February 23, 2004

The Massacre at Alto Naya

by Patricia Dahl

The following story was told to me by an indigenous man from Colombia’s Naya River region. The man is a Nasa. In his native speech, Nasa means “human.” It was the name his people called themselves—and still call themselves—before the Spaniards arrived and renamed them Paez. That, the indigenous man notes, was the time of the “first extermination.” This time, the time of the “second extermination,” I too, like the Spaniards before me, rename him, but for a different reason. He is a displaced person, driven from his homeland by violence. He must remain anonymous if he is to tell his story and live. I decide to call him Juan, after a friend. Juan is compact and muscular, his cheekbones are wide and dominant, and above them rests his most striking feature: his eyes. It is his eyes and the seemingly infinite humility that lives in them that impresses me.

The southwestern department of Cauca, which is separated from the neighboring department of Valle del Cauca by the Naya River, harbors the greatest number of indigenous people in all of Colombia. When the Spanish Conquistadors stormed onto their land, Nasa villagers performed communal suicide rather than face capture by the alien marauders. A popular protest was burying oneself alive. Slow, incremental decay into the earth was a preferable to any punishment the Spaniards might mete out. Those who remained among the living abandoned their homelands in the valleys and fled to the loftiest refuge of the Andes, an area known as Alto Naya.

A traditional crop for the Nasa is coca, or esh, as the native word sounds phonetically, which is used for stamina and for medicine. It is a word that does not escape the mouth easily: it lingers there, and then dissolves. To benefit from esh, the Nasa would mambear, which means to “chew leaves.” To indigenous people, the act of mambear is necessary to be able to think and reflect upon the spiritual and material world. It is the act of finding equilibrium between Mother Earth and her children.

When coca subsistence crops became a “production crop” more than 25 years ago, it was both a benchmark for nascent trade imperatives, and a harbinger of woes to come. At that time, the guerrillas from the 6th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) set up camp in the area for two to three months. Two weeks after they left, the army arrived. It launched a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the peasant and indigenous population, which at this time totaled a mere 1,000 people.

By the early 1990s, coca cultivation in Peru and Bolivia was being displaced to southern Colombia. This led to more people moving to the region in order to grow the new crop. According to Juan, “FARC and ELN [National Liberation Army] factions began killing indigenous people and peasants because they said that the people were doing intelligence work for the state.”

Also by this time, the Salvajina Dam, built in 1983 to garner hydroelectric power, had drastically altered the environment and the economy. The dam caused a dramatic change in the climate, making the soil too cool to produce healthy crops. When the people realized the extent of the damage caused by the dam, they marched from Santander to Popayan, the capital of Cauca, in protest. The Nasa, with other Naya River people, formed an alliance with the dam protestors. They volunteered to abandon coca cultivation if the government would agree to build roads that they could use to transport bulkier legal crops in a cost-efficient way. They wanted to rid themselves of the illicit business because they had come to understand that the violence raining down on them was connected to it.

Carlos Ossa Escobar, a government representative, proposed a plan to construct a road in stages. The “stages” would amount to a mere five kilometers each year. Still, the protestors signed an agreement with the government that led to nothing. The region’s problems were exacerbated by international manipulations of the coffee market in 1989. With prices falling 40 percent, the region’s once thriving coffee industry withered. In desperation, the people began to cultivate the poppies used for heroin.

They were unprepared when, in 1993, airplanes cruised over the mountain peaks and ejected a white substance onto the fields. Soon after, “horses, mules, pigs, and chickens fell ill and died. Fish dried even in water. Corn, beans, peas, and potato crops bore no fruit, only stalks and leaves. Lulo, a native fruit, grew green and healthy, but it produces a white moss, or fungus, to this day. And then,” says Juan, placing his hand on his chest and then stroking it upwards to his throat, “Children started coughing as if something were blowing up inside them.” Twenty-eight of them died.

The Prosecutor’s office and the Cauca Secretary of Public Health arrived on the scene. Accompanying the prosecutor was a forensic doctor. The corpses of all the dead children were removed to a laboratory. Twenty days after the children succumbed, members of the community set out to inquire about the results of the investigations. The Secretary of Public Health published the results of its investigation. Two weeks later, a man from another region began to question those published results, and was approached by personnel from the Department of Public Health. “Do you have any family?” they asked. “If you have family, you better keep quiet. You better go home.”

The families of the dead children and other concerned members of the community attempted to conduct their own investigations. A lawyer came to their aid. She made a video, but officials ruled that the video failed to demonstrate that the spraying was the cause of the children’s death. They were required to have legal autopsy and necropsy reports. They were required to furnish the exact dates of the fumigations. They were required to present the legal registries of the children. But the children were from areas abandoned by the state and it was not customary to comply with these registry requirements.

According to Juan, it was at this time that “one distinguished leader had the idea to ask for legal ownership of the land.” The leader was Elias Trochez, governor of Alto Naya. His plan was contested by the joint efforts of the national government and the University of Cauca, which claims ownership of 600,000 acres of land in the region. Elias Trochez then began to hear rumors of an impending massacre. On December 11, 2000, Trochez traveled to the nation’s capital Bogotá to report the rumors. When he returned, paramilitaries ordered him to attend a meeting with them. The guerrillas, thinking he was collaborating with the paramilitaries, assassinated him.

The guerrilla presence was so prominent in Naya that residents didn’t believe that other armed groups would enter the region. But by April of 2001, says Juan, “We realized we had been over confident.” During Holy Week, when it was customary for people to travel among the hamlets to buy goods, the paramilitaries laid siege to the area by sealing off its only entrance. In a single day, the paramilitaries purloined money, jewels and coca from local travelers, and made certain that those who left the region did not return.

It was on Holy Tuesday that Juan first encountered them. Because they were dressed like guerrillas, Juan thought they were guerrillas, and was puzzled when they asked, “Where are the guerrillas?” Some 60 more paramilitaries infiltrated the area. One of them announced: “We are the Calima Front. We are here to defend you, but we will kill anyone who has connections to the military or the guerrillas.”

The ELN had recently staged one of the largest mass kidnappings in history by abducting worshippers in a nearby church, and the paramilitaries accused the villagers of aiding the guerrillas. The paramilitaries set up a roadblock where they demanded that everyone turn in their national identification cards. They then checked the cards against a list containing the names of suspected guerrilla supporters.

“They permitted me, and most of those with me, to go through,” recalls Juan. He continued to the village. “On the edge of town there is a small cafe called Patio Bonito. In front of it, I saw a boy, about 17-years-old. He was naked and tied to a pole by the neck. A paramilitary traced the blade of a knife across the boy’s neck, back and forth, saying, ‘You will be the first one we kill.’ The boy was crying. Then he saw me: ‘Juan! You are my friend! Don’t let them kill me! Please don’t let them kill me!’”

“I told the paramilitary, ‘This boy is innocent. He is retarded. He has never carried a weapon. He has never even left the town. If he ran from you, it was only because he was afraid of you.’” Juan was taken to the paramilitary commander. The commander had a large scar running diagonally across his face. The disfigured face spoke: “The boy is a guerrilla. He will die. You will die too.”

But Juan was not killed. After his release, while walking down a narrow path, he recalls, “I was approached by another paramilitary. I was certain he had been sent to kill me.” The paramilitary was a young Afro-Colombian, a local, not an outsider. Juan confronted him: “Why are you involved in this? You should think of your own family. Maybe this could happen to them.” He replied, “My mother is going hungry. Now I have work. The paramilitaries pay me a good salary. ”

Further down, a paramilitary checkpoint had been set up. Paramilitaries forced a young boy and a young woman off a bus and tied them up. When people cried out to stop them, a paramilitary yelled, “Nobody here has any rights! If the mother of these people speaks up, we will kill her too!” After Juan and others had passed through the checkpoint, they learned that many of the families that had stayed behind had been slain. “We realized that this Calima Front were not our defenders,” says Juan, “They were evil.”

In desperation, some traveled to the base of the Colombian Army’s Third Brigade, which was only an hour away. They reported that paramilitaries were at that very moment slaughtering people in Alto Naya. But the soldiers replied, “We’ve heard this already, it’s a lie. We have no orders.”

No one dared to return to the village. “People scrambled higher up into the mountains. Some took their children, but they had no food or blankets. Pregnant women miscarried,” Juan recalls. “We asked for help from the Red Cross. Everyone was desperate to locate their relatives. I worried about my brother in the region, so I enlisted with the commission to rescue bodies in order to find him.” The commission was formed by members of the Prosecutor’s office and Juan, the single representative of the community. People had become so mistrustful of outside authority and of each other, says Juan, “that there were people who mocked us.”

The commission used a helicopter for the search: “We saw bodies thrown down an abyss. Clothes were strewn in a nearby brush. Identification cards were scattered everywhere. When we landed, we found evidence that the paramilitaries had taken drugs. We were afraid personnel mines had been planted, so we had cattle walk ahead to determine if areas were safe.” At Café Bonito, Juan recalls, “We found six dead bodies: the owner, three employees and two customers—Daniel Suarez and his wife Blanca, who showed signs of sexual torture. Some of the victims were shot, some stabbed, and one was chopped into pieces and burned.”

The prosecutor made a decision. The situation was too dangerous to continue the search. The people of Naya were left to recover the bodies of friends and relatives alone. For five hours, they scoured the area. Juan found bodies of people he knew. “Most of those who were tortured had been decapitated. One body had no hand. One’s neck was slit at the throat and his tongue was pulled out through the wound, a torture technique known as la corbata in Colombia, meaning ‘the tie.’ By the time we found Jorge Estaban Legado, his body was scavenged by animals. I picked him up with a single hand because there was so little left of him. Alexander Quejima was so destroyed by animals and mud that I could retrieve only a few bones, just to have him present with the rest of the dead.”

Witnesses said the paramilitaries detained Cayetano Cruz, an indigenous governor, and cut his body in half with a chainsaw. Seventeen-year-old Gladys Ipia’s head and hand were amputated with a chainsaw. It is said that one paramilitary carried the head of a victim in his backpack for a week. Naya residents believe 140 lives were lost in that paramilitary operation. However, the government has acknowledged the deaths of only 23. Another 6,000 people fled during the massacre. And while some 5,500 returned without any guarantees for their safety, 540 people are still displaced.

“Massacres of that magnitude have not been repeated,” says Juan. “Instead there are now random assassinations. There is confusion and everyone is afraid to speak,” explains Juan. “There is a proposal to build another dam and to sell the electricity from it. They are beginning to privatize the water. There is a place that provides water to several towns and now the people cannot use it. More and more the multinational presence is felt. The University of Cauca—as well as some religious groups—claims to own the land, but many believe the multinationals are behind the University. Things are blurred. We are confused. We want support, but do not know what path to follow.”

The 1991 constitution recognizes Colombia as a sovereign, pluralistic country. But Juan claims that the government is now trying to establish that indigenous, Afro-Colombians and peasants have differing rights, requiring that each have separate legislation. “We in these communities denounce this theory as an attempt to divide us, when all along we have lived together in peace,” Juan defiantly states. “There have been many truths that have not been told and we must now start telling them. We cannot be accomplices to this silence. With even one truth, we can save many lives.”

Patricia Dahl is a member of the New York chapter of the Colombia Support Network.

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