ALTHOUGH THE PEOPLE of Llorona and Puerto Galán don’t know it yet, their fates are sealed at 7 pm on Friday, when a convoy of five SUVs and four mini-vans drives south from Garbanzos through the abandoned army checkpoint. For anyone caught beyond this point, there is no escape – they are about to endure the most terrifying two days of their lives. Many will not survive.
No one is present to witness the passage of the vehicles, but their numberplates have been removed and their headlights are off, despite the fact that dusk is falling.
The vehicles speed towards Llorona but, several kilometres before the town, the last SUV in the convoy screeches to a halt. Soldiers wearing balaclavas alight and use chainsaws to cut down a huge Brazil nut tree. It crashes through telephone and electricity wires and falls across the highway, blocking the only road connecting Garbanzos to Llorona and the river villages to the south.
Shortly afterwards, thunder cracks overhead and torrential rain pours down. The wife of Juan Ricardo, our family mechanic, is cooking dinner in Llorona when the lights go out. Power outages are common and Juan Ricardo fetches candles and peers out the window.
There is just enough light from the rising moon to illuminate the convoy of vehicles travelling slowly down Avenida Independencia. One stops on the opposite side of the street. Four men knock on his neighbour’s door. Juan Ricardo is shocked to hear the loud pop of a pistol. The men drag a body to their vehicle, hurl it in the tray and then do a U-turn.
Juan Ricardo yanks the curtains closed, but when he tries to phone the police the line is dead. He tells his wife and children, ‘Crawl underneath the house and don’t come out until I get back.’
Meanwhile, the convoy continues south. Puerto Galán is now shrouded in darkness. At the food market, the men in balaclavas exit their vehicles. They illuminate the riverbank with a searchlight and greet other soldiers arriving by boat. The men spread out and sweep from door to door with torches and typewritten lists.
‘Is your father in?’ the men ask Margarita, the little girl with glasses.
‘Papá! Some men are here to see you.’
‘Are you Señor Gilberto Piñeda?’
‘Sí.’
Bang. Bullet to the face. Next house.
Margarita screams and runs, and she doesn’t stop running until she reaches the abattoir, where she squeezes through a gap in the fence and hides in an unlocked cupboard.
Confusion and panic spreads through the village. Pablo Ruben, the sunburned man, now wishes he’d heeded the warning pamphlets dropped from a helicopter a week earlier.
Some villagers run for the tropical jungle on the outskirts of town, where they hide, petrified. Others lock their doors. But the men carry crowbars and the flimsy locks provide little protection.
Isolated pistol pops are heard. Then gunfire erupts in longer, automatic bursts. The rules appear to be simple:
Those on the lists are guilty.
Those who resist are guilty.
Those who flee are guilty.
And those who stay behind have little chance.
Pablo Ruben is one of those who try to run. He and his wife sprint hand-in-hand through the fields behind their house. They do not know that teams of soldiers have spread out to form a security ring one kilometre outside the town. When the men begin shooting, Pablo Ruben’s wife is hit. A bullet lodges beneath Pablo’s clavicle, and he survives by playing dead, lying in a ditch beneath the body of his wife, who bleeds to death while he tries not to make a sound.
Back in Llorona, Juan Ricardo sets out to drive to Garbanzos for help. Once on the highway, however, he finds a line of vehicles banked up at the first curve north of Llorona, unable to advance because a huge tree has fallen across the road.
Assuming the uniformed men near the tree are army soldiers, motorists honk and lean out their windows. ‘Something’s happening in Puerto Galán,’ one shouts. ‘We heard gunfire.’
Juan Ricardo exits his car and runs towards the soldiers. They signal angrily for him to go back.
‘You need to help us!’ he pleads. ‘They’re shooting people.’
But he quickly realises his mistake. Government soldiers don’t wear balaclavas.
One of the men smashes a rifle butt across his face. Juan Ricardo falls and, before he can shield himself, is hit again. Dazed, he crawls and stumbles towards his car, but the men demand his ID. Fortunately, his name is not on their list. However, he sees a line of five kneeling motorists who’ve been separated from the others.
He’s permitted to drive away, but in the rear-view mirror he witnesses the gunmen spraying automatic fire along these motorists’ backs. They slump forward.
At Llorona, the same SUV from before is now blocking the town entrance. Juan Ricardo abandons his car and runs into scrubland, skirts wide around the fallen Brazil nut tree and, battling concussion, manages to stagger several kilometres north to his sister’s house on the outskirts of Garbanzos.
At dawn, the men in balaclavas conduct a sweep through the jungle surrounding Puerto Galán, to round up anyone who is hiding. The male citizens of Puerto Galán are herded into the marketplace and forced to file slowly past three handcuffed informants who are wearing balaclavas. Those men identified by the informants are led away to the abattoir for interrogation.
There, a silent boy and his assistants tie them up by the wrists to an overhead meat hook. Little Margarita, hiding in the cupboard, watches in horror. Operating with the chilling precision of a surgeon, the boy makes tiny incisions in his victims’ skin with a razor blade, which he then sews up before starting again. It seems to matter not how much pain he can inflict, but how long he can make it last. Margarita screws up her eyes and turns her head away. But even with her fingers in her ears she can’t entirely block out the victims’ screams and denials.
Finally, a group of twenty men are brought out of the abattoir. They look like scarecrows, their faces and bodies covered in sewn-up incisions oozing blood. They huddle together in terror. A soldier with a python tattoo on his forearm forces them to dance in the plaza, while he fires at the concrete under their feet. Bullets ricochet into their shins, bringing them down, and the soldiers crush their skulls with crowbars and bricks. Meanwhile, the next group of men are being led into the abattoir.
The sun is now high in the sky, and a helicopter hovers overhead. The villagers exit their houses waving, believing rescue has arrived. However, the helicopter fires .30-calibre rounds at the tin roofs, killing a small boy who is hiding beneath a mattress.
By midday, it is too hot for balaclavas, and the men remove them, even though this means that anyone who sees their faces must be killed. Vultures circle silently. Cicadas buzz in the heat. Above the low hum of flies come moans, groans and whimpers from the slowly dying.
The soldiers bring machetes from their mini-vans. The corpses from the highway and Llorona are added to the line of dead villagers outside the abattoir. The soldiers hack the bodies into pieces. However, cutting through bones using machetes is tiring work. They start up chainsaws and use them to cut up the bodies.
The soldiers have also brought garbage bags and shovels. But digging a grave seems like too much effort in the stifling heat.
‘The river,’ one gunman suggests.
Weighed down by stones, most of the body-filled bags sink. Some bags tear open and float. By late afternoon on Saturday, the river is awash with floating limbs.
At nightfall, several of the gunmen break into the general store and emerge brandishing bottles of aguardiente and rum. They ransack houses and terrorise anyone they find. Dogs and cats are killed. Slogans are drawn on walls with paint: Guerrilla Out! Later, the same slogans are written in blood. Now drunk, the men laugh at their own depravity.
On the third day – Sunday – the army returns from its mission. The guards have abandoned the fallen tree, and Colonel Buitrago’s men saw through it and speed towards Puerto Galán. Before they arrive, the boats leave suddenly and the soldiers pile quickly back into the SUVs and mini-vans and head north. There is only one highway connecting Garbanzos to Puerto Galán, and the convoy of vehicles must pass the army vehicles headed in the opposite direction. But Buitrago does not yet know of the carnage and does not stop them.