Guambianos: high stakes for tradition: with scarce economic resources, these Colombian Indians are caught between cashing in on the drug-related poppy trade and preserving age-old traditions.

• Author: Englebert, Victor

In the Andes central cordillera, in a southwestern corner of Colombia, live some seventeen thousand Guambiano Indians. Since the Spanish conquest they have gradually been pushed out of the best parts of their original land. Today they eke out a difficult existence in the colder, rainy, and more abrupt parts of Colombia's mountains above eight thousand feet.

Nobody knows how many Guambianos the Spanish found at their arrival. But in 1544-45, Cieza de Leon, the first Spanish chronicler of the region, wrote of a Guambia province, between Popayan and Cali, where many people lived. The fact that Sebastian de Belalcazar, the founder of those two cities, granted himself the Guambia encomienda, or concession, supports that statement, since the encomienda was not a title to the land but to its people. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the Guambiano population numbered only some fifteen hundred souls.

Likewise, no one knows what the limits of the Guambiano territory were before the Spanish conquest. Only that it stretched well around their present highlands to encompass lower valleys. The Guambianos do know, of course, how far their land extended more recently, and in the last two decades have reconquered some of it through mass invasions. A few Guambianos also bought back pieces of the old tribal land, but are treating it as their own private, rather than communal, property.

Guambianos weave their own clothes, grow their own food, and build their own dry-brick houses. Like most Andean Indians, they practice the minga, an Incan custom of community support. They help each other plant, harvest, build houses, and create new rural paths. Guambianos are also very young: Only 7 percent of their population is over fifty-five.

Though they have interacted with whites and mestizos for around five hundred years, Guambianos have retained their language, traditional customs, and typical dress. That attire consists, for men, of a knee-length blue anaco (a skirtlike wraparound garment), a short blue or gray poncho, a red scarf, and a narrow-brimmed felt hat. (To an outsider, the anaco contrasts almost comically with their unlaced army-type boots and bare legs.) Women dress similarly but wear a blue cape rather than the poncho, a true skirt, and heavy white bead necklaces instead of a scarf.

Floro Tunubala Paja, who served as governor of Cauca state between January 2001 and December 2003--the first indigenous person in Colombia ever to hold such a...