The center of Toribio is obscured by heavy rain that falls relentlessly. The Saturday morning market, however is swarming with hundreds of women, intent to choose fruits, vegetables and pieces of meat hanging on the stalls arranged in the square.

Toribio is in the selva of the central cordillera of the Andes range in Colombia, three hours away from Cali, home of the former homonymic cartel and of the most beautiful girls in our planet, or at least this is what lonely planet states.

The only way to come up here is with Chivas, a typical Andean bus. All open, without glass and doors, is a great colorful wooden bus with flashing flashing on the dashboard and frills hanging everywhere. At the sound of salsa and vallenato, it climbs steep slopes, thanks to a powerful motor that drags people, animals and goodies.

We are in the heart of the Nasa indigenous territory, 120 thousand people who base their lives on the search for harmony between man and nature, reject any form of violence and seek to preserve their ancestral culture, but do not avoid a constructive relationship with modernity.

Here the people speak nasayuwe and greets with a “ewcxa” instead of the happy “hola” used in the rest of the country. They are of smaller stature with light brown skin but have proud and bright eyes.

A couple of indigenous guards come to greet us, Cesar has a big smile and a welcome hug waiting for us, from his left pocket peeps an Avantel antenna- a radio transmitter that the Colombian government requires anyone under threat of death to carry. This is the first signal, so far, in this strange town, that the war is here. That internal conflict that bloodied the country for over 50 years has fallen even on the peaceful Nasa indigenous.

A little further on, between the dense vegetation that surrounds the center of the city, hundreds of guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are planning future actions.

A few steps away from us, instead, a white and squared military base stands between the humble homes. But if you look closer through the mist, reality shows in its tragedy. Near the base of the army and police, the walls of the houses are riddled with bullet holes. “These are signs of a tragic day of April of few years ago – the voice of Cesar breaks – was a Thursday and the war came right into our homes. The trenches were right here in the marketplace. We tried to save everyone. 3500 people live here in the urban area, but a man and a child died. He was only eight years old.”

It wasn’t the only time guerrillas attacked the small town, actually fights are pretty frequent.

“Today it rains and everything is silent, otherwise the shots in the forest would be the background in this hot summer day. There are shootings every day, sometimes far away, up in the mountains, sometime just in the trees over there. The urban area, however, now is respected. We imposed guerrillas and soldiers an uncompromising halt, reaffirming our active neutrality. Our autonomy. But the war does not respect anybody, so they both kill us while we just want peace.”

The Nasa population reject the presence of every armed groups in their territory, including the official Colombian army, stating that their presence jeopardizes the whole community, because guerrillas tend to attack the soldiers even when they are in the villages. Too many times government forces and FARC didn’t respect either the civilians, nor their land.

Now few more people are with us walking in the streets of the little town.

“We resist against anyone who does not respect our culture,” says our guide. ”Our strength is in unity and sharing, we call it Minga. We are peaceful, but we are willing to die to defend our identity. We firmly believe in the power of dialogue. The word is our weapon and the guardias indigenas are our protectors.”

The guardia is an ancestral tradition that the modern Nasa recovered from their history.

“We don’t use weapons. A beautiful colored wooden stick is our only defense and is the symbol of nonviolence and unarmed resistance,” says Alfredo Acosta, coordinator of the guard in Toribio. ”We protect the rest of the population, but even if now we are in charge, everybody is a guard. We don’t make distinctions and males or females, kids or older people, they all can be guards.”

The strength of the guardia indigena is in their number and in their civic sense. In many occasion they put the armed group in front of a choice: kill them all, all the guards, including children and women or walk back.

Acosta explains: “Here the training is the key. We work on the Nasa vision that rejects violence. We defend ourselves through the early alerts and the organization and we stand between the armed groups, forcing them to stop fighting and not to attack the community. We teach people what to do in case of emergency. We call on the guards by radio or cellular and mobilize the population when it becomes too dangerous.”

And it works, the guardia indigena already won several international and national peace prices since when this peaceful indigenous population had to learn the ways of war in order to protect themselves.





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