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There
are important lessons to be learnt from what happened in Naya.
In Naya, as in other atrocities, death alone was not the
objective. Take the massacre in the tiny northern village of El
Salado in July 2000, where the death squad danced and cheered
as music blared over the village loudspeaker, while they took two
and a half days to torture, rape, bludgeon and sometimes strangle
to death, 36 people, tying them first onto a table in the center
of the village basketball court. Or the Chengue massacre
last January, where 50 paramilitaries drove their trucks into a
community of avocado farmers at 4:30 in the morning, dragged 28
people from their homes, lined them up in the square, and crushed
their skulls with rocks and a sledgehammer. In these and similar
scenes the paramilitary objective is to instill terror and so force
the surrounding population to flee, thus clearing the land for their
backers.
Castaño knows the futility of the body count in a country
where a long history of rural violence has failed to change anything.
According to this logic, it is how you kill, the degree of pain
and terror that can be inflicted through the act of killing, that
counts. That is the message of Naya, of El Salado,
of Chengue.
A Lethal Alliance: The Paras, the Army, and Civilians
The paramilitaries who committed the Naya massacre belonged to a
unit of the AUC known as the Farallones Front. The Farallones,
and two companion fronts, the Pacífico and the Paez,
were formed last year. They are offshoots of an AUC unit—called
the Calima Front--that surfaced in the city of Cali in the summer
of 1999, shortly after a mass kidnapping in a local church by ELN
guerrillas. Government investigators established that the Calima
Front was organized by the Colombian Army's Third Brigade
with the assistance of Carlos Castaño and a group of wealthy
local people, including narco-traffickers. The civilians provided
the financing for the new front's operational needs, active-duty
Third Brigade officers provided intelligence and logistical support,
and Castaño supplied the troops.
Human Rights Watch, whose research into the Calima Front confirmed
the findings of Colombian officials, also reported that many of
the commanders for the Calima were recruited among the ranks
of former army officers. Government and United Nations human rights
investigators insist that the ease with which the Farallon,
the Pacifico and the Paez paramilitary fronts have
consolidated and expanded their operational capacity throughout
southwestern Colombia in the past year, would be impossible without
a continuing relationship between the AUC and the Cali based Third
Brigade.
In Bogotá, in the days following the Naya massacre,
Eduardo Cifuentes denounced the government's failure to prevent
"a massacre foretold." The people of Naya, he said,
had been clamoring for protection since last December. In the weeks
prior to the massacre, the O.A.S. Human Rights Commission had instructed
the Colombian government to extend special protections to the Naya
communities. The United Nations Human Rights Office reported that
it had alerted the authorities two days before the killings began
that a 300-strong paramilitary force was advancing into the Naya
area. But in a pattern repeated somewhere in Colombia, week in,
week out, the army did not lift a finger to protect the endangered
population.
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