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.
