-Caveat Lector- Paramilitary massacre stuns Caribbean fishing village on stilts By MARGARITA MARTINEZ The Associated Press 12/1/00 12:42 AM NUEVA VENECIA, Colombia (AP) -- Ten days ago this village, with its wooden houses perched on stilts in a vast inland sea, was a bustling fishing community: The hum of outboard motors filled the air as men worked to rig their nets. But then the gunmen came, dragging villagers from their homes, shooting them and leaving their bodies to turn the water red as neighbors fled in terror. Now the residents of Nueva Venecia are mostly gone, driven away by what was one of the deadliest single massacres in Colombia's decades-old guerrilla war -- at least 37 people killed, most of them poor fishermen. Other than water lapping up against stilts, the cackle of a few chickens and the barking of dogs, the village is silent. In Nueva Venecia on Tuesday, Daiver Yanez, a 20-year-old fisherman whose uncle and cousin died in the Nov. 22 attack, hurriedly unloaded two rocking chairs and other belongings onto a wooden canoe docked alongside his two-room stilt house. "I never thought something like this would happen to us, this kind of violence," he said before pushing off in the direction of the nearest town, Sitio Nuevo, where he planned to live with relatives until it feels safe to return. The attack here was allegedly carried out by members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC. The right-wing paramilitary group, which some here say operates with the support of the Colombian army, has spent years fighting left-wing rebels in the country's bloody civil conflict. Roughly 3,000 people die in the vicious fighting each year, most of them civilians caught in the crossfire. Colombia is receiving $1.3 billion in mostly military aid from the United States as part of a plan to battle the cocaine trade that fuels the conflict, but any progress could take years. The Nueva Venecia massacre was the second in the area this year by alleged members of the AUC: The group raided another fishing village an hour's boat ride away in February, killing about a dozen people. They had warned Nueva Venecia -- considered by the AUC to be a support base for the leftist National Liberation Army, or ELN -- that it could be next. Survivors interviewed in a church shelter in Barranquilla, the nearest city, said death came swiftly to the struggling 150-year-old settlement, located 420 miles from Bogota. According to their accounts -- most spoke anonymously for fear of retribution -- some 50 AUC gunmen converged by boat just after midnight the morning of Nov. 22, rousing villagers from their sleep. In trademark paramilitary fashion, they called out the names of men they were looking for and then dragged them and others from their homes. "I was awake and felt the gunshots," said a 30-year-old man who sells drinking water in the village. "I took out my family in the darkness in a canoe. We stayed (away) until they told us the paramilitaries had gone." Eighteen villagers were rounded up and shot in front of a small church built on a floating island. Others died in their homes or were hauled off and found later. Bodies turned up for days, floating in blue-brown waters or discarded in narrow, marshy inlets. Nearly a week after the attack, bloodstained clothing still lay on the dirt outside the red-and-white church. Ironically, survivors said, many of the young men targeted by the AUC -- water taxi drivers said to have been offering transportation to the leftist guerrillas -- escaped by starting up their boats and fleeing into the night. The attack, fresh evidence of degradation in Colombia's 36-year war, has made a ghost town out of this tiny village located in the Grand Cienaga, a breathtaking nature reserve just inland from the Caribbean sea. A week after the killings, only about 200 of the village's 3,000 residents remain. All the others fled, joining the ranks of the nearly 2 million Colombians displaced by violence during the past 15 years. of Amed Gutierrez, whose father-in-law, a shopkeeper, was killed, called the attack a devastating setback for the area. Environmental protection efforts had helped restore dwindling fish populations here, and two years ago the government extended electricity to Nueva Venecia for the first time. The AUC has not claimed responsibility, but villagers have no doubt they were the ones. "They've catalogued us as a guerrilla town," Gutierrez said. While many vented anger against the paramilitaries, others blamed the leftist guerrillas for recruiting supporters in Nueva Venecia and then failing to come to their rescue when the AUC attacked. "Both are a plague," said Willington Mendoza, 24, a builder of the wooden houses constructed on stilts. Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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