CIVIL WAR PREYS ON CIVILIANS

Thousands of Colombians have been slain as rebels and paramilitary
groups assert their control.

PURACE, Colombia -- When the guerrillas came to destroy this little
town, Jhimmy Guauna was there to stop them.

The musician and member of an indigenous band left his simple
whitewashed home with weapon in hand: his flute. Soon, nearly everyone
in town had joined him in the main square. They chanted. They sang.
They waved white flags and told the guerrillas to leave.

The New Year's Eve uprising did not succeed. When the rebels left a
few hours later, several buildings were in ruins. Two police officers
had been killed. And Guauna was dead. Medical workers said a single
bullet had passed through his throat, silencing the singer, painter
and aspiring lawyer. Whether stray round or deliberate shot, the
townspeople got the message: Next time, let the guerrillas win.

"I'm going to stay inside" if the guerrillas return, said Guauna's
brother Diego, who lived with Jhimmy in this town that clings like a
wasp's nest to a cliff ledge high in the western Andes. "It'd be tough
to confront them."

Jhimmy Guauna was not the first civilian killed in Colombia's
guerrilla war, nor the most recent. As Colombia's 38-year-old conflict
has intensified in the past few years, it has become one of the
deadliest in the world for noncombatants.

The number of civilians killed each year by one of Colombia's
bewildering array of armed groups has skyrocketed, from 1,552 dead in
1998 to an estimated 5,400 in 2001.

For every soldier killed in combat, six civilians die, either from
cross-fire, assassinations or massacres carried out by the military,
leftist guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary groups, according to
figures kept by the Center for Investigation and Popular Education, a
research group based in Bogota, the capital.

Colombia, in fact, is one of the few war zones in the world where all
illegal armed groups at times explicitly target civilians, according
to human rights activists. In Colombia's drug-financed conflict,
civilians often become targets as armed groups try to exert control
over rural areas where coca, the plant used in making cocaine, is
grown. Farmers, housewives, store owners and teachers are shot, blown
up or hacked to death. The murders take place day and night, in cities
and towns, at home and in schools and churches.

It's a crisis the Colombian government has so far failed to end. Peace
talks begun three years ago have made little progress, nearly
collapsing earlier this year. Hundreds of towns and hamlets are
without police or soldiers because of lack of money or fears for the
officers' safety, leaving citizens vulnerable to the whims of local
rebel or paramilitary commanders. Even when towns do have protection,
it's usually provided by poorly equipped police facing battle-hardened
fighters.

In response, an extraordinary grass-roots resistance has flourished in
the last several years.

Towns have declared themselves peace islands, where neither the army
nor insurgents are welcome. Other communities have mounted ad hoc
displays of resistance. Still others have attempted to directly
negotiate with the armed groups.

So far, there have been few successes, although some civilians
continue to hold out hope.

"It's a long, slow process and there's no magic bullet," said Robin
Kirk, an expert on Colombia with New York-based Human Rights Watch.

What is clear is that none of the armed groups will allow any such
movements to threaten their power.

Comandante Vladimir is the nom de guerre for a member of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which attacked Purace
on Dec. 31. Standing at a rainy, wind-swept roadblock in Colombia's
high plains 12 miles from the village, he explained that the civilian
resistance was a "serious" issue that the guerrillas would soon clear
up.

"We are going to make people understand things," said Vladimir, a
17-year-old who has been a rebel for four years. "We are going to call
everyone who has been doing this civil resistance together to explain
to them what is happening. The government is putting the people against us.

"The people are confused," he said.

Two leftist rebel groups have fought the government through most of
the nearly four decades of conflict. More recently, right-wing
paramilitary groups have joined the battle, sometimes with support
from the army.

Unlike other conflicts in which private armies must depend on locals
for food, shelter or supplies, none of Colombia's armed groups need
the goodwill of civilians.

Instead, all sides finance their activities at least in part from
drugs. Colombia accounts for nearly 80% of the world's supply of
cocaine and most of the heroin sold on the East Coast of the United
States.

The Colombian military estimates that more than $500 million a year
from drugs and kidnappings flows to the country's leftist rebel
groups--FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN. The
groups tax farmers who grow coca, and the Colombian military says FARC
has also begun to process and transport illegal drugs.

Meanwhile, paramilitary leader Carlos Castano has said that as much as
70% of the income for his right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia comes from drug sources as well, financing its explosive
growth from a few hundred men in the 1980s to more than 10,000 today.

More than any other factor, this growing reliance on drug money has
thrust civilians onto Colombia's killing fields as each group grapples
for territory. In addition, the desire to control transit corridors
and natural resources fuels the land grab.

The farmers and merchants living in areas controlled by paramilitary
forces are seen by guerrilla groups as right-wing sympathizers,
supplying labor and money to the enemy. Civilians in rebel-controlled
territory are viewed with suspicion by the rightists.

That is why a sense of dread gripped the town of San Vicente del
Caguan last month, when it seemed that peace talks between rebels and
the government were on the verge of collapse.

The town is the capital of a special zone ceded to guerrillas by the
government for negotiations. Residents feared that the military would
roll into the region to regain control if the talks ended, to be
followed by paramilitary forces.

"If the zone goes, we are cannon fodder," said Victor Ayala, the
second in command of the unarmed local police force.

The self-sufficiency provided by drug money has also meant that the
paramilitary groups and guerrillas don't have to answer to outside
forces. There are no superpowers that can yank their funding, no
external groups to influence their thinking. Both easily ignore
repeated pleas from the United Nations and national and international
peace groups to show more respect for human rights.

As a result, Colombia's conflict is more a brutal clash for power than
an effort to win the hearts and minds of the populace.

"As the sides fight for territory and economic resources, each year
the conflict becomes more degraded," said Ana Teresa Bernal, head of
Redepaz, a leading Colombian peace group. "It's a conflict that more
than anything else affects the civilian population. It is tearing
apart the fabric of society."

The first, scattered attempts at organized civilian resistance came in
the 1980s, when the right-wing paramilitary groups began to flourish.
But it wasn't until the late 1990s that local peace groups began a
concerted effort to advance the cause of civil resistance, especially
in rural areas.

The first "communities of peace" arose in northern Colombia, in a
volatile and isolated region near the border with Panama. People from
several towns banded together and pledged to remain strictly neutral
in the conflict, following three simple rules: no guns, no
participation in the war and no sharing of information with any side.

The hope was that the paramilitary forces and guerrillas battling for
control of the region's transit routes to the Pacific and Atlantic
would leave the communities alone.

But the theory was complicated by the realities of life. Families had
children who belonged to guerrilla units. Paramilitary fighters would
visit girlfriends in the towns.

And so, both sides continued targeting civilians.

By some estimates, more than 100 people have been killed in the peace
communities since 1997. Those who have worked to foster the growing
number of peace communities insist that many more people would have
been killed if not for the towns' desire to remain neutral. But they
acknowledge that results could have been better.

"The idea was that the armed groups would respect the communities.
That never happened," said one researcher, who declined to be named
because she is still involved in the project.

Jhimmy Guauna's rebellion here in Purace was one recent example of a
spontaneous grass-roots backlash. Several other towns throughout
Colombia have held similar demonstrations.

Many of them have taken place in indigenous communities, where there
is a long history of social organization as groups have fought for
recognition by the government. Still, the protests seem mostly a rush
of adrenaline and frustration, quickly quashed by the reality of
confronting armed guerrillas.

For instance, in Coconuco, about 10 miles south of Purace, a squad of
ELN guerrillas attacked the police station Dec. 17, firing machine
guns for less than an hour, then retreating. No one was injured.

As the guerrillas were leaving town, they ran into a band of carolers
celebrating the Christmas holidays. The revelers shouted at the
guerrillas and were joined by other townspeople.

Local media portrayed the event as though the citizens had driven out
the guerrillas.

When the ELN and FARC guerrillas came back two weeks later, striking
the police stations in Purace and Coconuco in a coordinated attack,
there was no effort to take to the streets.

"The first display was a valiant act, a defense of the country, the
people, the land," said Gustavo Valencia, Coconuco's mayor. "But in
front of the power of guns, we are vulnerable. People are terrified
now."

The tiny coffee town of Tarso in western Colombia is yet another
experiment in civilian resistance. Three years ago, ex-guerrillas got
together with local residents and held meetings that led to the
creation of a municipal assembly with 150 representatives.

The idea was that widespread citizen participation would stave off
attacks by convincing the leftist rebels that the town was run by the
people, not Bogota's central government.

Last year, the assembly worked with the mayor to develop a plan to
provide night classes for poor farmers, free bus transportation for
students and a fund to support small businesses.

Then, cars and motorcycles without license plates--an effort to
conceal the vehicles' origin--began to appear. Strangers with side
arms were seen idling on street corners with local police officers.

In October, they struck. A squad of right-wing fighters, angered that
ex-guerrillas were involved in the process, approached one of the
leaders of the assembly in front of the white church that dominates
the town. They gave the former ELN member and four friends 24 hours to
leave town.

The threat put a halt to the experiment in self-reliance. The assembly
has not met since October. The town seems a broken place, with
fragments of the assembly's vision scattered around like so much
shattered glass.

One assembly member, a coffee rancher, said he would consider it a
blessing if the right-wing paramilitary forces told him to leave.

"At least that way, I know they won't kill me," said Gabriel Jaime
Gomez, 40, who was once kidnapped by an ELN band. Rebels who later
left the same group worked with him to forge the assembly.

The former guerrillas who fled are more hopeful. They acknowledge that
many of Colombia's civil resistance movements have only ended in more
deaths.

But Tarso, they hope, will be different.

"The process has collapsed, but it will recuperate," said William
Zapata, one of those threatened by the right-wing fighters. "It cannot
be stopped."