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COLOMBIA: A Painful Pilgrimage
By Diana Cariboni and Constanza Vieira*
BELLAVISTA, Colombia, Oct 30 (IPS) - "Father Antún! Father Antún is back!" were the happy, surprised shouts heard by the IPS news
team accompanying Catholic priest Antún Ramos as he returned to his former parish in the
village of Bellavista in northwestern Colombia.
Local residents came up to hug him warmly or shake his hand with respect. Antún is seen
as a hero in the area along the Atrato river, which runs through the jungles of the province
of Chocó, where Bellavista is located in the district of Bojayá.
Chocó, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, also borders Panama and the Caribbean sea to the
north.
But the 34-year-old Antún denies that he is any sort of hero.
He still cries when he remembers the 119 villagers killed and 98 wounded in his small
church in the Afro-Colombian community of Bellavista.
"This story would take a whole month to tell," says one of the survivors of the May 2, 2002
massacre that put the district of Bojayá and the village of Bellavista on the global map of
war crimes.
That day, Antún led the evacuation of around 650 survivors through the crossfire between
the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the far-right paramilitary
United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). The civilians in the motorboats were
waving white flags and chanting: "Who are we? Civilians. What are we asking for? Respect
for our lives."
Shortly before they fled, the FARC, which was lobbing home-made mortars at paramilitary
fighters who had set up camp behind the church, hit the building with a gas cylinder
bomb.
Some 300 civilians had taken refuge in the church. Of the 119 people killed, 44 were
children.
The stage for the tragedy began to be set in late April 2002. On Apr. 23,
Freddy Rendón, alias "El Alemán" ("The German"), commander of the Elmer Cárdenas
paramilitary bloc, showed up at the parish house in Bellavista. In his tense meeting with
Antún, the paramilitary leader and the priest each made their position clear.
"I had heard a lot about him, because of all the atrocities he committed," recalled the
priest. The diocese of Quibdo, the provincial capital of Chocó, documented 700 murders
in the area by the AUC between 1996 and 2000.
The priest was struck by the paramilitary leader’s imposing presence. "He's around two
metres tall and looks totally European, with green eyes…"
After boating along the river for 228 km, heading north from Quibdó, the IPS team
reached Bellavista in the early afternoon of Sept. 14.
From the pier at the empty port, we followed a 90-metre cement walkway to the church
where the massacre occurred, in a painful pilgrimage. As soon as he entered the door, the
priest kneeled to pray, his hands clasped behind him.
The year of 2002 marked Father Antún deeply. Two months before the tragedy, his mother
died of a heart attack on the street in Quibdó, in the middle of a shootout between the
guerrillas and the army. Later, one of his brothers was kidnapped and held for 45 days by
the National Liberation Army (ELN). The priest had to negotiate the ransom payment,
which the family did not have.
On the morning of Sept. 15, 2007, Antún was sitting on the step which was once the altar,
next to what is left of a plaster statue of Jesus, a mute witness to what happened.
He recounted the tragedy for IPS, while a four-year-old boy ran around with a cart in the
empty, pewless church, imitating the noise of an engine: "Brrrruuuuummmm!
Brrrrruuuuuumm!"
The little boy has either visited a larger town or has seen cars on TV. There are no roads in
the Medio Atrato region. There is only the main route of transport - the wide, brown
waters of the Atrato river, in this territory where the population is overwhelmingly black,
and the poverty rate stands at around 80 percent.
But even when the river overflows its banks and floods all the way up to the floors of the
houses on stilts, families trapped in their homes can be seen watching TV in the
afternoon.
The boy’s playful noises seem to grow louder as Antún, describing the moment of the
explosion, makes a lengthy pause.
"What are you remembering, Father?"
"The number of pregnant women; I think nine or 10 died. And the tiny unborn babies.
They found them stuck to the walls" as a result of the shock wave of the explosion, he
explained.
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