SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS IN COLUMBIA

Paramilitary killers prey on peasants

Bogota

Father leonidas Moreno, a Catholic priest working in the embattled region
of Uraba in northwestern Colombia had hoped to give 520 peasants displaced
by death squad violence an unusual year-end present-after nine months as
internal refugees, he was going to help them go home for Christmas.

The peasants were among 10,000 inhabitants who fled paramilitary violence
and army aerial bombardments in the municipality of Riosucio, farther
south, in April, finding refuge in shelters of plastic and bamboo in the
sweaty hamlet of Pavarando.

But instead of a homeward journey, the refugees ended up making room in
their makeshif sanctuary on December 22 for a group of 500 more peasants
wrenched from their riverside farms after a new wave of paramilitary
attacks in the Riosuclo area.

"We were all set to go," Moreno said in a telephone interview from his
office in the town of Apartado. "Now, we cannot move freely in the area."

According to the Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), a
respected human rights think tank in Bogota, at least 26 peasants were
killed and their bodies thrown into a river after paramilitary groups began
a campaign in mid-December to "cleanse" leftist guerrillas and their
alleged supporters from a string of five hamlets in the Riosucio region.

Fighting between the paramilitaries and rebel forces set off the new
exodus. Peasants told stories of burying more bodies in common graves
before leaving.

During recent years, a network of paramilitary groups, calling themselves
self-defense squads, have spread throughout Colombia, grabbing control of
land, resources and political power.

At times working with army patrols, other times independently, they conduct
what the leaders call counterinsurgency "cleansings" of entire regions. The
campaigns resemble the "scorched earth" brutality of the death squads and
armies fighting Central American rebels in the l980s.

"These confrontations . . . are becoming institutionalized," Moreno said.
"The international community should demand that the government protect the
peasants and their land because when they abandon it, they lose
everything."

Those who wanted to return to Riosucio from exile had declared themselves a
neutral "peace community" and were trying to negotiate being left alone by
all the armed parties.

The strategy has been touted by the Catholic Church as a possible way to
shield innocent civilians, but successes so far have been few and far
between-a reflection of the staggering extent to which violence has become
commonplace in Colombia.

Military officials have admitted only superficial connections between
members of the armed forces and the paramilitaries. Army commanders and
government officials claim that the military fights guerrillas and
paramilitaries with equal vigor.

But a decade of judicial probes, classified documents, human rights
investigations and even reports from the U.S. State Department have
revealed direct links between the Colombian military and paramilitary
groups.

"We all know the military supports the paramilitaries. There are enough
testimonies, cases where there is clear support," said the Rev. Alonzo
Ferro, director of the Jesuit-run Program for Peace in Bogota. "The
paramilitaries do the dirty work."

Francisco Leal, a political scientist and dean of social sciences at
Bogota's prestigious Los Andes University, says Colombia's military is
"articulated with the paramilitaries, with powerful economic interests
(and) with the forces most resistant to reform-the landowners."

He added that the bewildering overlap of "interests" includes the country's
cash-laden drug lords, whom he said it was impossible to "separate from the
landowners and the military."

works to counterinsurgency models passed on to the Colombian armed forces
through U.S. training courses and directives from military and intelligence
advisers.

The Human Rights Watch report states that the United States bolstered the
paramilitary trend in 1990 by sending a team of CIA and U.S. military
strategists to Colombia to help enhance the "efficiency and effectiveness"
of Colombia's military intelligence.

The result of those consultations, the report asserts, was a Colombian
military document that "provided a blueprint for . . . a secret network
that relied on paramilitaries not only for intelligence but to carry out
murder."

The savagery of Colombia's paramilitaries is stunning; it is not uncommon
for peasants to be dismembered while they still are alive.

In some areas of Uraba, death squad members are called "mochacabezas," or
head-hackers, because they decapitate victims with machetes. In one case in
1996 in Apartado, the killers chopped off a primary school student's head
in front of his classmates.

The powerful landowners who sponsor many of the paramilitaries include drug
lords. According to Colombian academics and U.S. Senate sources, the
traffickers have snapped up an estimated 30 percent of the country's most
fertile land after hordes of peasants fled paramilitary attacks.

Colombian and international human right monitors cite paramilitary
violence, followed by guerrilla and army attacks, as the primary cause of
displacement of more than one million people from rural areas during the
past decade.

Statistics from a data bank run by CINEP and the Intercongregational
Commission for Justice and Peace show that paramilitary squads do indeed
perform "the dirty work"-74 percent of the noncombat killings of civilians.

Overall, 11 people a day die from political violence in Colombia, and
general homicide tallies are expected to top the 30,000 mark for 1997,
giving Colombia one of the highest rates per capita in the world.

In recent years, the paramilitaries have grown in firepower and audacity,
holding national meetings and intensifying attacks on intellectuals, human
rights investigators, unionists and individuals employed by both government
and nongovernmental organize tions working with the displaced.

For example, in July, paramilitaries were suspected of threatening a
delegation of U.N. and Colombian judicial officials who had traveled to the
Riosucio region to investigate the causes for the exodus of the first group
of 10,000 peasants.

"Leave or we'll blow you up," read a penciled threat slipped under a motel
room door.

As the right-wing mini-armies have gained control of key, resource-rich
areas, leftist guerrillas have intensified violent campaignsto maintain
their own territorial and political dominance.

So widespread is the conflict that a group of 30 Colombian intellectuals
issued a collective plea in August for U.N. mediation of the violence in
the countryside before Colombia turns into "another Bosnia-Herzegovina."

WHAT'S AT STAKE IN RIOSUCIO

* For the interests bankrolling Colombia's paramilitary gunmen, there is
much at stake in the Riosucio region. Hugging the Panamanian border, it is
a fertile swath of Choco, the only Colombian province with both Pacific and
Caribbean coasts.

* Local residents, municipal authorities and church sources say the area is
expected to become part of a strategic corridor of international trade as
plans advance for the construction of two seaports and a "dry canal"- a
belt of highway for the transport of goods between the waterways. This
development project could serve as a complement to the Panama Canal. The
area also would benefit from plans to extend the Pan American Highway
through the Darien jungle, a project that would link Panama to Colombia.
Presently, no major road connects Central America and South America. Land
values in the region are expected to climb with the onslaught of
development.

"What is worth 200,000 pesos a hectare today will be worth 5 million pesos
before long, with the canal," said Marco Aurelio Renteria, the local
council ombudsman for human rights in the municipality of Riosucio.

* Riosucio and the neighboring banana lands in Uraba also harbor mineral
resources, tropical hardwoods, top quality coal mines, excellent farm and
grazing land and, reportedly, oil. The zone also is a key launching pad for
the weapons and narcotics trade.