COLOMBIAN MASSACRE LARGE, BRUTAL

Chain Saws Used By Paramilitaries In Village Killing

TIMBA, Colombia -- They brought out the victims using a helicopter
with a cargo net dangling beneath. Soldiers wearing rubber gloves and
masks unloaded body bags and laid them in the broad shade of an acacia
tree. Forensic investigators began to work.

By the end of Thursday, the bodies of 12 farmers had been pulled from
a war zone near the village of Naya, a daylong walk to the west of
Timba in this embattled region 220 miles southwest of Bogota. Ten had
been killed by machete; two had been shot. At least one was
decapitated, the head still missing.

The grim business of preparing the bodies for burial, watched from
across a soccer field by the mostly black residents of Timba and
clusters of refugees from Naya, followed one of Colombia's largest
civilian massacres in years. Beginning the Wednesday before Easter, a
squad from Colombia's right-wing paramilitary force entered Naya and
its surrounding hamlets. For three days, as the government army tried
to reach the jungle town amid fierce fighting, Colombian officials
say, paramilitary troops used machetes, guns and chain saws to kill at
least 40 civilians.

In interviews with some of the 160 Naya families sheltered in the town
school, survivors said the number of dead might be twice that amount.
Colombian officials, who are continuing recovery efforts, agreed. The
only recent killing of comparable size came four months ago in the
village of Chengue, where paramilitary fighters killed 26 farmers with
stones and a sledgehammer.

Apart from its size, the Naya massacre has frightened survivors and
top Colombian officials for the way in which the paramilitary group,
the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), carried out the
killings. The use of chain saws and machetes in Naya, as well as rocks
and hammers in other places, suggests a gruesome turn in Colombia's
long-running war: As rightist paramilitary forces and the leftist
guerrillas whom they battle gain strength, the method of killing has
become its own message.

"Maybe they don't want to waste a single bullet on us," said Rafael
Caso, whose 25-year-old son, Wilson, was identified in the open-air
morgue, which filled the town with the smell of decomposed bodies. "No
one knows why they are killing us this way. To clean everyone out is
their idea. But why us?"

In a strategic sense, the savagery advances the AUC's goal of emptying
out civilian populations used by guerrilla armies for supplies and
support. Paramilitary forces, whom the government blames for the
majority of civilian massacres, now have a stranglehold on many areas
where they have carried out brutal killings, which they refer to as
"cleaning."

One result is an internally displaced population of more than 2
million people, concentrated mostly in urban centers where the AUC
already enjoys a large measure of control.

Explaining the rationale behind the AUC massacres, Luz Eugenia Vasquez
of the Interior Ministry's human rights office said, " 'All men are
equal, but communists are not men and so not equal to me.' This
attitude negates the theory of human rights that most of the rest of
the world subscribes to."

Vasquez, who spent Thursday helping identify the first wave of bodies
brought here, said the recent savagery echoes a period five decades
ago known as "The Violence" when partisan politics turned into open
war. Pregnant women were killed, their breasts cut off, to drive
people out of certain regions. Now the rising paramilitary movement
has resurrected those tactics.

After visiting Naya soon after the killings, Colombia's ombudsman,
Eduardo Cifuentes, warned that "we have returned to the most barbaric
era," and reminded the country that the carnage is not "from a movie"
but is a fact of modern life for peasants. A 17-year-old girl had her
limbs cut off with a chain saw taken from a Naya farmer. Another was
eviscerated. The bodies were left for a week in a roadside ditch;
paramilitary forces who made camp in the village refused to allow any
to be retrieved for burial.

"I have no guarantees that I or my four sons will be safe if I go
back," said Luis Alberto Ganas, a farmer who fled from the hamlet of
La Paz, a few hours from Naya. "The government needs to find some way
to help us, because I can tell you, there will be more people like me
on their way."

Naya, a town of 8,000, became a target because of its vast coca fields
and location along a strategic stretch of river used by guerrillas to
transport guns from the Pacific Ocean. The National Liberation Army,
or ELN, also used the thick jungle around Naya as a hiding place for
kidnap victims.

Last month, a commission consisting of the United Nations, the
ombudsman's office and the Interior Ministry warned the government
that Naya was ripe for a paramilitary strike, placing it on a long
list of Colombian towns under threat at any given moment. An
overstretched army made no move to protect it, human rights groups
say, and has yet to secure the region, where more than 150 families
are still missing.

Paramilitary commanders in the region, wary of public relations
fallout from the killings, say their troops are required to conduct
assassinations with single shots to the head. They have dismissed the
more grisly accounts from Naya as fiction based on postmortem
mutilations done by guerrilla forces. But Vasquez said that for at
least 10 victims recovered so far, a machete blow was the cause of
death, not an afterthought.

In an interview last month, Carlos Castano, the AUC commander in
chief, pledged to turn himself in if it were proven that his troops
carry out killings in such ways. But he also warned that, because his
8,000-member militia is growing exponentially, "excesses" might result
from a lack of properly trained field commanders.

For years, Naya and the surrounding region, populated by mostly black
and indigenous people, has been home to a large guerrilla presence.
The ELN and the larger rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC), operate there, and the two guerrilla forces have now
joined forces to confront paramilitary troops. New coca crops in and
around Naya have given the guerrillas and the paramilitary fighters a
financial incentive to control the region in order to tax the drug
trade.

Delio Chate, a 41-year-old farmer who has a 25-acre coca field near
Naya, said the killing started on April 11. Paramilitary troops
rounded up Naya residents, house by house, and assembled them along
the dirt path running into town. Chate said the paramilitary
commanders gave his neighbors two chances to answer: "Do you know any
guerrillas?" A machete blow followed the third negative response.

Chate, now living in a second-grade classroom, said the schedule was
the same for three days. He saw neighbors die by the handful, and he
said some were alive and some dead when paramilitary troops used a
chain saw on their bodies. He escaped with his wife and two sons in
darkness.

"Now, of course, the army is there or is trying to get there," Chate
said. "But they left us out there alone."