BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- Leftist guerrillas took away hundreds of
                 people from a rural Colombian village, leaving it a virtual ghost town, the
                 army said on Wednesday, but it did not know why or where the townsfolk
                 went.

                 Guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong
                 band known by the Spanish acr onym FARC, told the people of Puerto Alvira, in
                 the central Colombian province of Meta, to leave on Saturday, said the army,
                 whose soldiers spoke to the few locals who remained.

                 A Roman Catholic priest from the area near Puerto Alvira, who did not want to be
                 named, told local television the rebels had told men, women and children to board
                 motorized canoes and travel down the River Guaviare into the jungle.

                 "Between 500 and 1,500 people were forcibly taken away," said the priest, adding it
                 seemed they were moved to other villages and not allowed to return. He did not say
                 whether he had been in Puerto Alvira at the time of the incident.

                 The army arrived in the town on Tuesday night and a civilian humanitarian
                 commission followed the trail of the disappeared townsfolk into the jungle to try to
                 determine their fate.

                 The town is near the borders of a Switzerland-sized chunk of jungle and savanna
                 that the government ceded to the Marxist FARC for over three years as a safe
                 haven for peace talks that collapsed in February.

                 The wild zone, key to trafficking cocaine and arms, is disputed by the FARC and
                 its fiercest foes, illegal far-right paramilitaries who massacred civilians in the area in
                 1997 to smoke out the leftist rebels.

                 "The town is practically deserted. We could only speak to about five people," said
                 Gen. Carlos Saavedra, commander of the army's Seventh Brigade.

                 While the army said hundreds of people were forced from Puerto Alvira, an official
                 from the provincial government of neighboring Guaviare said as many as 5,000
                 locals had been taken away.

                 About 2 million Colombians have fled their homes to escape fighting, death threats
                 or forced conscription into illegal armed groups over the past decade. But neither
                 the FARC nor the paramilitaries have driven out a whole town in recent years.

                 Thousands of people, mainly civilians, are killed every year in Colombia's
                 38-year-old war, which has flared in the last decade thanks to cocaine profits.

                    Copyright 2002 Reuters.