Bogotá

Bloodletting in Colombia became more or less a permanent fixture back in 1948 when a popular presidential candidate was murdered. Mass rioting turned into an era known as La Violencia, which stretched into the 1960s. At that time, some of the peasant groups that had armed themselves as self-defense militias became politicized and, under the leadership of the now-septuagenarian Manuel "Sure Shot" Marulanda, morphed into the leftist guerrilla group known as the FARC--today a well-armed force of 18,000 fighters. Other smaller Marxist insurgencies flowered. The FARC and to a lesser degree the 3,000 member ELN have through the decades extended their reach over sizable chunks of sparsely populated Colombian countryside but failed to gain much support elsewhere. "Be clear on the FARC," says Mauricio Vargas, an editor and columnist at Gabriel García Márquez's weekly, Cambio. "They are not your Che Guevara, Comandante Marcos sort of romantic guerrilla force."

That's an understatement. While originally rooted in Marxism, the FARC has moved into criminal activity. Its base of operations in southern Colombia overlaps some of the richest coca-growing regions in the world. For some time now, the FARC has harvested rich revenues by levying a "tax" on the coca-growers, in return for which the FARC protects the growers from attack. Recently, there is growing evidence that the guerrillas have gone deeper into the coca trade, expanding into processing and edging into trafficking and sales.

Colombia's--and President Pastrana's--dilemma is this: Poverty and social inequality produce not only coca plantations and violence but also dogged guerrilla armies. And eventually they all become intertwined. How to undo this Gordian knot?

Talking Peace--Planning War

President Pastrana met with US officials in 1999, showing them his comprehensive national reconstruction plan and asking them to fund a significant part of it. He came out of those meetings with a $1.5 billion opening commitment. But in those same meetings, the Plan Colombia playbook got radically redrafted. The Marshall Plan aspect of the blueprint was pushed aside. Shoved to the top were a militarized drug war and an El Salvador-like counterinsurgency plan. "Maybe the rewritten Plan Colombia is the price Pastrana had to pay the US to be able to proceed with the peace process," speculates Carlos de Roux.

Pastrana pushed ahead with his peace initiative, meeting with the FARC's Marulanda and even granting the guerrillas a temporary demilitarized zone to be used as a staging area for negotiations. But because the talks produced no cease-fire, the fighting has intensified as all sides escalate in order to win bargaining advantages. Government forces, badly hurt by the guerrillas from 1997 to 1999, have gone on the offensive. The FARC has also ratcheted up its forced recruitment, its drug involvement and its kidnapping for ransom.

Not only has the United States been lukewarm to the peace talks--many Colombians have also soured on their prospects. To the revulsion of millions, the FARC used the demilitarized zone to hold kidnapped hostages. Meanwhile, it allowed coca cultivation, while its attacks on civilian areas rose. The FARC formally froze the peace talks in November, demanding that President Pastrana take effective action against the right-wing paramilitaries if he wanted to renew the negotiations.

Which brings us to the latest set of "armed actors," the paramilitaries, at least 11,000 well-armed troops financed by the wealthiest coca barons and committed to exterminating the leftist guerrillas and their supporters. From their stronghold in the north, the paras have started branching out nationwide and are locked into a particularly bloody struggle with the guerrillas to secure access to the Pacific Coast--a key to maintaining the coca trade. "In the past few years the Colombian military has gotten out of directly waging the dirty war, and at the same time there has been a commensurate rise of the size and ferocity of the paramilitaries," says Andrew Miller of Amnesty International. "And it is amply documented that even if independently financed, the paramilitaries work hand in hand with the government forces." Even the US government, at some level or another, will concede that last point.

In February Pastrana managed to get the stalled peace talks restarted by making a commitment to crack down on the paramilitaries. But the FARC also bears responsibility for the situation: Its behavior has been so outrageous that it has allowed the paramilitaries to pose as heroes to an ever more frightened and disillusioned urban population.

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