Pipeline Blasts Kill Hundreds on 2 Continents

At least 45 people were burned to death and more than 60 others were hurt when leftist rebels bombed Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and blazing crude engulfed two villages before dawn Sunday, authorities said.

Many of the victims were women and children sleeping when the explosion ripped apart a section of the 500-mile-long Ocensa pipeline near the gold-mining villages of Machuca and Fraguas in Antioquia province in the northwest.

Police blamed the explosion on the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, which only a week before launched tentative peace talks with the government and independent civic leaders.

The incident is likely to be a severe embarrassment to the ELN as it strives to portray itself as a political as well as military movement. It also risks torpedoing the talks to end Colombia’s long-running civil conflict, which has claimed at least 35,000 lives in the last decade alone.

President Andres Pastrana, attending a summit in Portugal, offered sympathy to the victims but avoided condemning the ELN in an apparent effort not to jeopardize peace negotiations.

“The latest report we have is of 45 dead, more than 70 injured and an indeterminate number still missing,” said Guillermo Leon Franco, head of the Antioquia public health department.

“Survivors say the guerrillas arrived and blew up the pipeline, which caused an explosion, spilled crude and set the whole village alight,” said police agent Jairo Guerra, who was on duty at a hospital near the site of the blast.

Defense Minister Rodrigo Lloreda declined to lay the blame on the ELN but said there was “a strong suspicion this was a terrorist act.”

The Ocensa pipeline is owned and operated by a private British, French and Canadian consortium. The ELN, which rose up in arms in the mid-1960s and now has about 5,000 combatants, routinely targets energy infrastructure in protest against what it sees as excessive foreign involvement in Colombia’s oil industry.