Villagers' Resistance Could Alter War

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

PURACE, Colombia -- Jimmy Alberto Guauña Chicangana was going to be the first in his family of Paez Indians to graduate from college. With his law degree, he
planned to prosecute criminals and help the poor. A poster of Che Guevara, the Argentine physician and revolutionary commander in Cuba, hung on the wall of his
tiny bedroom, homage to his commitment to struggle for social justice.

Guauña was a year and a half away from graduating when he was shot and killed by members of a Marxist insurgency purporting to share his beliefs.

His death was a tragic irony. But beyond that, it was part of something that is helping to redefine rural Colombia's relationship with a nearly four-decade-old guerrilla
movement. In the past three months, residents of several towns, including this pretty mountaintop village in southwestern Colombia, have risen up in response to
guerrilla attacks -- an unarmed civil resistance to a well-armed insurgency.

These protests, apparently spontaneous, have confounded the guerrillas. In response, the insurgents have designed a political campaign in hopes of winning over this
and other villages across the country that have long provided them with recruits, food and intelligence.

Historically, civil resistance in Colombia has been largely ineffective. It is too soon to tell whether these uprisings will fare much better.

But Guauña's death was at the center of what appears to be a new relationship between combatants and civilians, on whom the war falls most harshly. And its
lessons could determine whether what happened here remains an aberration or grows into durable resistance by the rural Colombians who for years have been left
largely to fend for themselves by a weak central government.

"We've always tried to maintain a neutral position, but this neutrality has become very costly for us," said Gustavo Adolfo Valencia Garcia, the mayor of the
Purace-Coconuco municipal district, whose two main towns were attacked simultaneously on Dec. 31. "This is part of a national struggle, and it's a struggle for
power. Whichever [armed] group wins, we don't want them here."

The drama began in the cool afternoon that day, hours before a costumed procession was to march through this mostly Indian village 225 miles southwest of the
capital, Bogota. Guauña and a dozen friends who made up a musical band reveled at a pre-party lunch. Guauña, 21, had made a papier-mache devil's mask to wear.
An effigy of the old year in the likeness of the popular, bespectacled town priest slumped in a corner, ready to be burned at midnight to welcome the new year.

At about 5:30, the thud of gunfire reached Guauña's house from the main square about a quarter-mile away. All of Purace heard the guerrilla attack, the first ever on
this town, but instead of hiding in fright, the villagers reacted with defiance. Hundreds flowed down green hillsides and up dirt lanes toward the small, sandbagged
police station to protect the outnumbered officers.

With his brother and his band, Guauña quickly made his way to the town square, where an austere white church loomed across from the small school he had
attended a few years earlier. He was armed with only a flute.

Nonetheless, witnesses said, Guauña was one of the most active members of the resistance over the course of a fluid, five-hour protest. Directing his band, members
of the soccer team he founded and other villagers, Guauña helped organize the town to impede the guerrillas' pursuit of the police.

Chaos filled the town square, lit only by burning tires after a power outage. Vladimir, a young guerrilla who said he was not present during the attack but recalled
details with a clarity suggesting otherwise, said: "The people were all over us. There was a lot of shooting."

The guerrillas' homemade bombs fell first on the police station, leaving much of it in rubble. A villager stood in front of the ruins waving the Colombian flag, hoping to
hold off the guerrillas long enough to let the police escape.

The roughly 18 policemen fled in the face of several hundred guerrillas, who were swarmed by villagers waving white flags and the Colombian tricolor. Guerrillas
entered the small clinic across from the church in search of police, eventually dragging out the body of an officer named Richard Nixon Quilindo.

At about 10 p.m., Diego Guauña, 19, saw his older brother slumped near a pile of burning tires. It was only when he approached that he discovered that Jimmy
Guauña was wounded. Diego hurried his brother to the clinic, where a nurse said he was near death.

No one in the crowd learned of Jimmy's death until nearly midnight, after the guerrillas had left town. He was the only civilian to die, along with two policemen and
three guerrillas.

"They saved us," said the national police commander of Purace, whose headquarters were flattened along with the former Agrarian Bank building, the priest's house
and the pool hall. "But we can't count on their help. It's too risky for these people. Next time we'll have to rely on our own luck and capability."

What has happened in Purace and several other villages nationwide with varying degrees of success is a sign of Colombia's worsening war. Gaining intensity and
reach, a four-party conflict featuring two guerrilla armies battling a growing paramilitary force and the Colombian military is forcing a battered civilian population to
risk taking matters into its own hands.

Over the past five years, the number of civilians who have died in a war dating back to the Communist insurgencies of the 1960s has risen fivefold. In 2001, 2,088
civilians were killed by guerrillas and paramilitary forces, according to numbers compiled by the Colombian army that will be part of the Defense Ministry's annual
human rights report. The guerrillas were responsible for 1,060 of the deaths, giving them a slight edge over the paramilitary forces.

While stronger with the help of U.S. military aid, the Colombian armed forces have had little success corralling the guerrillas or the paramilitary group that sometimes
works by the army's side. Each irregular army relies on villages like this for logistical support and combatants, so significant rural resistance could severely complicate
military operations for both sides.

But the civil defiance, which began emerging late last year in this province of waterfalls, volcanoes and chilly high plains where the country's two largest rivers are
born, comes at a critical time for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the largest guerrilla army and the group that attacked this village.

Threatened with the loss of a 16,000-square-mile demilitarized zone that has been the site of peace talks for the past three years, the guerrillas recently agreed to
drop their long-held demand that the government scale back an increased military presence around the zone. But the concession, which came under pressure from
President Andres Pastrana, has proven controversial within the guerrilla movement. Diplomats and intelligence sources said the FARC's most committed military
commanders, who work outside the safe haven, are angry that their negotiators allowed a rare sign of weakness.

So far, though, the 18,000-member FARC appears to have largely tolerated the civilian uprisings. Guauña is the only known civilian casualty. But that could change
quickly as the FARC, seeking to restore an image of military strength, ratchets up attacks throughout the country.

The FARC has opened an offensive along two key roads -- one leading from Bogota into the southern province of Meta, and another east from Meta into Casanare
province. The governor of Meta, which includes a large chunk of the guerrilla safe haven, called for civil resistance to the campaign.

Last month, about 12 miles west of this village, FARC forces killed four national police officers as part of a wider recent offensive in this province. These villages,
tucked inside government-sanctioned reserves for indigenous groups, have long considered themselves outside the conflict and the government's reach. They are
governed by their own laws and community norms, but are still protected by state security forces that are the guerrillas' targets.

That independence has always been difficult to sustain because the towns, with slightly more than 1,000 residents each, sit in the middle of a key guerrilla
transportation corridor from the Pacific coast to the government-sanctioned safe haven less than 150 miles to the southeast.

As a result, local officials interpreted the New Year's Eve attacks on Purace and Coconuco as part of a new guerrilla effort to preserve territorial control in the face
of encroaching paramilitary forces. Graffiti of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the paramilitary group, have appeared on walls in recent months.

Vladimir, a 17-year-old FARC guerrilla who heads a small patrol near the town of Paletara, 20 miles from here, said the civil resistance is the result of the
government's "dark politics" of lies against the guerrillas' goals and tactics.

"We understand that these people are confused, not against us. And we are definitely not against these people," he said.

It is difficult for the people of Purace, particularly would-be leaders like Guauña, to draw that conclusion. An average student at the Manuel Maria Mosquera school,
Guauña was one of just four of the 15 members of his graduating class to head to the University of Cauca in the provincial capital, Popayan, an hour away.

There he bloomed, according to Cesar Agusto Fernandez, Guauña's grade school teacher, who was pleased when he saw him not long ago speaking passionately
about his studies and his planned legal career. "Everyone develops at different times," Fernandez said, "so I wasn't surprised he was becoming a leader."

During vacations, Guauña started Real Juventud, a soccer team to compete in regional championships. He was the team's star sweeper, as he was for his university
team. Certificates and trophies decorate the small home where he lived with his father, a peasant whose assets comprise three cattle, and his younger brother and
sister. A small cockfighting ring at the back of the house provided entertainment.

"He was our hope," said Diego, with whom Guauña shared a room. Then, recalling the attack, Diego said: "We were not afraid when we heard the noise. We saw
many people moving that way."

Many of those people were singing and chanting: "We want peace. Get out, violent ones. This is a place for peace." Oveimar, a local police official and Purace native
who did not want his last name used, recalled the swelling songs as "the voice of humanity."

"About 90 percent of the people in this town didn't even know what a guerrilla looked like -- they had never stopped here before," he said. "People just began telling
their neighbors: 'I'm going to defend this town. Let's go.' "

No one can explain why their reaction was defiant and not fearful. There had been no advance planning, villagers insisted, only vague warnings of a possible guerrilla
attack that Oveimar called "psychological warfare" to frighten towns into submission. Villagers are careful not to exaggerate their success for fear of embarrassing the
guerrillas and drawing brutal retaliation.

"The guerrillas had nothing left to do [by the time they left] -- the damage had been done," said Abraham, another police official and Purace native. "The resistance,
though, was to show them that they could not stay here. It could have been much worse, with many more deaths."

How Guauña died is not in doubt: A bullet ran clean through his throat. But other important questions that could determine whether Purace and other towns rise up
again in the face of guerrilla attacks linger: As an apparent leader in the resistance, was Guauña targeted for reprisal by the guerrillas? Or was it accidental?

No one saw the shooter. And no one has the answers.

"We don't know if it was intentional or a mistake," said Diego, who nonetheless has made up his mind about what he will do if guerrillas attack again. "Next time I will
stay in my house."

                                               © 2002