Colombian Rebel Force Surrenders Its Weapons : Civil war: The country’s third largest guerrilla army is dissolving as part of a year-old peace process. Two other groups have stepped up attacks.

Dario Mejia, a Communist guerrilla for 19 of his 35 years, stood on a dirt soccer field Friday and laid his pistol on a wooden table. As applause from 200 onlookers echoed against steep green mountains, the rebel commander wept and embraced his comrades who joined in dissolving Colombia’s third largest rebel army.

The tearful farewell to arms by the 1,950-member People’s Revolutionary Army was the biggest so far in a year-old peace process that has turned two smaller insurgencies into legal political parties. It gave Mejia a vote in Colombia’s new Constituent Assembly as one of his movement’s two representatives.

“The people got tired of so much violence and viewed us as dogmatic and narrow-minded,” said Mejia, a tall, intense man who has abandoned Maoist ideals to embrace social democracy. “We worked as warriors sowing a message in these fields, but our harvest was a failure. People stopped applauding us.”

Amid the cheers for detente, however, the country’s two largest rebel groups--the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, known by the acronym FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN--have stepped up attacks, causing more than 400 deaths and $350 million in damages to oil pipelines, roads and other infrastructure this year. The two rebel armies field about 11,000 fighters, joined by at least 100 renegades from the movement that disarmed Friday.

One policeman was reported killed Friday in an ELN ambush in the northwestern province of Northern Santander. A restaurant owner here in Labores, 70 miles north of Medellin, apologized for his limited menu, blaming guerrilla roadblocks and looting of food delivery trucks.

Despite a near-continuous state of siege, leftist guerrillas have flourished in Colombia since the mainstream Liberal and Conservative parties ended their decade-old civil war in 1957 with a power-sharing pact that largely excluded other groups from politics.

That equation was upset dramatically last December when the notorious April 19 Movement, or M-19, which had disarmed its 500 fighters last March, won 19 seats in the 73-member assembly that is rewriting the country’s 104-year-old constitution.

Weary of war, confused by communism’s decline in Eastern Europe and inspired by the M-19’s political success, three of Colombia’s five remaining revolutionary armies began peace talks with the Liberal government of President Cesar Gaviria. In January, the 250-member Revolutionary Workers Party tossed its guns from a boat into the Caribbean Sea and gained one assembly seat.

Quintin Lame, a 200-member Indian self-defense force, is expected to follow suit in the coming weeks, adopting a model agreement that offers amnesty, job training, scholarships and unemployment benefits of $130 per month for six months--the equivalent of an army sergeant’s pay--to each disarmed rebel.

The People’s Revolutionary Army, known as the EPL, signed a peace agreement Feb. 15 and disarmed its forces at six separate camps Friday. At its main camp in Pueblo Nuevo, near the Caribbean coast, more than 200,000 people rallied to support the armistice, radio news reports said.

EPL leaders, worried by a resurgence of paramilitary death squads in some of its rural strongholds, have called on the government to take special steps to protect their followers. To keep their weapons out of enemy hands, the rebels surrendered them to Socialist International and Spanish Socialist Party observers to be melted down and forged into a peace monument.

Before the solemn disarmament ceremony, many of the 220 rebels at this camp emptied their pistols and automatic weapons by firing straight up into the clear Andean sky or against a velvet-green hillside across the Labores River. Children mingled among them, scrambling for spent cartridges. Salsa music blared from loudspeakers, and a huge banner spelled out the new political name of the EPL: Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace and Liberty).

“It’s easy to fall in love with this thing,” said Astrid Suaza, one of several female combat veterans here, cradling her M-16 rifle. “It has protected me, but it’s time to give it up.”

In a speech to combatants, many of whom are younger than the 23-year-old movement, veteran EPL leader Freddy Sanchez said it was imperative to disarm “to slow Colombia’s race toward death.”

“We are proud to be ending our struggle as the world celebrates the end of war in the Gulf,” said Edwin Ortega, a 26-year-old guerrilla. “We want to set an example.”

President Gaviria said Friday he hopes negotiations with the two belligerent guerrilla groups can begin “in the next few days.”

“They should understand that their political project--the establishment of a Communist government in Colombia--is no longer valid,” he told reporters in Bogota.

The latest guerrilla offensive began after the army attacked the FARC’s jungle headquarters on Dec. 9, the day of the Constituent Assembly elections. It reached a peak in the days after the assembly convened Feb. 5, as guerrillas burned buses, held thousands of motorists at roadblocks, cut off most highways to Bogota and blew up oil and gas pipelines.

Gaviria responded with a war tax on business income, mineral production and long-distance phone calls to finance a stepped-up army counteroffensive. At the same time, he has backed away from his insistence on a rebel truce before peace talks can begin.

Rebel leaders have expressed interest in talks while insisting on conditions the government refuses to meet. They have called for demilitarization of any site where negotiations will be held and demanded the election of a new Constituent Assembly so the two rebel movements can take part.