Colombia militias murder peasants

The Times (London)
By Gabriella Gamini
6 October 1999
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GUADALUPE, Colombia -- Paramilitary gun men terrorising rural Colombia dumped the bullet-riddled bodies of ten peasants on the cobbled central square of this small farming village to convey their message.

"Rebel sympathisers face execution" was scrawled in blood on a brick wall near the village square. Dozens of hooded gunmen wearing regulation army uniforms, but also the black armbands that identify them as right-wing paramilitaries, had taken the village by surprise during the midday siesta.

They raided several homes and dragged out young men, whom they accused of being supporters of left-wing guerrillas, before beating them, performing a summary trial and shooting them as other villagers watched.

By the time that Colombian police and a handful of journalists arrived, the bodies had been in the square for two days.

Villagers had hidden in their homes, frightened that if they attended to the bodies the paramilitaries would return and accuse them of being rebel sympathisers. "They said that they would kill all those who were friends with those executed," said Estella de Guaira, 54, whose 26-year-old nephew was killed.

Until recently Guadalupe was a sleepy village inhabited by 2,000 banana growers and campesinos who cultivate the coca leaf, the crop used by drug barons to produce cocaine. It had been one of the lucky few rural areas unaffected by Colombia's spiralling violence.

But it happened to be in the path of the growing band of paramilitaries that has recently expanded control over Colombia's northeastern states, bordering Venezuela. The militias have emerged as the third force in Colombia's 40-year civil war between the military and left-wing guerrillas.

Human rights groups in Colombia, who have seen 21 of their workers killed by right-wing militias this year, accuse the Government of turning a blind eye to the expansion of paramilitary armies, which have grown in recent years into an independent force made up of some 4,000 gunmen, intent on dislodging rebels from rural areas that are also drug-producing regions.