Colombia Political Violence Kills 27

At least 27 people died in the latest outbreak of political violence across Colombia, including 20 peasants who were shot and hacked to death by members of a right-wing paramilitary death squad, authorities said Friday.

News of the killings came a day after the government, which is engaged in year-old peace talks with the country’s leading Marxist guerrilla force, said it was preparing to launch negotiations with Colombia’s second-largest leftist rebel group as well.

Police said the slaughter of the peasants--all of whom were beheaded--came during a three-day rampage by about 200 members of an ultra-right paramilitary group operating in a rural area of northern Sucre province.

The number of people killed in six separate villages belonging to the municipality of Ovejas, which means sheep in Spanish, was initially placed at 11 by the police. But Alejandro de la Rosa, a municipal human rights official, said that 20 bodies had been recovered by late Friday afternoon and that the final death toll could rise to 30.

“The blood bath began Wednesday. All the victims are men who were shot and decapitated by the paramilitaries,” De la Rosa said in a telephone interview.

“We think at least 10 other bodies are still out there,” he added, explaining that the fate of some townspeople was unknown after the orgy of violence that finally ended early Friday.

The paramilitaries, who field an estimated 6,000 fighters across Colombia, have killed leftists and suspected rebel sympathizers for more than a decade. Though outlawed, human rights groups say, the paramilitaries operate with the complicity or support of the armed forces.

Senior army officers have been linked to peasant massacres and other atrocities in the past, in a three-pronged civil conflict that has killed more than 35,000 in the last decade.

Ovejas is located in Montes de Maria, a mountainous and jungle-covered region where Carlos Castano, the country’s top paramilitary chief, has fought a long-running battle with Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, or ELN, for territorial control.

The killings there came as the government stepped up recent peace overtures to the ELN, culminating with an offer announced late Thursday to give the group a safe haven in northern Bolivar province to begin talks to end their long-running war against the state.

Details of the possible land-for-peace deal with the ELN have not been made public. But the government has pulled all troops out of a Switzerland-size area of southeastern Colombia since late 1998, in an effort to create a forum for ongoing peace negotiations with the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Pablo Beltran, a senior ELN commander, told reporters on a visit to Nicaragua on Friday that government security forces would also be removed from the zone where the ELN is to be granted control in Bolivar. “The only military force that will be left there is that of the guerrillas,” Beltran said.

In addition to the killings in Ovejas, police said a paramilitary death squad gunned down three people Friday in northwestern Antioquia province.

Meanwhile, two soldiers died in a clash with members of a paramilitary group in southwestern Valle del Cauca province--the same province where two police officers died in a FARC rebel attack in the town of Cumbarco.

Slow-moving peace talks with the FARC, which has about 17,000 fighters compared with the ELN’s 5,000, are taking place without any previous cease-fire deal.