At the end of the 1960s, just as anthropologists and clergy were stepping forward to denounce human rights violations against native peoples across the hemisphere, two episodes of violence against the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples of the Colombian Llanos surfaced in the public eye. The first was the December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch near the Venezuelan border. The perpetrators' forthright admission of a horrifying ambush and their professed ignorance of both the evil and the criminality of their actions provoked widespread shock and exposed the virulence of racism on the frontier. Then, in 1970, the Colombian military cracked down on a brief armed rebellion by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas, in the department of Meta. A national controversy emerged over charges of extrajudicial killings, torture, and corrupt use of power by the Colombian Administrative Security Department's Rural Security Service of the Eastern Plains (Servicio de Seguridad Rural de los Llanos Orientales, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, or DAS Rural) and the VII Brigade of the Colombian Army. By making the La Rubiera massacre and the Planas Affair into public spectacles, Colombian rights advocates were finally able to generate outrage over the violent actions of settler society in indigenous communities.The La Rubiera massacre and the Planas militarization differ in critical ways. One was carried out by private individuals, the other was backed by state agencies, and the state prosecuted the former for their crimes but exonerated the latter. Yet their origins and relationships to ongoing dispossession of indigenous communities overlapped. The Llanos region of Colombia-the