Suspected leftist rebels gunned down at least 34 farm workers after tying them up at a ranch in a region that is among Colombia's biggest cocaine producers, authorities said.
The workers were sleeping in hammocks at the ranch near La Gabarra, 500km northeast of the capital, Bogota, when a group of armed men burst through the doors at dawn on Tuesday, tied them up with the hammocks' ropes and then shot them with automatic weapons, La Gabarra Mayor Taiz Ortega said.
At least five people were wounded and taken by boat to a hospital in the nearby town of Cucuta. It was the worst massacre in Colombia in at least a year.
"We saved ourselves by running toward the mountain," Jesus Bayona, 45, who was shot in the foot, said from his hospital bed in Cucuta.
Ortega said the motive behind the attack was not immediately known, but it appeared to be the work of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest guerrilla group that has been battling to topple the government for 40 years.
Ortega said it appeared the victims worked in coca fields -- the raw ingredient in cocaine. She said, however, that the ranch also produced cocoa, the main ingredient for chocolate, and other agricultural products.
Yinith Guerrero, a regional human-rights official, said from La Gabarra that villagers were now fleeing the area in droves as news of the massacre spread.
The La Duquesa ranch is nestled amid the thick jungle and steep mountains of Norte de Santander province, where FARC rebels and their right-wing paramilitary foes are locked in a bitter struggle for control of the lucrative drugs trade.
The top commander of the main paramilitary umbrella group known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, denied involvement in the killing and said his forces later helped remove the victims' bodies.
"We condemn the massacre by the FARC ... carried out against a peasant community that had nothing to do with the conflict," Salvatore Mancuso told local radio from a safe haven in northwest Colombia, where his group is pursuing peace talks with the government.
Paramilitary militias have been blamed for some of the worst massacres in Colombia's civil war.
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