Heavily armed rebels besieging the village of Toribio said they were eager for combat with government troops and vowed to resist efforts to force them from this mountainous region.
"I'm going to get to hit those guys hard," said a 17-year-old rebel, who identified himself only as Alexis, as he stood with other guerrillas less than 3km from Toribio on Tuesday.
He toted a mortar over his shoulder and his backpack was filled with tightly wound electrical wire used for explosives.
"We have no plans to leave here," said a rebel platoon leader named Carlos, at the roadside rebel checkpoint.
He said some 500 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were participating in the siege of Toribio.
It poses a major challenge to President Alvaro Uribe's efforts to bring order to this South American nation. Uribe personally visited the town last Friday to denounce the rebels a day after they attacked the town with rockets and rifles. The rebels attacked again on Sunday.
Few residents dared remain. Booming explosions from green mountains outside town punctuated clashes between rebels and army troops.
Police Lieutenant Mike Vargas said he is not sure when this town will be safe.
"For now, it's best the townspeople stay away, because anything could happen," Vargas said, speaking in a police bunker in the center of town whose thick walls are scarred by more than 50 fresh bullet holes.
Police, who were airlifted by helicopter into Toribio, hugged smoldering, bomb-scarred buildings as they patrolled streets, fearing snipers.
Arquimedes Vitona, the mayor of Toribio, said Uribe's promises on Friday that the townspeople were safe have turned out to be empty words.
"If he had said what he said and backed it up -- great," Vitona said in an interview, speaking under the same shady tree where Uribe spoke to the villagers days earlier. "But instead he left the town once again vulnerable."
Of the 3,000 residents of Toribio, not more than 100 were there on Tuesday.
Jaime LaVerde sent his wife, children and grandchildren to stay with relatives in a distant town when the fighting first erupted, but stayed behind to prevent looters from stealing his few valuable possessions: a small TV, a small refrigerator and his children's bicycles. He said he has heard reports of looting in the town, located 400km southwest of Bogota, but authorities could not confirm that.
Roofs of homes outside town bore white sheets in an effort to keep military aircraft from firing on them.
A rebel commander said the Colombian military's inability to dislodge the guerrillas showed the government's two-year-old military offensive is failing.
"The government is in a very weak position to give assurances that it has the capacity to force the FARC into retreat," Raul Reyes, a member of the FARC's ruling secretariat, said in an interview posted late Monday on a Web site linked to the rebel group.
The attacks on Toribio, a mainly Indian village, were the latest in a series of increasingly audacious FARC strikes across the country.
The fighting since last Thursday has killed at least five counterinsurgency police officers, two soldiers and a 9-year-old boy and left dozens more people wounded.
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