamlets,” said National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano. “Unfortunately, because of the guerrillas, we cannot assign small groups as one would in a normal situation. . . . Where there would normally be five police officers, we have to assign 30, and that complicates matters.”

Instead, he said, the police rely on army support. But the army claims to have its own manpower problems.

“It is possible that military intelligence knows these towns are threatened,” said Manuel Jose Bonett, commander of Colombia’s armed forces. “The worst part is knowing these things and not having enough troops to go protect people. . . . We have to give priority to the population centers.”

Colombian sociologist Maria Victoria Uribe said those answers show that “the government has no ability to protect its citizens. It is just another feudal power”--along with the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, drug traffickers and organized crime.

Kirk strongly disagreed. “That is deeply cynical,” she said. “To believe that, you would have to believe that the paramilitaries are ghosts.” Heavily armed, uniformed men driving through army roadblocks would normally be noticed, she said, adding: “They [the armed forces] turn a blind eye.”

Human rights activists have long accused the armed forces of allowing the self-defense forces to do the dirty work of anti-guerrilla war.

That is not the case, argued Col. Miguel Perez, the commander of the military base where the troops surrounding Medellin del Ariari are stationed.

The army is trying to protect civilians, Perez said. Troops have not entered Medellin del Ariari because the guerrillas are trapped inside and the army does not want villagers caught in the cross-fire of an attack, he said.

“The people there are very fond of the subversives,” Perez said. “They have lived with them for many years.”

That is exactly what makes Medellin del Ariari a massacre target, say human rights activists.

The village was founded in the late 1950s by men like 81-year-old Calixto Saavedra. They came here fleeing La Violencia, “the Violence,” more than a decade of fighting that ended in 1965.

“I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Saavedra said, his tired brown eyes outlined by dark circles. “I have gotten used to violence, to seeing corpses. Now, the violence has become war, and that makes us nervous.”

Meta, then a frontier, was carved up among the different factions that fought in La Violencia.

Medellin del Ariari is part of El Castillo, a municipality dominated by the most radical leftist faction of the Liberal Party. In the late 1980s, the area’s loyalty switched to the newly formed Patriotic Union party. The Patriotic Union is widely believed to be the political arm of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, this nation’s oldest and largest guerrilla group, known by the initials FARC.

By contrast, El Dorado, a town about 45 minutes down the unpaved highway, was settled by Conservative Party supporters. Now it is known as the center of regional paramilitary activity.

Although all of the settlers were fleeing violence, they never really stopped fighting. The killing intensified in 1986, when the self-defense forces made their first appearance in Medellin del Ariari.

That same year, three injured men approached widow Beatriz Oveido’s ranch outside the village. Because she was a trained nurse in an area with no doctors, neighbors often asked her for help dressing wounds. So she used her skills to aid the men.

“Later, I had to go into the market at El Dorado,” she recalled. “When I got there, the first thing I saw was that two of the men I treated were lying in the street, dead. Yes, they were guerrillas.” Shocked, she told the story to a man standing next to her. “That was my error,” she recalled, crying. “I should not have said anything.”

After that, the persecution of her family was relentless, she said. Her sons, then 10 and 13, disappeared on their way to El Dorado. Their bodies were never found. Her 10-year-old daughter was kidnapped and raped; she is now institutionalized. Then, a third son, an older teenager, was killed.

By 1993, Oveido knew she was in danger when a group of uniformed men knocked on her door late one night. She and her daughter escaped by crawling through an underground tunnel that the older son had dug shortly before his death.

They spent the night hiding in a tree and the next day began the journey to Ciudad Bolivar, one of the rings of misery surrounding the Colombian capital, Bogota.

“Now I do not even have money for sugar,” she lamented. “When my [surviving] children hear me say that, they tell me: ‘How can you even think of that after all you have been through? Just pretend you have always been poor. It’s better to sleep soundly, even if you have nothing to eat.’ ”

While Oveido was being pursued, Patriotic Union members were also targeted. In 1992, gunmen trying to assassinate the mayor of El Castillo killed 17 other people attending a rally she skipped at the last minute because of car trouble. Still, they killed her a week later, along with her driver, the mayor-elect and the city treasurer.

“They targeted everyone in the area identified with the guerrillas or the Patriotic Union,” Kirk said. “Now it’s gone way beyond spot assassinations into massacres.”

“Their message is: ‘We, the paramilitaries, have arrived. If you are sympathetic to the guerrilla or have done things for them in the past, even involuntarily, leave or we will find you,’ ” she said. “A massacre sweeps out the population that has supported the guerrilla.”

That message has already been heard clearly in Medellin del Ariari. Only about 10% of the families remain, villagers said.

Gesturing across the empty park toward shuttered concrete block houses, Saavedra said: “All the houses are closed up. No one lives there. They have all gone. Every day, we feel threatened by the self-defense forces.”

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Bloodshed in the Back Country

So far this year, 97 Colombians, mainly peasants living in remote areas, have died in ssacres. Army officials say they cannot protect villagers from either the two main guerrilla groups, known by the initials FARC and ELN, or the illegal self-defense forces, whose initials are AUC.

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No. of Suspected Village and province Date victims killers La Ceja, Antioquia Feb. 24 7 unclear San Vicente del Caguan, Caqueta Feb. 25 4 FARC San Carlos, Antioquia March 24 5 AUC Paratebueno, Cundinamarca March 25 4 AUC Urrao, Antioquia April 28 10 AUC Puerto Alvira, Meta May 4 20 AUC Liborna, Antioquia May 11 7 unclear Betania, Antioquia May 11 4 unclear Barrancabermeja, Santander May 16 11 AUC Barrancabermeja, Santander June 4 25* AUC

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* These people were kidnapped May 16 and killed later.

Source: Human Rights Watch/Americas