Colombian Rebels Resist U.S. War on Coca
 

          By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

               SAN JOSE DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia -- As leftist rebels
               occupied Albert Schweitzer Hospital in the city of Miraflores 11
          days ago, using it as a vantage point to attack a military base across the
          street, explosions and gunfire rained over the corrugated-tin roof of the
          hospital. A plane dropped bombs in the distance. Outside teen-agers fell
          dead and wounded.

          "How do you like our party?" a witness recalled a guerrilla as having said.

          After taking the hospital the rebels searched the rooms for soldiers and
          police officers, said doctors, nurses and other hospital employees who
          had fled here to San Jose from Miraflores, a short plane ride away. In
          occupying the hospital and routing the soldiers and police, the rebels
          turned it into a target in the battle as well as now, more than a week later.

          "There was panic, terror, because of the continuous explosions," said a
          nurse's assistant who insisted on anonymity.

          The battle continued for 23 hours, with the doctors and nurses' cleaning,
          stitching and bandaging the wounded throughout the period. For some the
          memory of a battle three years ago in which the hospital burned came
          crashing back.

          In the final days of Ernesto Samper's presidency, which ended last week
          when Andres Pastrana was sworn as as his successor, rebels launched
          attacks in 17 of the 32 states in the country, killing an estimated 140
          soldiers and police officers, as well as scores of civilians.

          The most stunning attacks were at the police and military bases in
          Miraflores, which is critical to U.S.-backed efforts to eradicate coca. In a
          visit here this week Drug Enforcement Administrator Thomas Constantine
          pledged U.S. aid to rebuild the bases.

          For the coca growers in Guaviare state, the bases at Miraflores and here
          at San Jose are symbols of a U.S. war on drugs that, they say, is being
          fought on their backs. Guaviare produces 65 percent of Colombian coca,
          or 250 tons of coca paste, from 60,000 acres, the Colombian
          government said.

          Even before the August offensive, police and soldiers were at odds with
          residents of Miraflores, a coca-growing enclave carved in the jungle 275
          miles southeast of Bogota. Soldiers did not venture out alone after dark.
          In the middle of the night snipers sometimes shot at the base.

          The hospital workers called Miraflores "an attack foretold," saying that in
          fliers and statements the rebels had warned civilians to keep a distance
          from government security installations. But with an unusual meeting last
          month between Pastrana and the leader of the largest rebel group, the
          Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, residents had grown optimistic
          about the prospects for peace and may have thought that the attack had
          been called off.

          Instead it was fierce. Shooting continued from one evening into the next
          day, with 40 soldiers and officers killed and 129 taken prisoner.
          Eventually the hospital workers overcame their terror and sent a
          delegation to give the rebels an ultimatum, to take the fight outside or the
          workers would stop treating injuries.

          "They agreed, but they didn't really understand," a hospital administrator
          said. "They still kept shooting from the grounds of our compound."

          When the shooting stopped, workers said, the rebels took wounded
          soldiers and officers to the hospital, chiding them for putting up a fight.

          "If you'd have surrendered, none of this would have happened," the
          guerrillas told them.

          The reproach was taken as an apology. "I think they felt a bit of solidarity
          with the wounded," said one doctor.

          The danger for the 40 workers who fled here did not end when the guns
          quieted. Now the workers grapple with an amorphous dread, so choked
          by violence that they are not sure whom to fear. They insisted on
          anonymity.

          After the attack the military has been using the hospital freely, the workers
          said. At first soldiers arrived with weapons, breaking a rule that requires
          arms be left outside. The soldiers argued that the hospital's neutrality had
          been broken.

          The soldiers' use of the hospital made health workers fear another
          guerrilla attack or sniper fire.

          At the same time the workers know that the military or the police could
          fault them because the rebels had chosen the hospital building to stage
          their attack. The insurgents also occupied the school at Miraflores in the
          battle. All the teachers resigned and have been trying to reach San Jose
          for safety.

          "In Guaviare we're living under three forces, the guerrilla, the paramilitary
          and the state," said the local Roman Catholic parish priest, the Rev. Jorge
          Vargas. Colombians, Vargas said, are caught in the middle.

          The whole region and all the military bases in the country are at a state of
          maximum alert, and there are rumors that another attack on military
          installations may be coming. In Miraflores shopkeepers pull down the
          shutters at 5 p.m. for the curfew that begins at 6, and everybody entering
          and leaving the town goes through government checkpoints.

          With the bases destroyed and guerrillas having seized guns, ammunition,
          grenades, night-vision equipment and other supplies, soldiers are stationed
          in foxholes covered by plastic sheets. Asked what the soldiers were
          protecting, a health-care worker said "themselves."

          The worst part, the refugees say, is maneuvering survival in a war whose
          combatants are often quick-change artists, looking like a neighbor by day
          and a killer by night.

          "It looks like it's calm, but beneath the surface, it's very tense," said a
          hospital administrator.

          In the past military defeats have led to the paramilitary death squads'
          executing suspected rebels. In the last year, people say, paramilitary
          groups have infiltrated Guaviare, quietly killing an estimated 100 people in
          piecemeal massacres called "selective deaths." The most recent was last
          week, but the families have remained silent.

          "Here there is a law of silence," said Alejandro Ovalles, who has quietly
          negotiated with the paramilitary groups to stop the killing.

          Although Pastrana has pledged to open peace talks with the rebels in an
          attempt to end the polarization, a senior military commander in one of the
          most troubled areas said recently that civilians who did not take sides
          were suspicious.

          "In this war one cannot be neutral," the commander of the First Division,
          Gen. Victor Alvarez Vargas, told El Tiempo, the daily in Bogota, in a
          lengthy interview. He called Colombians who tried to remain neutral
          "either useful idiots or willing sympathizers of the interests of subversive
          groups."

          Alvarez's area covers the states of Bolivar, Cesar, Choco, Cordoba,
          Magdalena and Sucre, as well as the Uraba area, where the strength of
          right-wing paramilitary groups has soared. Human rights groups say
          masked paramilitary death squads who appear carrying lists of suspected
          guerrillas marked for execution are believed to be responsible for 70
          percent of the thousands of political killings each year in the country,
          according to human rights groups.