For those of you who may not know, Buga is a small town not too far from Cali. I've been there a time or two as it's a tourist place because of the large church and frequent religious festivals. It's always been considered safe because of the flat terrain leading from Cali to there but I don't believe any small town is safe these days.
I'm headed for Cali this weekend. I'm a bit nervious about my San Fran to Miami flight as I understand only 10 percent of the bags are being checked for bombs. Also I understand the checks are random and do to political correctness they're not profiling the bags of passengers of foreign countries or origin. If anyone wants to get together in Cali the next couple of weeks send me an email.
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Gunmen have killed 55 people in a series of massacres around war-torn Colombia, with most of the attacks blamed on selective murders by far-right militias, police said on Thursday.
The worst killing took place on Wednesday around the small village of Buga, a hilly cattle and farming district in Valle del Cauca Province about 160 miles southwest of the capital Bogota, where members of an outlawed anti-communist death squad killed 24 peasants, all of them men.
``They separated women, children and old people. Those left were told to run and were shot. Those who fell were then finished off point-blank. This was atrocious,'' Buga Mayor John Jairo Bohorquez told Reuters in a telephone interview.
In a separate attack also on Wednesday, a group of about 30 militia gunmen killed 12 people in the town of Remolinos, in the steamy northern region of Madgalena. The area is considered to be a stronghold of the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, which groups the country's paramilitaries and is known by the Spanish initials AUC.
The far-right militias often target peasants suspected of collaborating with leftist guerrillas and have been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia's 37-year-old war, which has claimed 40,000 mainly civilian lives in the last decade alone.
The 8,000-member AUC was also blamed for the killing on Wednesday of Luis Elias Marin, the mayor of Cartagena del Chaira.
The AUC have killed hundreds of civilians so far this year.
AUC DUBBED ``TERRORISTS'' BY UNITED STATES
The group recently admitted it had committed excesses and said that it would strive to kill more selectively rather than carry out the indiscriminate massacres of village populations which made it notorious.
In one incident earlier this year, paramilitaries killed 40 Indians in the remote southern village of Naya, using a chainsaw to cut off the arms of one of the victims, a 17-year old girl.
The AUC are classified by the State Department as a ''terrorist'' organization. So are their sworn enemies, the Marxist guerrilla groups FARC and ELN, which also stand accused of regular massive human rights abuses.
Human Rights Watch last week accused parts of the Colombian military -- which is receiving a large part of about $1 billion in U.S. aid for the anti-cocaine ``Plan Colombia'' -- of maintaining links with the paramilitaries.
President Andres Pastrana has sworn not to tolerate cooperation between the armed forces and the AUC -- which says that it wants to gain a place on the nation's political stage.
The government has been maintaining difficult peace talks with the Marxist FARC -- Spanish initials for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- for three years, but has never spoken to the AUC.
Another 14 corpses were found in three provinces of the war-torn country, but the police said they did not know if they had been killed by the far-right paramilitaries or by their leftist guerrilla foes.
