Los Angeles (EFE)— Some of the brightest stars of Latin music joined with Colombia’s Juanes here to sing into the early hours of Thursday to support victims of land mines in Colombia and raise consciousness about the hidden devices that each year kill or maim a thousand peasants and children.

His compatriot Carlos Vives, along with Spaniard Alejandro Sanz, Dominican merengue master Juan Luis Guerra and even Mexico’s Salma Hayek, better known from her acting than for her voice, joined Juanes in a benefit concert.

Also on stage for Wednesday night’s all-acoustic set at Gibson Amphitheater in Los Angeles were Laura Pausini, Luis Fonsi and Ricardo Montaner.

The aim of the emotion-charged performance, Sanz told EFE, was “the awakening of consciousness, which is the most important thing.”

Fans snapped up all the tickets for the “Colombia sin minas” (Colombia without mines) concert within five hours of their going on sale.

While the idea for the benefit was born just four months ago in Los Angeles, Colombia’s civil war dates back more than four decades, and it was during the late 1990s that Juanes began to focus on the damage done by land mines.

“It is against nature to plant mines in land that is for planting crops,” said Colombia’s Vives, acknowledging that he was not aware of the dimensions of the problem in their shared homeland until Juanes recruited him to take part in the benefit.

Raising awareness about the scourge is just what Juanes has been trying to do for the past seven years, since he wrote and recorded a song, “Fijate bien,” about the civilians - mostly children - killed and maimed by the buried explosives.

The L.A. concert featured the artists’ singing each other’s compositions, with Juanes interpreting pieces by Sanz and the latter offering his renditions of Guerra’s hits. And the “unplugged” format helped to keep costs low and maximize the amount of money raised for land-mine victims.

“This time, music is a tool, a weapon of peace,” Juanes told the audience.

But Juanes also acknowledged that the battle to do away with the buried weapons is an uphill struggle. He recommended decriminalizing drugs as a tactic in the fight, noting that leftist rebels and rightist paramilitaries heavily engaged in drug trafficking are the ones who sow the devices.

“A song cannot stop a mine, but it can pierce the heart of the one who plants it,” Sanz said.

“From what has happened in the rehearsals, I feel that this will go further,” Vives said, suggesting that the lineup from Wednesday’s concert could record a song together or even take the show on tour as part of efforts to ameliorate a problem in which, according to Juanes, “all of us are in a small way accomplices.”

The concert came less than two months after observation April 4 of the first International Day for Land Mine Awareness.

Colombian officials and NGOs marked that date by noting that the Andean nation has the dubious and sad distinction of seeing more of its citizens, many of them children playing in rural fields, killed or wounded by land mines per year than any other country on earth.

Up to 120,000 of the devices are estimated to have been planted around the Andean nation, the great majority of them by leftist rebels seeking to inflict casualties on soldiers and protect coca leaf plantations that supply their extensive drug-trafficking operations. Almost all of the weapons are “non-industrial” homemade mines manufactured in guerrilla camps at low cost.

On that occasion, the Colombian Campaign Against Mines, Unicef, the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. Development Program called for belligerents to forswear use of the devices.

Having ratified in 2001 the Ottawa Convention, which outlaws the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel mines, Colombia subsequently developed an action plan to rid the country of the buried bombs.

A report by the international Landmine Monitor said that an average of three Colombians per day are victims of land mine blasts, for a total of 4,804 casualties over the past 16 years, including 1,167 dead and 3,637 wounded.

Among those killed were nearly 500 children.

The global watchdog outfit also noted that 97 percent of Colombia’s land mine blasts take place in rural areas, which together constitute the main battleground in the country’s internal conflict.

The mines observation agency said that planting each mine costs the armed irregulars less than $2, while it costs the country about $1,000 to eliminate one.