Rebels' New Tactic Avoids Contact With Army, Focuses on Cities

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

VISTA HERMOSA, Colombia -- In the month since army troops marched in to reestablish government control in Colombia's vast rebel sanctuary, thousands of
Marxist-led guerrillas have slipped from the region's largest towns without a fight.

They have fanned out to hiding places across the country or blended into the jungles and villages of southern Colombia where they have held sway for decades. From
these lairs, they have mounted a campaign of hit-and-run attacks against the military but avoided frontal clashes, taking the civil war back to the brutal stalemate that
has prevailed here for nearly 40 years.

A frustrated President Andres Pastrana on Feb. 20 broke off peace talks with the largest guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), and ordered his military to reoccupy the 16,000-square-mile region that he had given to the guerrillas three years earlier as an enticement to negotiate an
end to the oldest civil war in the Western Hemisphere. Since then, the army has reoccupied the region's five main towns, moving in behind a bombing campaign
against guerrilla targets. But the rebel response has made it difficult for the army to pin down the guerrillas, engage in major encounters or inflict heavy casualties
during the month-long offensive.

Instead, the guerrillas, many now dressed as civilians, are exploding car bombs in towns where clandestine rebel militia groups operate and chipping away at the
national power grid with steady attacks on remote electrical towers. The army terms the acts terrorism, but the guerrillas who operate around this town inside the
former rebel haven said they are part of a developing strategy to make the war felt more acutely in the cities.

"It means nothing if the army arrives here or not," said a guerrilla who gave his name as Willington, who patrols the area around Vista Hermosa in rubber peasant
boots and an untucked sport shirt that conceals a pistol. "We don't confront them, but we never leave."

Colombian military officials said the offensive has killed 34 guerrillas, an average of about one a day. More than a dozen abandoned guerrilla camps have been
destroyed, but most army victories have come in sporadic ambushes, like one this month that killed 17 guerrillas traveling along a sunken road just north of here.
Over the same time, the army has suffered 12 deaths and 25 wounded in what officials said have been more than 300 engagements.

"It's pure guerrilla war: minefields, car bombs, package bombs, telephone threats to town residents," said Col. Manuel Canastero, who is coordinating operations
around this city 110 miles south of the capital, Bogota. "The guerrillas do all these things, but they always avoid contact with us."

The new pattern of battle has emerged as U.S. lawmakers are deciding whether more help from the United States could tilt the balance toward Colombia's armed
forces. The additional aid would result from a U.S. rule change allowing the Colombian military to use 80 transport helicopters donated for use only against the drug
trade to be employed directly against the guerrillas. It would also entail additional electronic intelligence sharing with Colombian forces.

The offensive, named "Thanatos" for the Greek word for death, is also expected to clarify strategically important questions about the strength of the various sides in a
war rooted in enduring political differences and fueled by millions of dollars in drug profits. The FARC, a peasant movement drawing on Mao Zedong and Karl Marx
for its political rationale, has grown to 18,000 armed members and an unknown number of civilian supporters since emerging in 1964.

But while stronger than ever, the guerrillas are facing an increasing threat from the 15,000-member United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group
that works alongside the army but employs the guerrillas' own irregular tactics against them. A paramilitary spearhead of a dozen men has arrived here, and a grave
has been discovered holding the bodies of two people killed since the guerrillas withdrew.

"They [the paramilitaries] visited me to ask for help identifying guerrilla supporters," said Mayor Jose Leonel Castano, who declined a request from the paramilitary
group to use several houses built by the town for the poor as barracks for arriving members. "I told them, 'We were all with the guerrillas, starting with me. You'd
have to kill off the whole town, because we were all their slaves.' "

Two days after the army arrived here on Feb. 24, a group of men dressed in civilian clothes occupied a former funeral home across from San Juan Bosco Hospital.
The house belonged to a family that offered it as a kind of guerrilla support center and gathering place. The family fled the night the army entered the zone.

Almost at once, the young men began commandeering motorcycles from local residents, and people began disappearing. One of those people was Carmen Rosa
Sierra, 33, a member of the defunct civic police force. Those who knew her say she was affiliated with the guerrillas. A decomposed woman's body turned up in a
field outside town two weeks ago, but Sierra's family has fled and the body has not been identified.

Over the three years that the army stayed away, the FARC won admirers and enemies in this town of 8,000, most of them farmers who have uprooted unprofitable
yucca and plantain crops to plant coca, the raw material for cocaine. Sons and daughters joined the FARC's 27th Front, part of the potent Eastern Bloc, and its
residents provided the rebels with everything from food to intelligence to shelter.

But the FARC also imposed a capricious tyranny. Last year, after a FARC commander allegedly slept with a local woman infected with the AIDS virus, guerrilla
commanders ordered all 26,000 people here and in surrounding villages to submit to blood tests. One woman who tested positive was later found dead in her bed,
and two others left the town with help from the mayor.

A recent guerrilla operation, a show of force that coincided with the opening phase of the army offensive, also fell hardest on the people whom the rebels rely on for
support. For 17 days, no traffic was allowed into or out of 74 villages around Vista Hermosa. Food ran short. And farmers were forced to carry Nubia Torres, a
peasant woman in labor, four hours by hammock from her farm in Palmar to the Vista Hermosa hospital where she delivered a child who had died en route.

Traveling northwest from Vista Hermosa, the dirt track rises through vast coca fields before emptying into the center of Costa Rica, a town where a FARC banner
promising "power to the people" flutters on the empty square. Costa Rica is nine miles from the local army command in Vista Hermosa. But the only thing that seems
to have changed there after a month of military operations is the guerrillas' wardrobe: Camouflage has given way to civilian attire.

The only sign that Willington, a smiley 30-year-old, is a guerrilla is the walkie-talkie-style radio he tucks into the pocket of his loose-fitting shirt. The same is true for
another member of his mobile unit, who pulls up on a motorcycle as the breeze lifts his unbuttoned shirt to reveal two grenades and a pistol hanging from his belt.

Of this mobile unit, only its commander, a 26-year-old guerrilla veteran who gave his name as Giovanni, wears FARC insignia on his ammunition vest and carries a
Galil automatic rifle. "When the army is close, we have to do this," he explained. "They know my face, though, so no matter what I wear, if they catch me I will be
killed."

On March 18, an army patrol acting on an informant's tip took up position on the steep slopes above a track 10 miles south of here. Two trucks carrying 17
guerrillas passed along the narrow lane, and a barrage of gunfire killed them all. The toppled truck now sits in a tableau of torn fatigues, scraps of blue denim, dried
blood and pale blue women's underwear. Four female guerrillas were among those killed.

"They were undisciplined," Giovanni said of his dead comrades.

Sipping coffee above a clear creek, Giovanni said the guerrilla defense would not be mounted here in the countryside, where he believes rebel support is firm, but on
a new urban front nationwide. He said a bomb placed in a car that exploded in Vista Hermosa on March 12, killing Miguel Angel Escobar, 62, was an example of
how the guerrillas plan to carry out their strategy.

"It's no more terrorism than the 500-pound bombs they drop on these towns," Giovanni said. "Our offensive is coming on a national level of a size never seen before."

Each afternoon, as the soaking seasonal rains begin, squads of soldiers march through the streets of Vista Hermosa. They arrive wet, tired, covered in plastic
ponchos with pots and pans and rubber boots poking out from stuffed packs. From corner billiard halls and street-side restaurants, the townspeople watch them
pass. No one says hello or offers a cup of coffee.

                                               © 2002