MANY CIVILIANS STILL CAUGHT UP IN COLOMBIA'S CIVIL WAR

PURACE, Colombia -- When the guerrillas came to destroy this little town,
Jhimmy Guaua 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 didn't succeed. When the rebels left a few
hours later, several buildings were in ruins. Two police officers had been
killed. And Guaua 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 Guaua'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 Guaua 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
crossfire, 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 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 the nation'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 and 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 failed to end. 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
past 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, windswept 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 where 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 percent 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 Castao has said that as much as 70
percent 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. T he 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. 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.