The first to die was Luis Pablo Redondo, the village teacher, one of the most respected men in the community. The paramilitaries accused him of being a rebel sympathiser. The villagers were forced to look on as he was beaten savagely, his ears cut off. He was stabbed, slowly and deliberately, dozens of times between his ribs, no wound fatal. He was then suffocated with a black plastic bag. One girl, aged five at the time, now 13, has not spoken a word since that day. Another, Nayibis Contreras, a pretty 16-year-old, was dragged by her hair through the dirt streets to the central plaza where in the evenings the locals would come to sit and chat. She was strung up on the only tree in the square, in front of the Catholic church, before being gutted by a bayonet; her crime was to have been the girlfriend of a known guerrilla.