An Elusive Justice:7 Years After Massacre in Colombian Village, Truth of Paramilitary Attack Remains

[Judi Lynn]

An Elusive Justice
Seven Years After Massacre in Colombian Village, Truth of Paramilitary Attack Remains Hazy

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 25, 2008; Page A13



Chengue residents speak with navy officers
after a ceremony honoring massacre victims.
Villagers say the military was culpable in
the killings. (Juan Forero - Twp)

CHENGUE, Colombia -- The ceremony to remember Chengue's dead included a puppet show for children, free groceries and bagpipes wailing "Amazing Grace," all courtesy of Colombia's military.

And then Adm. Edgar Cely, the navy's operations chief, lamented how paramilitary fighters roared into this town seven years ago and, wielding truncheons, split open the heads of 27 villagers in one of the more egregious displays of depravity in Colombia's long civil conflict. "We want punishment for those criminals," Cely told families of the victims.

Luis Barreto, who lost six relatives in that pre-dawn attack, could only shake his head at Cely's words. In his view, justice is still glaringly absent in Chengue -- as is the truth about the government's culpability in a crime that made this northern hamlet a monument to terror.

"So many of us say they should be punished, but nothing happens," said Barreto, 54, one of the few villagers who returned after the massacre displaced Chengue's 500 residents. "How much more proof do you need? Everybody knows what happened."

The truth, as villagers see it, is that the paramilitary commanders who carried out the killings received uniforms and armaments from the military, and passed unmolested through this region, which was controlled by the navy. Once inside Chengue, the paramilitary fighters went about killing villagers they had branded rebel sympathizers.

In the aftermath, only one paramilitary member was convicted, a low-level fighter who confessed after nightmares spurred by memories of the massacre haunted his sleep. Authorities implicated several officials from the navy, but none was ever convicted.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012403382.html