COLOMBIANS TELL OF MASSACRE, AS ARMY STOOD BY

[Photo Caption]
Pieces of a table used by members of
a death squad and other reminders remain scattered on a basketball
court where residents of El Salado were summoned, judged and executed.
During three days in February, survivors say, members of the
right-wing paramilitary group executed people accused of helping
left-wing guerrillas.

EL SALADO, Colombia -- The armed men, more than 300 of them, marched
into this tiny village early on a Friday. They went straight to the
basketball court that doubles as the main square, residents said,
announced themselves as members of Colombia's most feared right-wing
paramilitary group, and with a list of names began summoning residents
for judgment. A table and chairs were taken from a house, and after
the death squad leader had made himself comfortable, the basketball
court was turned into a court of execution, villagers said. The
paramilitary troops ordered liquor and music, and then embarked on a
calculated rampage of torture, rape and killing.

"To them, it was like a big party," said one of a dozen survivors who
described the scene in interviews this month. "They drank and danced
and cheered as they butchered us like hogs."

By the time they left, late the following Sunday afternoon, they had
killed at least 36 people whom they accused of collaborating with the
enemy, left-wing guerrillas who have long been a presence in the area.
The victims, for the most part, were men, but others ranged from a
6-year-old girl to an elderly woman. As music blared, some of the
victims were shot after being tortured; others were stabbed or beaten
to death, and several more were strangled.

Yet during the three days of killing last February, military and
police units just a few miles away made no effort to stop the
slaughter, witnesses said. At one point, they said, the paramilitaries
had a helicopter flown in to rescue a fighter who had been injured
trying to drag some victims from their home.

Instead of fighting back, the armed forces set up a roadblock on the
way to the village shortly after the rampage began, and prevented
human rights and relief groups from entering and rescuing residents.

While the Colombian military has opened three investigations into what
happened here and has made some arrests of paramilitaries, top
military officials insist that fighting was under way in the village
between guerrillas and paramilitary forces -- not a series of
executions. They also insist that the colonel in charge of the region
has been persecuted by government prosecutors and human rights groups.
Last month he was promoted to general, even though examinations of the
incidents are pending.

What happened in El Salado last February -- at the same time that
President Clinton was pushing an aid package to step up antidrug
efforts here -- goes to the heart of the debate over the growing
American backing of the Colombian military. For years the United
States government and human rights groups have had reservations about
the Colombian military leadership, its human rights record and its
collaboration with paramilitary units.

The Colombian Armed Forces and police are the principal beneficiaries
of a new $1.3 billion aid package from Washington. The Colombian
government says it has been working hard to sever the remnants of ties
between the armed forces and the paramilitaries and has been training
its soldiers to observe international human rights conventions even
during combat.

"The paramilitaries are some of the worst of the terrorists who profit
from drugs in Colombia, and in no way can anyone justify their human
rights violations," said Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug
policy director. But he said "the Colombian military is making
dramatic improvements in its human rights record," and noted that the
aid package includes "significant money, $46 million, for human rights
training and implementation."

But human rights groups, pointing to incidents like the massacre here,
say these links still exist and that mechanisms to monitor and punish
commanders and units have had limited success at best.

"El Salado was the worst recorded massacre yet this year," said Andrew
Miller, a Latin American specialist for Amnesty International USA, who
spent the past year as an observer near here. "The Colombian Armed
Forces, specifically the marines, were at best criminally negligent by
not responding sooner to the attack. At worst, they were knowledgeable
and complicit."

The paramilitary attack on El Salado killed more people and lasted
longer than any other in Colombia this year. But in most other
respects it was an operation so typical of the 5,500-member right-wing
death squad that goes by the name of the Peasant Self-Defense of
Colombia that the Colombian press treated it as just another atrocity.

The paramilitary groups were founded in the early 1980's, mostly
funded by agricultural interests to protect them from extortion and
kidnapping by the left-wing guerrillas. The paramilitary groups were
declared illegal over a decade ago, but have continued to operate,
often with clandestine military support and intelligence, and in
recent years have become increasingly involved in drug
trafficking.

Over the past 18 months, more than 2,500 people, most of them unarmed
peasants in rural areas like this village in northern Colombia, have
died in more than 500 attacks by what the Colombian government calls
"illegal armed groups" involved in the country's 35-year-old civil
conflict. And according to the government, right-wing paramilitary
groups are responsible for most of those killings.

Since the El Salado massacre, nearly 3,000 residents of the area have
fled to nearby towns, including El Carmen de Bolivar and Ovejas, as
well as the provincial capital, Cartagena. Early this month, more than
a dozen of the survivors were interviewed in the towns where they have
taken refuge under the protection of human rights groups or the Roman
Catholic Church.

Despite efforts to protect them, however, some have recently been
killed in individual attacks or have disappeared, actions for which
the same paramilitary group that attacked their village has been
blamed. As a result, all of the survivors interviewed for this story
spoke on condition that their names not be used.

Their accounts, however, coincide with investigations conducted by the
Colombian government prosecutor's office and by the Colombia office of
the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

Members of a paramilitary unit had attacked this village in 1997,
killing five people and warning that they would eventually come back.
Many residents fled then, but returned after a few months believing
that they were safe until the death squad suddenly reappeared on the
morning of Feb. 18.

"I looked up at the hills, and could see armed men everywhere,
blocking every possible exit," a farmer recalled. "They had surrounded
the town, and almost as soon as they came down, they began firing
their guns and shouting, 'Death to the guerrillas.' "

The death squad troops, almost all dressed in military-style uniforms
with a blue patch, made their way to the basketball court at the
center of the village. They took tables and chairs from a nearby
building, pulled out a list of names and began the search for victims.

"Some people were shot, but a lot of them were beaten with clubs and
then stabbed with knives or sliced up with machetes," one witness
said. "A few people were beheaded, or strangled with metal wires,
while others had their throats cut."

The list of those to be executed was supplied by two men, one of whom
was wearing a ski mask. Paramilitary leaders, who have acknowledged
the attack on El Salado but describe it as combat with the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, later said
that the two men were FARC deserters who had dealt with local people
and knew who had been guerrilla sympathizers.

"It was all done very methodically," one witness said. "Some people
were brought to the basketball court, but were saved because someone
would say, 'Not that one,' and they would be allowed to leave. But I
saw a woman neighbor of mine, who I know had nothing at all to do with
the guerrillas, knocked down with clubs and then stabbed to death."

While some paramilitaries searched for people to kill, others were
breaking into shops and stealing beer, rum and whiskey. Before long, a
macabre party atmosphere prevailed, with the paramilitaries setting up
radios with dance music and ordering a local guitarist and
accordionist to play.

In addition, a young waitress from a cantina adjoining the basketball
court was ordered to keep a steady supply of liquor flowing. As the
armed men grew drunk and rowdy, they repeatedly raped her, along with
several other women, according to residents and human rights groups.

As night fell, some residents fled to the wooded hills above town.
Others, however, stayed in their homes, afraid of being caught if they
tried to escape, unable to move because they had small children, or
convinced that they would not be harmed.

Saturday was more of the same. "All day long we could hear occasional
bursts of gunfire, along with the screams and cries of those who were
being tortured and killed," said a woman who had taken refuge in the
hills with her small children.

Of the 36 people killed in town, 16 were executed at the basketball
court. An additional 18 people were killed in the countryside,
residents and human rights workers said, and 17 more are still
missing, making for a death toll that could be as high as 71.

By Friday afternoon, however, news of the slaughter had spread to El
Carmen de Bolivar, about 15 miles away. Relatives of El Salado
residents rushed to local police and military posts, but were rebuffed.

"We made a scandal and nearly caused a riot, we were so insistent,"
said a 40-year-old-man who had left El Salado early on Friday because
he had business in town. "But they did nothing to help us."

Not only did the armed forces and the police not come to the aid of
the villagers here, but the roadblock they set up prevented
humanitarian aid from entering the village. Anyone seeking to enter
the area was told the road was unsafe because it had been mined and
that combat was going on between guerrilla and paramilitary units.

In a telephone interview, three Colombian Navy admirals said that
residents of El Salado were accusing the military of complicity in the
massacre because they had been coerced by guerrillas." The roadblock
was set up, they said, to prevent more deaths or injuries to civilians.

"At no point was there collaboration on our part, nor would we have
permitted their passage" through the area, Adm. William Porras, the
second in command of the Colombian Navy, said of the death squad unit.
"We never at any point were covering up for them or helping them, as
all the subsequent investigations have shown."

But local residents, Colombian prosecutors investigating the massacre
and human rights groups say there was no combat. Villagers say that
the armed forces had not been in the center of El Salado recently, and
that they had left the outlying areas a day before. Residents also say
they had passed over the dirt road that Friday morning and there were
no mines.

"The army was on patrol for two or three days before the massacre took
place, and then suddenly they disappeared," recalled a 43-year-old
tobacco farmer. "It can't be explained, and it seems very curious to
me."

What has been established is that the villagers were simple peasants,
and not the guerrillas the paramilitary leader says his troops were
fighting. "It is quite clear that these were defenseless people and
that what they were subjected to was not combat, but abuse and
torture," said a foreign diplomat who has been investigating.

Residents said the paramilitaries felt so certain that government
security forces would stay away that late on Friday they had a
helicopter flown in. It landed in front of a church and picked up a
death squad fighter who was injured when a family he was trying to
drag out of their house to be taken to the basketball court resisted.

In a report published last February, Human Rights Watch found
"detailed, abundant and compelling evidence of continuing close ties
between the Colombian Army and paramilitary groups responsible for
gross human rights violations." All told, "half of Colombia's 18
brigade-level units have documented links to paramilitary activity,"
the report concluded.

"Far from moving decisively to sever ties to paramilitaries, Human
Rights Watch's evidence strongly suggests that Colombia's military
high command has yet to take the necessary steps to accomplish this
goal," the report stated.

At the time of the El Salado massacre, the senior military officer in
this region was Col. Rodrigo Quinones Cardenas, commander of the First
Navy Brigade, who has since been promoted to general. As director of
Naval Intelligence in the early 1990's, he was identified by Colombian
prosecutors as the organizer of a paramilitary network responsible for
the killings of 57 trade unionists, human rights workers and members
of a left-wing political party.

In 1994, Colonel Quinones and seven other soldiers were charged with
"conspiring to form or collaborate with armed groups." But after the
main witness against him was killed in a maximum security prison and
the case was moved from a civilian court to a military tribunal, the
colonel was acquitted.

According to the same investigation by Colombian prosecutors, one of
Colonel Quinones's closest associates in that paramilitary network was
Harold Mantilla, a colonel in the Colombian Marines.

Today, Colonel Mantilla is commander of the Fifth Marine Battalion,
which operates in the area around El Salado and is one of the units
said by residents and human rights workers to have failed to respond
to appeals for help.

After the paramilitary unit left El Salado, the police captured 11
paramilitaries northeast of here on the ranch of a drug trafficker who
is in prison in Bogota. Along with four others who were arrested
separately, they are facing murder charges, but their leaders and most
of the others who carried out the killings remain free.

More than four months after the massacre, El Salado is virtually
deserted. Only one of the town's 1,330 original residents was present
when a reporter and human rights workers visited early this month, and
he said the village remains as it was the day the death squad left,
except for the two mass graves on a rise near the basketball court
where the bodies were buried and later exhumed for
investigators.

The tables and chairs used by the paramilitary "judges," smashed or
overturned as they left, are still strewn across the basketball court.

"I don't know if the people are ever going to want to come back
again," the resident said. "What happened here was just too terrible
to bear, and we didn't deserve it."