A REVOLT AGAINST THE WAR

The 'Peace Communities' -- Easy Targets For Death Squads

Many of La Union's 300 or so inhabitants were relaxing after a July day's
work when 20 masked men armed with AK-47s tramped into the Colombian
mountain hamlet. The intruders ransacked the peasant farmers' homes,
severed the solitary phone connection and ordered every male between 20 and
40 to line up in the main square.

ONE VILLAGER TRIED to argue with the gunmen. "This is a community of
peace," Rigoberto Guzman protested. "We don't allow armed men here." The
death squad's leader cut Guzman off with a terse -- and false --
condemnation of the entire village: "You are a guerrilla community." At
that the gunmen forced Guzman and five other villagers to kneel and shot
them dead.

La Union is part of Colombia's "peace community" movement: a kind of
grass-roots rebellion against the civil war itself. Three years ago
thousands of displaced peasants from the war-ravaged rural Uraba region
began a mass migration back to their abandoned homes and farms. Community
leaders banned all weapons and declared their villages to be neutral
territory, off-limits to combatants of any sort -- whether government
troops, Marxist rebels or members of the right-wing paramilitary groups
that terrorize the countryside. International human-rights groups say they
are convinced the peace communities are for real.

The war has refused to stop. More than 200 peace-community members have
been killed since the movement began. By all signs, many of the triggermen
belong to the region's paramilitary forces. Even so, human-rights groups
charge that the killings often take place with local Army units' tacit
encouragement -- and sometimes with active support. Within a 30-minute
drive of the Army's Uraba regional headquarters, dozens of peace villagers
have vanished after being stopped at paramilitary roadblocks. "The military
has consistently failed to act against the paramilitaries or protect the
peace communities," says Amnesty International researcher Susan Lee. "In
fact, eyewitnesses say [the armed forces] have assisted in attacks."

Dozens of local residents say that in the weeks before the attack at La
Union, soldiers at roadside checkpoints warned them that the community
would be "annihilated." Some 100 soldiers were posted on the hillsides
above La Union on the day of the raid, residents say, but the troops never
budged from their positions even after the gunfire. Local farmers also say
a military helicopter buzzed overhead just prior to the massacre, and it
returned soon after the attack was over.

Senior Colombian military officers deny any role in the peace-community
attacks. They insist their troops are fighting the death squads as fiercely
as they fight the leftist rebels, arresting 28 paramilitary fighters last
year in the Uraba region alone. The Army's Uraba regional commander says
his closest troops were six kilometers away from the raid on La Union and
knew nothing of the attack. The national armed-forces chief, Gen. Fernando
Tapias, adds that soldiers can't always reach the scene of a paramilitary
attack in time to stop it, and he insists his men had nothing to do with
the massacre at La Union: "If any man of mine is implicated [in the
killings], I'll personally take him to the prosecutor's office."

No one has claimed evidence of direct military involvement in the raid.
Even so, few villagers voice the least doubt that "soldiers" were behind
the death squad that rampaged through La Union. "The Army and the
paramilitaries are the same team of assassins," says a villager. "They both
want to drive us from our lands and take it for themselves." All the same,
the peasant farmers of La Union say they have no intention of abandoning
their homes -- or their commitment to peace.