A War-Torn Village Finds No Sanctuary

They came seeking sanctuary. Instead, they found death.

About 300 villagers crowded into St. Paul the Apostle Church here two weeks ago to escape a battle between leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary fighters that raged around this muddy riverfront town.

As they huddled inside, they cried and sang and prayed for deliverance. And then, a little after 10 a.m. on May 2, they heard a thump and a long, moaning whistle.

Suddenly, the ceramic tile roof shattered and an explosion ripped through the church. The rebels had launched a homemade mortar, its path tragically awry.

“It was an indescribable sound, like nothing I have ever heard before,” said Diofanor Romana, 26, who was sitting in the rectory next door when the bomb hit. “Everywhere there was blood. Some people had no hands. Some people were crawling away with no legs.”

The blast resulted in the worst single-day massacre of civilians in decades in Colombia’s long and bloody civil war, killing as many as 119 people, including 46 children. More than 100 people were injured.

The mortar that turned the tiny concrete church into a human slaughterhouse underscores several terrible new trends in Colombia’s four-decade internal conflict.

Since the collapse of peace talks this year, the war has increasingly become a contest between two giant clandestine armies: the leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.

The two forces have grown considerably in recent years, thanks to drug trade profits, and are becoming more closely matched in both arms and men. Just last week, scores of paramilitary fighters and rebels were killed in a battle in northwestern Colombia, about 100 miles east of Bellavista.

As the two groups have repeatedly clashed, the Colombian army has shown an inability to intervene, despite millions of dollars in U.S. aid designed to increase the military’s ability to quickly reach far-flung battle sites.

Military officials were warned about the possibility of an attack near Bellavista a week before by the government’s top human rights official. After the killings, it took five days to get to the town, by which time the combatants had fled and the residents were burying their dead.

Responding to outrage over the slow response, top military officials said that such warnings are too common and too imprecise to merit a response from an army stretched thin by combat. There are only 1,000 soldiers stationed in the 10,000-square-mile region that includes Bellavista.

But in the weeks since the massacre, fresh evidence has emerged that the military was not so much doubtful about the warning’s veracity, but simply unable or unwilling to respond.

Military intelligence quickly confirmed the civilian report of impending trouble. And the night before the attack began, the military obtained infrared images of rebel forces massing just outside the town but decided against airstrikes or a troop invasion.

“It’s very difficult to do movements in this area,” said Col. Juan Alfonso Bautista, a local military official.

Ultimately, the massacre in Bellavista shows that as Colombia’s violence spirals to ever greater levels, those most likely to pay the price are the rural poor, abandoned by a distant central government to the depredation of vicious private militias.

Bellavista today is a haunted place, empty of people and filled with the stench of death. The church is destroyed, the sacristy is shattered.

“If you can’t be safe in a church, then where can you be safe?” asked Father Antun Ramos, who was injured by shrapnel as he witnessed the destruction of his flock. “It’s a horrible choice. You either die in your home or you die in your church.”

Prelude

The Atrato River is a wide, muddy thoroughfare that snakes more than 200 miles through the thick rainforest of Choco, one of Colombia’s poorest, meanest and most forgotten provinces.

There are only three colors in this flat, humid region, which boasts the second-heaviest rainfall on Earth: the green jungle, the brown river and the gray, overcast sky.

Here, the descendants of black Spanish slaves eke out a living, fishing and farming in scattered river communities of about 50 wood huts without electricity or running water, hemmed in by the jungle.

The region is attractive for one reason: transportation. The river is a key corridor for smuggling out the cocaine that fuels Colombia’s multi-front war--and smuggling in the chemicals needed to manufacture it and the guns needed to fight.

Two years ago, rebels seized control of the middle section of the river, blowing up the church and police station in Vigia del Fuerte, a town just across the river from Bellavista. Twenty-four policemen were killed. The town, like nearly 200 others in Colombia, was left without a police force.

In April, paramilitary fighters decided to win it back. About 400 men made their way upriver, apparently passing through several military checkpoints. The Colombian military has frequently been accused of cooperating with paramilitary forces, because both are battling the leftist guerrillas as a common enemy.

The paramilitary fighters arrived by boat in Vigia del Fuerte on April 21, calling residents together at a meeting. “They said not to worry, that they weren’t going to harm any civilians,” Romana said.

The guerrillas were taken by surprise. Their ranks had been thinned by fighting nearby with local Colombian army units, who were trying to rescue the governor of a nearby province who had been kidnapped by the FARC.

The guerrillas immediately placed a blockade on the river, cutting off food and fuel to strangle the paramilitary fighters. They attacked Noah’s Ark, a tug that makes its way up and down the river to deliver food to the communities once a month.

The events were enough to alarm Eduardo Cifuentes, the country’s top human rights defender. On April 24, he issued an alert, warning of a possible clash in the area. His office has issued 44 such warnings this year, he said, about one every three days.

But Gen. Mario Montoya told reporters later that the armed forces cannot respond to every such alert. He said recent operations had overextended the military.

“The capacity of the armed forces is being reduced each day due to the number of missions we take on,” Montoya told reporters when he arrived in Bellavista on May 8.

But if there were doubts, military intelligence had backed up Cifuentes’ report by April 26, confirming the presence of the two sides in the general area around Bellavista. And on the night before the attack began May 1, an air force plane captured infrared images of a mass of fighters gathering just outside Bellavista.

Bautista, the local military official, said the navy sent an armed troop transport ship up the Atrato River. But it simply took a long time to get to the site, about 105 miles south of the Gulf of Uraba.

The air force, he said, rejected a bombing mission because the guerrillas were too close to the town. And the army could not land troops because flooding had left the airstrip in Vigia del Fuerte covered by nearly three feet of water.

“Everything was flooded up to six feet deep,” Bautista said. “It was too difficult to move in.”

The people of Bellavista were left alone to face the violence.

The Attack

Bellavista is a tiny town, perhaps 1,000 people. Most are descended from a handful of families. It’s a place where everyone is related to everyone else and fear spreads like a lighted fuse from home to home.

When the bullets started flying early May 1, most of those in the northern part of town headed for the church, one of the few buildings with concrete walls.

More and more people began to crowd inside as an estimated 800 guerrillas exchanged gunfire with the 400 paramilitary fighters. There was fear, but most felt safe inside.

“Nobody thought that a bomb was going to hit,” said Rosa Mercedes Caicedo, 19, whose 1-year-old daughter was injured in the blast.

Outside, the battle was going badly for the paramilitary fighters, who were pushed into the center of town by rebels approaching from high ground to the north.

Rains had flooded the town, and the paramilitary fighters found themselves trapped. They plunged into chest-high water, shooting from beneath the wooden sidewalks that surround the basketball court in the town’s central square.

Bullet holes that punched through tin roofs and wooden walls testify to the ferocity of the combat. Those who were in the church said that on the first day, the gunfire never seemed to stop.

During the night, the guns quieted. Those inside huddled together and slept fitfully. At dawn, the gunfire began again.

This time, the paramilitary forces suffered injuries. Around 9 a.m., fighters bearing two injured men tried to enter the church. One of the men was a paramilitary commander, known as Camilo. He was bleeding badly.

But civilians inside prevented the men from entering. So the fighters sought refuge in the medical clinic that adjoins the church.

There, Camilo spent his desperate last moments bleeding to death on the floor of the clinic’s labor room. Even today, a bloodstain the size of a kitchen table coats the floor. Flies cover the walls.

About 10 a.m., Father Ramos entered the church to calm down the townspeople, who had become increasingly restive under the constant barrage of gunfire.

Just after he had asked everyone to sit down, he heard a noise, then a sound like the droning whistle of a train. The rebels had just launched a homemade mortar, manufactured from propane gas cylinders, from a soccer field about 150 yards to the north.

The mortar came blasting through the roof, smashing into the altar, around which many of the women and children had crowded.

“It was horrible, terrible. The blow was so powerful. People were running everywhere [outside the church] in water up to their necks,” said Yenny Adriana Palacio, who lost two nieces in the blast.

The devastation was astonishing.

The church’s tile roof shattered, sending shards as sharp as knives raining down. The mortar was filled with shrapnel that went flinging through the crowd.

The force of the blast blew through a wall and hurled several people into the adjoining school. Some were decapitated. Others lost arms or legs.

“It was chaos. I was bleeding all over myself. There were mutilated people everywhere, “ Ramos said. “There was so much blood. I totally lost control of the people.”

The church today is a silent witness to the mortar’s profane work. Pews are scattered and overturned. The walls behind the sacristy have collapsed. But there are few holes in the walls, most of the shrapnel having been absorbed by the bodies of the children and adults.

Bits of flesh still cling here and there, covered with flies. A young girl’s braids, attached to what appears to be a small piece of scalp, peek out from under the rubble.

There is nobody to talk to in town. All have fled.

Exodus

In the moments after the bombing, chaos ensued. People ran in all directions as gunfire continued. Most headed for a nearby convent of Augustinian missionaries, a two-story concrete building about 70 yards away. There, nuns laid the dead and dying onto a floor, which soon became slick with blood.

As the battle continued, the priests feared that the guerrillas or the paramilitary fighters would attack again. They consulted with the townspeople and decided to risk flight across the river.

“We decided we have to leave, or we will die,” said Avelantonio Chala, 35, who was among those gathered in the convent.

Ramos, going first, tied a white rag to a pole and led a group of about 150 people toward the bank of the river. The group chanted as they walked.

“Who are we?” Ramos asked.

“We are civilians!” the people shouted back. “Don’t shoot!”

Father Antonio Mena led a second group, also behind a white flag. The two groups mounted a small flotilla of the long, thin canoes used to haul plantains and pineapples up and down the river.

At last, around 2 p.m., about 200 survivors straggled across the river to Vigia del Fuerte, exhausted, bleeding and in shock.

In the days that followed, the villagers would return to the church, placing the dead in plastic bags and ferrying them three miles downriver to a high bank that stood above the floodwaters.

There, in a mass grave about 10 feet by 10 feet, they buried their loved ones in thick, red soil. They tied two sticks together to make a cross.

The exodus from the mid-Atrato River region has continued, with boatloads of people from surrounding villages arriving daily in Quibdo, the regional capital. More than 3,000 have descended on the city in the last two weeks.

The military, which arrived on the scene five days after the massacre, now controls Bellavista and Vigia del Fuerte, although guerrillas can still be seen patrolling the river between those towns and Quibdo, about 60 miles south.

Locals and church officials said people are continuing to flee because of worries about renewed combat. They said that paramilitary fighters are now wandering openly in Vigia del Fuerte, mixing with army soldiers.

Although those claims could not be verified, light-skinned men in civilian clothes could be seen moving about the town Tuesday. Those men stood out, because the region is populated mostly by dark-skinned townspeople.

Still, military officials denied that there was any intentional cooperation, and they asked locals to come forward and identify the suspected paramilitary members.

“The paramilitaries are horrible to us. How could we cooperate with such criminals? It’s just that we don’t know who is who,” said Maj. Juan Mauricio Prieto, an official with the local battalion. The locals “don’t tell us anything.”

There is still some skepticism among Colombian officials over the final death toll, which was tallied by locals who stand to receive benefits for the dead.

So far, forensic investigators have pulled only 16 bodies from the mass grave, although they suspended work after more rains turned the grave into a bog. Ramos made an initial estimate of about 30 dead as he fled the scene.

Still, nobody has come forward to contradict the list of dead, which has been widely circulated in an attempt to find people who may simply be missing.

And so for now, Ramos says he is convinced that 119 were killed. And something must be done, he said, in remembrance of them. “The deed,” he said, “cannot be forgotten.”

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Caught in the Crossfire

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