"Witness 3" and her children and grandchildren were nervous as they started heating food on their stove at around 6 a.m. on December 13, 1998. Planes and helicopters had been circling for most of the previous day over their small village of Santo Domingo in the northeastern Arauca region of Colombia. The helicopters were battling with leftist guerrillas in the brush about half a mile from the village, shooting machine guns as they swooped low.

At about 10 a.m., as she walked across the room to put more wood on the stove,

A drawing of the massacre by a child from Santo Domingo.

everything went black. Seconds later her children and grandchildren were screaming and bleeding. Her two daughters, ages 5 and 7, were dead. Her son and grandson died soon after. "He was saying 'Help me, mom, help me,' " the middle-aged woman, who did not want to reveal her name, told an international human rights tribunal at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago on September 22 and 23.

In all, 19 people, including seven children, were killed that morning in Santo Domingo. At least 25 more were seriously injured. Witness 3 and other residents say they have no doubt the attack on their town came from Colombian military helicopters dropping bombs. But the Colombian government maintains that the town was demolished by a powerful homemade car bomb placed in an abandoned truck by guerrillas with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

The tribunal, convened by Northwestern's Center for International Human Rights, aims to determine whether the government was in fact responsible for the massacre and whether it violated five international human rights treaties in the process. While it is not judicially binding in any way, human rights workers hope the publicity the tribunal garners will show the Colombian government that its brutality and impunity is not going unnoticed.

There is an average of more than one massacre--defined as the killing of three or more people at one time in one area--a day in Colombia. There is a 98 percent impunity rate for the perpetrators of this brutality, with not a single person brought to trial last year for any of the almost 400 massacres that occurred.

Colombia was represented by two Chicago attorneys at the tribunal, since the government refused to send a representative. But the government did send a sensational video called "La Gran Verdad en Santo Domingo" ("The Great Truth in Santo Domingo"). The video features B-movie, horror-style music and footage of actors dressed as guerrillas negotiating a transfer of 1,300 kilos of cocaine, as an English voice-over describes the government's efforts to "keep the dangerous drugs from reaching the U.S."

The prosecution asserted that U.S.-made helicopters and munitions were used in the massacre, a point that is particularly relevant given the recent approval of the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia aid package to the Colombian military despite its rampant human rights violations. This allegation was backed up by the FBI, which issued a report in May confirming that specimens recovered after the massacre came from "a United States designed AN-M41 fragmentation bomb and fuse."

In early December the tribunal will announce its verdict. This is part of a growing movement of international tribunals for crimes that aren't being brought to justice in their own countries. There have been three other international tribunals regarding Colombian atrocities in the past few years--two in Canada and one in the Colombian town of Barranca.

"The massacre in Santo Domingo is one among thousands of serious crimes committed in Colombia every year," says Father Javier Girardo, a Jesuit priest who heads the International Commission for Justice and Peace. "International tribunals like this are necessary because even if they don't affect the judiciary, they bring injustice to light in the international community. It shows the government and the paramilitaries that in other parts of the world there are people watching."