Rebel Army Took No Prisoners on the Banks of the Naya River

The killers came at Easter.

They butchered 18-year-old Gladys Ipia first, slicing off her head and hands with a chain saw.

Next, they killed six people at a restaurant just down the trail. They shot some, stabbed others. They hacked one man to death and then burned him.

And so they traveled, 200 men and teens belonging to Colombia’s largest ultra-right paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.

Holy Week became a procession of death as the forces hiked 60 miles from the Naya River’s headwaters in the high Andes toward its outlet in the lowland jungles, stopping to slaughter at hamlets along the way.

By the time they had crossed the Naya region, a remote and stunningly beautiful stretch of Colombia’s Pacific coast, at least 27 people had been killed, with 20 more missing and presumed dead. Some were leftist guerrillas. Others were peasants. One was found splayed in a soccer field like a discarded doll. Almost all the victims were indigenous or black. The violence sent thousands fleeing.

By Easter Sunday, the Naya was nearly forsaken.

This is the story of the massacre last month along the Naya River--the first thorough accounting of the tragedy--pieced together from more than three dozen interviews with survivors, community leaders, government officials and human rights workers. Captured paramilitary forces confirmed most of the accounts but contended that they killed only leftist guerrillas and mutilated no one.

The massacre showed the exploding power of Colombia’s paramilitaries, bent on wiping out by any means necessary the leftist guerrillas who have plagued the country for 40 years.

It also showed the Colombian armed forces’ evolving history with right-wing violence. The military was seemingly powerless to stop the paramilitaries’ entry into the region but was able to capture more than 70 of the fighters as they fled.

But most important, the massacre tells the story of the Naya River, and its people, and the dead left behind.

The Roots

The story of the massacre begins long before this Easter, perhaps as many as five to 10 years ago, when the first coca bushes were sowed by narco-traffickers near the Naya’s birthplace 7,300 feet above the Pacific in the rainy ridges of the eastern Andes.

At the time, the Naya River region held fewer than 10,000 people. In the high mountains where the river begins, small tribes of indigenous people lived where they had for thousands of years. At the bottom of the river were the mostly black descendants of slaves who had fled Caribbean ports a hundred years ago for the safety of the untamed Pacific coast.

If the government cared about the population, there were few signs of it. Then, as now, there were no roads, no police, no telephones. Yucca, plantains and a root called papachina were the main crops. There was fishing, and some river mining for gold and other precious metals. Travel is still by mule, canoe or foot.

The coca plants brought three things to the Naya: money, more people and the leftist guerrillas who rely on drugs to finance their war against the Colombian government.

The region existed as a backwater, more or less ceded to the guerrillas. Then, in 1999, the guerrilla group that controlled the area--the National Liberation Army, or ELN for its Spanish initials--staged two spectacular mass kidnappings.

That May, the group seized 144 worshipers at a church in Cali catering to the city’s elite--and, allegedly, some of its powerful drug cartel members. Last September, the ELN kidnapped 80 people dining at a series of roadside restaurants popular with the city’s middle and upper classes. In both cases, the victims were taken to the Naya, where they were held until their release.

Suddenly, the region had moved from isolated backwater to rebel hide-out.

The two mass kidnappings convinced Cali’s conservative upper class and local military leaders that something had to be done. That something, according to human rights groups, was the creation of a paramilitary group known as the Calima Front, organized and equipped by the Colombian army’s 3rd Brigade, based in Cali.

The brigade’s leadership has strenuously denied any connection to the Calima Front. But human rights groups have gathered testimony from a former army intelligence officer and others that indicates the Calima Front was staffed, supplied and trained by members of the 3rd Brigade while under the command of Brig. Gen. Jaime Ernesto Canal Alban.

Canal has since resigned from the army, reportedly disgusted by the government’s strategy of negotiating instead of confronting ELN guerrillas.

“There is an established pattern of tacit tolerance of paramilitaries” by the Colombian army, said Robin Kirk, who follows Colombia for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “But here, the 3rd Brigade gave the paramilitaries direct support.”

From its base in Cali, the Calima Front grew and moved south toward the Naya. At the same time, paramilitaries fighting in southern Colombia moved north.

The strategy was a classic pincers movement, designed to cut off the guerrillas’ access to the Pacific coast and, in the process, their income from drug trafficking.

In the middle of the pincers was the Naya.

Rumors of an invasion by the paramilitaries began in December. More than 4,000 people in a region just on the other side of the mountains fled their homes in terror.

The refugee crisis was enough to persuade the government to set up a verification commission with local nonprofit groups, the United Nations and church officials. The idea was to visit once a month to monitor the region’s stability. During the last visit, in March, the commission was stopped three times by paramilitary fighters at roadblocks, according to a panel member.

The commission sent an urgent message to the government, asking for help.

“We knew there were threats. We knew there was a risk,” said Eduardo Cifuentes, Colombia’s human rights ombudsman. “These are people that are very poor, very abandoned.”

The army responded, sending a battalion from the 3rd Brigade to patrol the area around Timba, a dusty speck of a town that guards the only road into and out of the Naya.

Army officials also began receiving independent reports of paramilitary movements from local residents. In response, they sent a plane with infrared sensors to fly over the Naya River on the night of April 11 and early morning of April 12, according to Brig. Gen. Francisco Rene Pedraza, the current leader of the 3rd Brigade.

Pedraza said cloud cover prevented the army from detecting any movements of the paramilitary forces. In any case, he said, “there were only rumors of problems.”

By that night, at least 18 people were already dead.

April 11

Marc Antonio Samboni had no idea his world was about to shatter the morning of April 11.

A carpenter, Samboni was headed out of the Naya with a team of mules in search of nails, paint and wood.

The door to the local Catholic church was broken. The pastor had sent Samboni out with about $200 to fix it before services on Easter Sunday.

Samboni had just left a restaurant called Patio Bonito, which was plunked on a summit pass with stunning 360-degree views, when he met the first of the paramilitary fighters.

He knew them instantly, he said, because they were wearing camouflage uniforms with black-and-white armbands identifying them as paramilitaries. They walked in a long line along the steep and muddy trail.

They stopped Samboni, took his mules and the church’s money and sent him, stunned and terrified, on his way.

Samboni was one of the lucky ones. As he hurried along the path toward Timba, he passed the town of El Ceral, where Ipia had been killed the day before. Samboni doesn’t know why he was spared, other than perhaps to spread a warning.

That evening, he returned to the Naya region by a second footpath, walking 14 hours to warn his village, La Playa, of the approach of the paramilitaries.

Thus began the flight of those living in the mountain reaches of the Naya. “The panic,” Samboni said, “was tremendous.”

After leaving Samboni, the fighters continued on the trail, arriving at the Patio Bonito restaurant sometime after noon.

There, Daniel Suarez and his wife, Blanca Flor, were lunching before a planned Easter vacation.

Suarez was the son of the owner of the biggest store along the upper Naya River. Suarez himself owned a tiny disco. The guerrillas in the area patronized both Suarez’s discotheque and his father’s store. In the eyes of the paramilitaries, apparently, that made him a leftist collaborator.

Suarez and his wife were killed at the restaurant, as were three workers and the restaurant owner.

Weeks later, a team from the central government’s medical examiner’s office arrived at a nearby town where the body of the restaurant owner had been buried. The smell of death choked the air as the examiner exhumed the body of William Rivera, a large gash visible across his back.

A small group of Rivera’s neighbors watched from behind a barbed-wire fence surrounding the cemetery. An investigator offered to pay $2, a half-day’s wages, to anyone who would identify the body. No one stepped forward, for fear of being labeled a government collaborator by the guerrillas.

It’s about a two- to three-hour march downhill from Patio Bonito to the first of a string of hamlets--containing perhaps a dozen homes each--called Crucero La Mina, Palo Solo and Alto Sereno.

Marin Davila, a 22-year-old paramilitary fighter known as “Junior,” said the paramilitary forces detained at least four peasants in that region whom they believed to be guerrillas.

The forces entered the region with an informer, a Judas of sorts who pointed out the people who were guerrillas, he said. When they searched the captured peasants’ homes and found guns and communications equipment, their identities were confirmed, Davila said.

When asked whether the peasants were killed, Davila lifted his head and nodded once.

“We don’t take prisoners,” he said. “What would we do with them?”

He said the paramilitaries killed only guerrillas, not civilians.

Despite Davila’s assertion that only four people were killed, government investigators discovered six bodies in the three hamlets. One had been hacked to death, three shot in the head. Only pieces of the other bodies were found, scavenged by animals.

One of those killed was Jorge Valencia, 33, who had traveled to the region looking for work.

He left behind six children, a boy and five girls between the ages of 3 months and 13 years, and his wife, Regina Jyule, 35. The family now lives among the child-sized desks and chairs at a school in Timba that has been converted into a shelter for those fleeing the violence in the Naya.

Dressed in a blue baseball cap and bright yellow T-shirt, Jyule seemed at a loss about her future. She’s hoping for government help. But she isn’t counting on it.

“He was a good person and a good worker,” she said. “He just stumbled across [the paramilitaries], and they killed him. It’s so very hard now. I have so many children.”

Those who knew the dead described them as farmers, strongly denying that they were involved either in coca farming or in guerrilla activity. They blamed the Colombian army for somehow missing the presence of 200 heavily armed men in a region the troops patrolled on a daily basis.

“How is it possible the government was here and they didn’t see any of these men enter?” Samboni said.

Sometime late in the evening of April 11, the paramilitaries finally arrived in La Playa, the largest town in the upper Naya.

With the evening sun going down, the tally for the first two days was 13 dead.

April 12

The next day, April 12, Maundy Thursday, the guerrillas finally caught up with the paramilitaries.

A running gun battle ensued near La Playa, in which the 200 paramilitary fighters realized they were badly outnumbered and began to flee down the river.

Gumersindo Patino, 24, one of the paramilitaries involved in the firefight, said more than 800 guerrillas had attacked from the front and rear. The battle lasted several hours as the paramilitaries, unfamiliar with the region, desperately tried to escape.

“They put up a fight and we had to escape,” Patino said. “There was a lot of popular support for them. The people in that region didn’t like us very much.”

All told, Patino and his fellow paramilitary, Davila, said they had killed between 15 to 17 guerrillas--a figure the government has not included in any tallies of the dead. They said they lost only one of their own.

Both men denied they had killed civilians. The corpse mutilated by a chain saw was the work of guerrillas angry that the locals didn’t raise an alarm about the paramilitaries, they said.

“It’s propaganda for the guerrillas,” Davila said. “It gives us a bad name with the people.”

Davila and Patino’s claims of no more than 17 dead notwithstanding, the leader of the paramilitaries, Carlos Castano, took credit for killing 42 guerrillas during the invasion of the Naya.

In a letter published on the paramilitary group’s Web site, Castano denied reports that the forces had used chain saws to cut up bodies.

“A chain saw weighs 10 times more than a rifle,” Castano wrote. “If we carried these cumbersome things, people would be right to think that the self-defense forces are more stupid than bloody. We use bullets to put an end to subversion!”

The deaths of the guerrillas are unconfirmed, because no outside groups have yet managed a thorough exploration of the region below La Playa, where the gun battle allegedly occurred.

At least seven bodies were found in the area when government officials used a helicopter to evacuate some of the dead. It is unknown whether the seven were guerrillas, but they are believed to have been killed April 12. The prosecutor’s office has confirmed another seven deaths through statements by witnesses and family members, but it has been unable to locate the bodies.

Far downstream, at the mouth of the river, there have been reports of bodies floating by in the muddy brown water of the Naya.

April 13

Father Gustavo Ocampo met the paramilitary forces on Good Friday.

Ocampo is responsible for all the Roman Catholics between the mouth of the Naya River and a town called La Concepcion, where the river narrows and becomes unnavigable.

He had stopped his boat at a landing just below La Concepcion when four men came out of the jungle. They were paramilitary troops. And they were desperate to escape.

“We need your boat and your motor, father,” said the leader of the small band.

“I represent the church. This boat belongs to the church. I can’t give it to you,” Ocampo replied.

“Father, you’re right. We don’t have anything against you. We don’t have anything against the church. But we have to go now. You have to take us out,” the leader said.

Seeing no alternative, Ocampo agreed to take the men down the river to Puerto Merizalde. During the 10-hour boat trip, the men were mostly quiet, Ocampo said. But they told him several times that they meant no harm to the peasants in the area.

Ocampo dropped the men off in Puerto Merizalde--a town near the Pacific coast that suggests one of the Great Pyramids set down on the “Planet of the Apes”--where refugees had begun to gather.

The town was founded about 70 years ago by Bishop Bernardo Merizalde, who planned to make it the preeminent Colombian port on the Pacific. He built an enormous cathedral, half the size of Notre Dame, on a hill overlooking the jungle.

The people never came. But the cathedral still stands, vast, empty and rotting, rising 200 feet above a few hundred palm-frond huts and the circling mangrove forest.

Once there, the paramilitaries demanded gas, apparently to supply their comrades up the river. They broke into a shed, stole several tanks of gas, then fled.

The presence of the paramilitaries was enough to terrify the town of 4,000 residents, who immediately began fleeing toward Buenaventura, the city that ended up becoming Colombia’s largest Pacific port, a two-hour ride on the ocean from the mouth of the Naya.

One of the terrified was Martina Mondragon. A few days after her exodus, the 51-year-old waited outside the whitewashed Red Cross building in the steaming heat of Buenaventura to fill out paperwork for government assistance.

She and her husband own a small plot of land along the Naya that provided enough to eat, she said. She didn’t know if she would return.

“We want to go back, but only if there’s peace,” she said. “We have spent our whole life there. We are poor. We have nothing. But we would like to go back.”

It was exactly two weeks after the paramilitaries had entered the region. Naya’s resurrection seemed a distant promise.

Coda

It took 10 days for the government to get to the site of the killings on the Naya River. Even then, it had to negotiate with paramilitaries and guerrillas for permission to use a helicopter to take out 20 corpses.

It took a week more before the navy and army tracked down the paramilitaries, who had holed up in a town a few hours north from the mouth of the Naya.

After a brief series of battles in which 10 paramilitary troops were killed, the government held a news conference April 30 at a coast guard base on an island off Buenaventura to trumpet the victory.

There, with the paramilitaries lined up in a sullen row, officials displayed machine guns, uniforms and even the chain saw allegedly used in the massacre. President Andres Pastrana later declared the capture the greatest blow to the paramilitaries in the country’s history.

After the news conference, the paramilitaries trooped back to the base’s air-conditioned cafeteria, out of the rain and away from the shouted questions of the media.

There, three weeks after trampling the Naya, its people and their Holy Week, the paramilitaries dined on stew and plantains and watched a horror film from the comfort of a couch.

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The Factions

The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia--Now estimated to number about 8,000, Colombia’s ultra-right paramilitary group began as a private army for the country’s drug lords in the 1980s and has grown dramatically in the last five years. The militia is financed mostly through donations from Colombia’s landed elite and through drug proceeds.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--Colombia’s largest leftist rebel group, known as the FARC for its Spanish initials, has been fighting the government with a roughhewn brand of communism for nearly 40 years. The FARC, about 15,000-strong, makes its money from kidnapping and increasingly deeper involvement in the drug trade.

The National Liberation Army--Known as the ELN for its Spanish initials, Colombia’s smaller leftist rebel group is most famous for its mass kidnappings. ELN forces have claimed responsibility for seizing an entire church congregation, the passengers and crew of an airplane and dozens of restaurant diners. The Cuban-inspired group has about 5,000 members.

The Colombian Armed Forces--Colombia’s army, air force, coast guard, marines and navy have long had difficulty maintaining control over the nation’s 440,000 square miles, about the area of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined. They also have a history of human rights abuses and cooperation with the far-right paramilitary forces, although there are signs that this is improving. All told, the armed forces have about 145,000 members, but many of them are undertrained conscripts.

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Latimes.com: More photos of the Naya massacre aftermath are on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/naya.