Bishop Jose Luis Serna spends his days in an austere room at Our Lady of Fatima Church, staring from a window that overlooks the cloud-filled valleys of Colombia's richest coffee country.
His body shakes and sways in the grip of Parkinson's disease. His voice has weakened to a whisper. But other thoughts now crowd into his empty afternoons, worrying him to tears in his tiny room on the hill.
Once an adviser to Colombian presidents on how to bring peace to this country, the retired bishop, 67, now stands accused of being a guerrilla collaborator. In a country where religion and rebellion have mixed frequently over decades of civil war, he is the highest-ranking cleric to face a formal investigation on charges of conspiring against the government.
The office of Colombia's attorney general opened the investigation last month to determine whether Serna, through his brokering of the release of people kidnapped by the guerrillas, was part of a civilian support network for a Marxist insurgency active in this region of coffee farms fallen on hard times. A mayor, a government human rights ombudsman, a doctor, a nurse, a dentist and a school bus driver are among 17 other civilians named in the case, which has stunned a community rich with the legacy of Serna's social work.
"I am an old man, and I have been working for peace my entire life," Serna said during a recent interview in Manizales, a city 30 miles northwest of here where he now lives. "My conscience is clean."
Having withdrawn to mountain redoubts in the face of a more intensive military campaign, Colombia's two Marxist guerrilla groups are relying as never before on civilians to provide them with intelligence, food, money and recruits -- often at the point of a gun. Since taking office 11 months ago, President Alvaro Uribe has sought to separate the guerrillas from that civilian support and has turned increasingly to the courts to accomplish his goal.
According to the attorney general's office, prosecutors might open more than 3,075 rebellion cases by the end of this year, more than triple the number in 2000 and a 22 percent increase from 2002. Many of those cases, including Serna's, rely on testimony from guerrilla deserters who have been coaxed out of the war by the government, which provides them with education, job training and money to begin new lives.
Human rights groups have objected to the investigations and arrests, arguing that many appear to rely on testimony influenced by the government's financial incentives. But Uribe aides say the new prosecutions are a mark of progress in the war effort, something demanded by the United States in return for about $800 million in aid each year.
"This is a good sign," Defense Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez said in a recent interview. "It shows us that the government is very motivated and that it is using its best efforts not only to confront them militarily but also obviously to apply all legal mechanisms to capture them."
Serna was born in Caldas province, just north of here, in 1936, the son of a coffee farmer and the fourth of eight children. Like many families here, Serna's parents were conservative and deeply Catholic. They sent Jose Luis and a brother to a seminary and a sister to a convent.
Serna's seminary years coincided with "the violence," nearly a decade of bloody partisan strife that ended in the late 1950s after more than 200,000 people had been killed. Soon after, Serna became an itinerant priest in the southern province of Caqueta, now a stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a mostly rural guerrilla movement that today is the country's largest.
At the time, Colombians displaced by political violence began to colonize the southern jungles. The government wanted to create rubber plantations, but the migrants preferred to plant rice, corn and plantains. Serna sided with the peasants, antagonizing the government but giving him credibility among the rural poor.
In 1983, Serna was a member of a commission established by then-President Belisario Betancur to conduct peace talks with the FARC. The process failed, but Serna maintained his guerrilla contacts. In 1997, he arranged a peace agreement between the FARC and an indigenous tribe in the southern part of Tolima province.
"Some may have seen this work as revolutionary," Serna said. "But I didn't see it as political, only as a simple matter of peasant rights, something I have spent my life committed to."
After working in Rome and traveling to Africa, Serna returned to Colombia and founded the Catholic diocese here in northern Tolima province in 1988. It encompasses Libano and several neighboring cities in this valley, 65 miles northwest of Bogota, the capital. Coffee bushes dot the hills; coffee-growing made the region rich until prices began a steady slump a decade ago.
The region's fading fortunes coincided with a rise in guerrilla activity, particularly by the National Liberation Army (ELN), a Marxist insurgency founded in 1964 that has about 5,000 combatants. One of the ELN's earliest members was Camilo Torres, a Catholic priest who died in combat soon after joining. His example inspired three Spanish priests to come to Colombia and join the ELN. One of them, Manuel Perez, led the group for 25 years until his death in 1998.
Serna met Torres as a young priest in Cartagena at a time when the radical Catholic philosophy known as liberation theology was influential in the Colombian church. Liberation theology, which encouraged the poor to rise up against oppression, provided "an interesting analysis of Colombia's social troubles," Serna said, adding that he rejected the concept of armed struggle.
Traveling throughout the diocese, Serna opened a children's foundation, a drug rehabilitation clinic, a home for seniors and a meeting house for struggling coffee farmers. He organized peasant marches and demanded that debts of small coffee farmers be forgiven.
Serna said it was clear that kidnapping was the region's most pressing concern. Colombian authorities say 2,986 people were kidnapped in Colombia last year, the vast majority by guerrilla groups who rely on ransom to help fund military operations.
Serna said that the families of kidnap victims asked for his help and he began using his position to help arrange the release of hostages. He said he did not negotiate ransom payments, but only passed messages between the parties. He said he helped in the release of 54 hostages, including 15 police officers.
"Getting close to the guerrillas, as I have done, brings a kind of peace to these places," he said. "The guerrillas have a human dimension, but they have become so violent over the years."
Serna's role is not uncommon in Colombia, where the law permits civilians to serve as intermediaries if they do not profit personally. But Colombian officials discourage mediation and ransom payments, saying the practices perpetuate the conflict.
In Libano, however, many of the 40,000 residents break the law every day to make their own accommodations with the various armed groups. Both guerrilla groups and a recently arrived anti-guerrilla paramilitary force exact illegal monthly "taxes" from local merchants. This week paramilitary leaders were meeting with taxi and bus drivers to set their monthly tax rate.
"What does the central government want? That no one has any dealings with the guerrillas, as the bishop did on our behalf," said Orlando Florez Forero, Libano's mayor, who was kidnapped by the ELN in 2000 and freed five days later, after Serna intervened. "We are the ones living with the war. The fact is that if these types of arrests continue we are going to have a lot of people in jail. Almost everyone has contacts with one group or another, and much of it is the result of fear."
Two former ELN guerrillas, now participating in the government's "reinsertion" program, have told prosecutors that Serna helped manage the group's regional finances. They have accused the bishop of taking provisions to the guerrillas during trips to the mountains -- whiskey, specifically, and fried rice. According to the attorney general's file, however, no other evidence against him has been gathered.
"It seemed to me that it was moral to intervene," said Heliodoro Garcia Nieto, Libano's parish priest. Nieto served with Serna for eight years and traveled with him into the mountains on behalf of kidnap victims.
The region has rallied behind Serna, who retired last year because of his advancing illness and moved near his family in Manizales. A march last month drew thousands of people to Libano's town square, with its moss-draped trees. A petition of support has attracted several thousand signatures.
At Our Lady of Fatima, the bells chimed one recent morning for the 11 o'clock Mass. Officiating at the service was Serna's only clerical duty of the day. Hunched over, he walked across the churchyard, hands clasped together to prevent them from shaking. Now, he said, it is a matter of waiting to see what the government will do.