The paramilitaries accused the villagers of supporting the FARC guerrillas, though no evidence supported the claim. Over the course of the attack, 15 people were killed -- peasant farmers, not combatants. Women were raped. Forty-three houses were burned to the ground, reducing the village to ash and rubble. Cattle were stolen. Nine hundred people -- nearly the entire population -- were forcibly displaced, driven from the only homes they had known. The attack was not an isolated act of violence in a country scarred by decades of civil conflict. It was systematic, planned, and carried out with a level of coordination that would later implicate state institutions themselves. The people of El Aro lost their loved ones, their property, and their community in a single day. Many would never return.

In 2006, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights convicted the Colombian state for its role in the massacre. The court established that members of the Colombian Army's 4th Division, local police, and the governor's office had either actively participated in the killings or had failed to fulfill their constitutional obligation to protect the civilian population. The following year, the Third Section of Colombia's Council of State ordered the government to pay damages to the victims' families. On May 31, 2018, the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia declared the El Aro massacre a crime against humanity -- a legal designation that ensures there is no statute of limitations on prosecution. For the families who survived, these rulings represented acknowledgment, though they could not undo what had been done.

The political fallout from El Aro reached the highest levels of Colombian government. Alvaro Uribe had served as Governor of Antioquia from 1995 to 1997, the period during which the massacre occurred. In 2008, a former paramilitary fighter named Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernandez accused Uribe of having planned the massacre alongside military generals and paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso. Opposition Senator Gustavo Petro -- who would later become Colombia's president -- questioned Uribe about a government-owned helicopter allegedly used to transport paramilitaries to El Aro. A pager message intercepted from one of the perpetrators read: "I remind you to call the governor. Introduce me and I will visit him in the afternoon." Uribe denied all involvement, calling the testimony inconsistent. The Colombian newsweekly Revista Semana noted that Villalba's earlier testimony, given years before, had not mentioned Uribe at all.

Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary commander convicted for the massacre, received a 40-year prison sentence. He maintained that the victims had died in combat and were guerrillas, not civilians -- a claim contradicted by the evidence and by every judicial body that examined the case. After his extradition to the United States, Mancuso continued testifying via satellite as part of Colombia's Justice and Peace process. In November 2008, he told Revista Semana that three helicopters had been present during the massacre: one belonging to the guerrillas, one from the Colombian military, and one from the Antioquia governor's office. The full truth of El Aro may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. What is settled is this: fifteen people who were alive on the morning of October 22, 1997, were dead by the end of the day, and the community that mourned them was scattered across Colombia's countryside. In 2023, President Petro formally recognized the state's involvement in the Ituango massacres, offering an acknowledgment decades in the making.