REBEL ARMY TOOK NO PRISONERS ON THE BANKS OF THE NAYA RIVER

Paramilitary Fighters Stormed Through Colombian Guerrilla Territory,
Stopping Only To Slaughter. At Least 27 Civilians Died. The Armed Forces
Seemed Powerless.

On the Naya River, Colombia --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.

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.