Colombia-Massacre
8-29-1995
^By ANDREW SELSKY=
^Associated Press Writer=
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) _ Gunmen killed at least 16 people today on a banana plantation in northwestern Colombia, the third such slaughter in a month in one of the country's most violent regions.
Survivors blamed leftist rebels, according to Osvaldo Munoz, mayor of Carepa, a town six miles from the massacre site.
An army brigade in the region dispatched troops to the site.
"We believe there were 16 or perhaps 17 killed," Cpl. Manuel Andres said by telephone from the brigade headquarters in Carepa. "We have soldiers there trying to find out what happened."
The victims were members of Hope, Peace and Liberty, a political party founded by demobilized rebels, Munoz told RCN radio.
The party, known by its initials in Spanish as the EPL, has been in a bitter dispute with rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which backs two rival parties: the Communist Party and the Patriotic Union party.
On Aug. 12, gunmen killed 18 people in a bar in Chigorodo, six miles south of Carepa. A right-wing paramilitary group is suspected in that attack, which apparently was a reprisal for the killings of six people, including three off-duty soldiers, in a nearby town hours earlier.
A rights group, the Andean Commission of Jurists, identified the region as one Colombia's deadliest. An average of three people are killed there every day for political reasons, the report said.
The steamy region of banana plantations and impoverished towns, called Uraba, is located near the Caribbean and 35 miles from the Panama border.
^By ANDREW SELSKY=
^Associated Press Writer=
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) _ Gunmen killed at least 16 people today on a banana plantation in northwestern Colombia, the third such slaughter in a month in one of the country's most violent regions.
Survivors blamed leftist rebels, according to Osvaldo Munoz, mayor of Carepa, a town six miles from the massacre site.
An army brigade in the region dispatched troops to the site.
"We believe there were 16 or perhaps 17 killed," Cpl. Manuel Andres said by telephone from the brigade headquarters in Carepa. "We have soldiers there trying to find out what happened."
The victims were members of Hope, Peace and Liberty, a political party founded by demobilized rebels, Munoz told RCN radio.
The party, known by its initials in Spanish as the EPL, has been in a bitter dispute with rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which backs two rival parties: the Communist Party and the Patriotic Union party.
On Aug. 12, gunmen killed 18 people in a bar in Chigorodo, six miles south of Carepa. A right-wing paramilitary group is suspected in that attack, which apparently was a reprisal for the killings of six people, including three off-duty soldiers, in a nearby town hours earlier.
A rights group, the Andean Commission of Jurists, identified the region as one Colombia's deadliest. An average of three people are killed there every day for political reasons, the report said.
The steamy region of banana plantations and impoverished towns, called Uraba, is located near the Caribbean and 35 miles from the Panama border.
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