Massacre reported in Colombia

Six confirmed dead; peasants evacuated

By JOHN OTIS
Copyright 1997 Special to the Chronicle

BOGOTA, Colombia Dozens of terrified peasants were airlifted
out of a remote Colombian village Monday following a weekend
massacre by a suspected paramilitary group.

Authorities confirmed that at least six people were killed in and
around the town of Mapiripan, 185 miles southeast of Bogota.

Colombian radio and television reported that as many as 30 people
may have been slaughtered, but there was no immediate official
confirmation of a death toll that high.

"There have been a series of assassinations," said Carlos Rios, a
spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in
Bogota. "People are fleeing by land and by river."

The Colombian station Radionet reported that about 120 members of
a paramilitary group arrived in Mapiripan last week. They cut
telephone lines and radio links to the outside and began
torturing and killing villagers.

Witnesses said that six bodies with their throats slit
turned up in the village. The paramilitaries abandoned the
village in the southern state of Meta on Sunday, and information
about the killings began to surface Monday.

"Military men arrived here, but they were not from the military,"
a local resident told Radionet. "They had different kinds of
weapons. They took the people out ... and killed them."

The Red Cross evacuated more than 50 people on a DC3 transport
plane Monday. Television and radio reports said, meanwhile, that
as many as half of the estimated 2,000 residents of Mapiripan
including all of the village's teachers and health workers had
fled.

Paramilitaries are private army squads that are carrying out a
brutal vigilante war against Colombia's two main leftwing
guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and
the smaller National Liberation Army.

Claiming that the regular army has been unable to stop guerrilla
advances, the paramilitaries target rebels and suspected civilian
supporters on behalf of ranchers, large landholders and drug
traffickers often with the tacit support of the Colombian
armed forces.

Both the paramilitaries and the guerrillas have ties to drug
traffickers. Meta Department is an important region for the
cultivation of coca leaves the raw material for cocaine and
is dotted with drug laboratories. At the same time, there is
almost no permanent government presence in the zone.

The motive for the attack was unknown, although Army commander
Gen. Manuel Jose Bonett speculated that it may have been a
vendetta or a turf war among drug traffickers.

"And when these groups clash whether it's over a laboratory or
a (drug) shipment or a debt or something else it can be very
rough," Bonett said.

The massacre is one of dozens attributed to paramilitary groups.

Such violence has helped make Colombia the most violent country
in the world, with an annual rate of 89.5 homicides per 100,000
citizens, according to World Bank figures. In contrast, the
annual rate in the United States is 10 homicides per 100,000
citizens.

Alfredo Rangel Suarez, a former national security adviser for
President Ernesto Samper, said the paramilitaries are responsible
for about 60 percent of all humanrights violations in Colombia.

The massacre occurred just as Samper began a new campaign to
improve the nation's dismal humanrights record.

In an appearance before Congress on Sunday, Samper dedicated much
of his onehour speech to human rights and pledged to create a
national peace commission to help bring an end to the guerrilla
war, which has lasted for more than three decades.

On Monday, Samper condemned the massacre and announced he would
send a special commission of prosecutors and a government human
rights delegate to the zone to investigate the killings.

John Otis is a freelance journalist based in Bogota.