PACHO, Colombia — They came looking for paradise in the Andes but found disillusionment and death.
For Jenny James and the little band of starry-eyed followers who arrived in Colombia in 1989 from a commune in Ireland, the verdant mountains of the southern part of the country seemed perfect--so much so that they abandoned their original plan to settle in Bolivia to the south.
James, then 46, found a revolutionary fervor that appealed to her in the hinterlands of Colombia, where guerrillas have waged a war against the government since the 1960s under the banners of agrarian reform and justice for the poor. Her own leftist activism was born of the social revolt of the '60s.
"I was impressed by the people's high level of political consciousness," she recalled in an interview on a farm in Pacho, 30 miles from Bogota, Colombia's capital.
James had begun her search for a new life with "primal scream" therapy in her native England and ran a commune at Burtonport in Ireland's County Donegal before coming to Colombia.
Pursuing free love and back-to-the-roots living, her Atlantis commune bought land in the rebel-controlled mountains of Tolima state. Reaching the commune near the town of Icononzo, 50 miles southwest of Bogota, required hours of walking and sometimes a machete to clear overgrown paths.
James and the others, including Ann Barr, a commune member from County Donegal who earns cash for the group as an astrologer to Bogota's well-to-do, lived in simple wooden houses and tended vegetable plots some 6,600 feet above sea level.
The commune members freely exchanged sexual partners and reared several children with no formal education but a love for art and nature.
To many, life seemed idyllic. At its height in the mid-1990s, the group had about 60 residents.
Back-to-Roots Quest Led to the Jungle
But Atlantis' peaceful illusions were shattered by the slayings of two of its teenagers--one of them James' own grandson--allegedly by leftist guerrillas. The killings happened last July, but details only recently emerged.
James described how the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC from the Spanish abbreviation of its name, turned against her group--and she against them.
For 10 years relations were harmonious, she said. Then, two years ago, the rebels abruptly expelled a group of about a dozen Atlantis members that had branched out onto lands in Caqueta province, about 190 miles south of Bogota.
