The Nasa Indians appear to live well on their lush Rhode Island-size reservation in southern Colombia, a swath of mountains and valleys where sweet fruit grows wild, trout teem in fast-flowing creeks and colorful birds dart about.
They live in tidy well-kept homes, growing coffee, bananas and beans. They produce milk. Placing a great emphasis on economic independence, they run a successful fish farm and are trying to strike up a marble mine.
The one major threat to their existence is Colombia's unrelenting civil conflict, which has ground on for 41 years. But the Nasa, an Indian nation that numbers about 100,000 in this region, has used a pacific civil resistance campaign to stay out of the drug-fueled war, which pits the army and right-wing paramilitaries against Marxist rebels intent on toppling the state.
For four years, the Nasa's stern-faced but unarmed Indigenous Guards -- now a force of 7,000 men and women -- have simply driven away the fighters who venture into their fog-shrouded mountains in Cauca Province. They confront rebel and soldier alike with ceremonial .91m batons decorated with tassels in the colors of the Nasa flag, green and red, and, drawing on their powers of persuasion and numerical superiority, pressure the outsiders to leave.
Their success is legendary, earning the acclaim of the UN and the foreign governments that pay for Nasa development programs.
The Indians have forced traffickers to close down cocaine-producing labs. They have faced down paramilitary death squads. When the mayor of the Nasa town of Toribio was kidnapped by guerrillas last year, 400 guards marched for two weeks over the Andes to the rebel camp where he was being held. They won his release.
"We do not want armed groups on our land," said Julio Mesa, 57, the leader of the Indigenous Guards in Tacueyo. "So what we do is we get people together and get them out."
But in recent weeks, brutal fighting has swept into three of the Nasa's eight towns, testing the Indians' pacifism and autonomy as never before.
Starting on April 14, the rebels began rocket attacks on the Nasa town of Toribio. In nine days of fighting, a 9-year-old boy and several policemen and soldiers were killed. The government took back the town, but rebels pounded another community, Jambalo, with their notoriously inaccurate mortars, propane tanks armed with explosives.
Tacueyo was next.
Last Wednesday, with a Colombian military plane raining down bullets on rebel positions, dozens of young soldiers supported by light tanks and armored vehicles stormed Tacueyo. The rebels responded by firing nearly a dozen of the makeshift mortars. Soldiers answered back with their mounted machine guns from the central square.
"What worries me are the sharpshooters," said one baby-faced soldier, Andres Nova, 24, as he squeezed up against a wall for protection. "They are not that good, but anyone with a rifle is a danger."
Shortly after, snipers killed a soldier with a long-range shot to the head, and wounded two others.
Tacueyo's Indians were caught in the middle. When a rebel rocket landed on a house, severely injuring two children, Mesa and others ran to help. They looked stunned and helpless.
"How can we deal with this?" Mesa said. "They're just shooting off these things. What can we do? It lands wherever it lands."
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