Unreported World

Unreported World investigates how Colombia's indigenous people have been targeted in a string of massacres perpetrated by guerrillas, paramilitary groups and the security forces.

Colombia's government claims success in its war against left-wing FARC guerrillas and in restoring law and order. But the country is still beset with a conflict that is killing thousands.

And as Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Katherine Churcher discover at a jungle massacre site where the pools of blood are still drying, behind the continuing violence there is a state of complete impunity. Nobody can explain why the massacre happened. Soldiers claim civilian attackers with pistols have murdered eight people. But local witnesses say they heard sustained bursts of automatic gunfire, hinting at the involvement of security forces.

In the region of Narino, the Awa people - one of about 100 indigenous groups in Colombia - are trying to escape the violence. The Awa are living in squalid conditions without proper shelter, hygiene or food. One tells Hartley they fled a massacre in the jungle that killed 11 people. A young farmer, who narrowly escaped being killed, claims their FARC attackers told him they were taking revenge against the Awa, who they accuse of collaborating with the army.

The team is told about another massacre in the nearby village of Rosario, where they find the local Awa people too scared to reveal what happened. A human rights worker shows Hartley photos of the grisly scene at Rosario. He says that the attackers wore camouflage uniforms and masks and executed 12 people, including small children. He claims the murders took place after a local Awa woman complained that the Colombian army had shot dead her husband, who they accused of being a FARC rebel. He says the authorities have failed to investigate what happened.

The team talks to a colonel at the army camp where the alleged killers are based. He claims the Rosario incident was nothing to do with the army, but that the Awa had been feuding among themselves. But the Attorney General's office tells Unreported World that five members of a criminal gang had been charged with the Rosario murders and that the army's alleged role has also been investigated.

The team travels by boat to see another tribe under threat, the Emperara. In the village of Tortola they hear how the inhabitants fled after the village was turned into a battleground. One tells Hartley that FARC guerrillas entered the village to address a meeting of the Emperara when government soldiers ambushed them. He says the Emperara feel trapped between FARC and the army. Whenever they talk to one side or the other, they're accused of being collaborators, and are targeted. But, he says, indigenous people are completely neutral in the war.

At a nearby military camp, where the team are told the soldiers who attacked Tortola are based, a lieutenant tells Hartley that his men had moved in to prevent a cocaine drugs deal. He says the indigenous people of Tortola have brought the war into their homes because they are trading narcotics with FARC rebels.

Hartley and Churcher find out that indigenous people are heavily involved with the coca business in the region of Cauca, where they see huge fields of the plant used to make cocaine growing in the hillsides. Bogota's government is trying to eradicate the coca fields, but as one local tells Hartley, the money is too good to uproot the crop and grow something less risky.

Also in Cauca the team meets the indigenous Nasa people, who are suffering a campaign of murders, death threats and intimidation: they say it's because international mining companies want to drive them off their gold-rich land. The Nasa people's struggle to keep their land underlines how, despite the government's claim that it is destroying the rebel threat, the vicious civil war is driving the country's indigenous tribes to the brink of extinction.