Colombians brace for strife

Three years ago, Colombian President Andres Pastrana - elected on a wave of clamors for peace - granted the country's largest insurgent group a vast haven to facilitate negotiations toward resolution of South America's longest and deadliest guerrilla war.

Today, as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) vacates the Switzerland-size zone that Mr. Pastrana has ordered the Army to take back, Colombians wonder nervously if what was once dubbed a "laboratory for peace" was not instead a training ground for even more devastating warfare.

After years of sporadic peace negotiations, the FARC, the Army, and resurgent paramilitaries are in fact stronger in numbers, financing, and arms - and most observers foresee a period of heightened violence for the 40-year-old war.

In the past three years, thousands of ordinary Colombians attended meetings in the safe zone to discuss issues such as land reform and oil policy, but the government and FARC never so much as reached a cease-fire agreement. The only tangible result of the talks was a prisoner exchange last May, while fighting continued throughout the rest of the country.

Using the enclave as a training ground for new recruits, the FARC has grown over the past three years, now fielding some 17,000 well-

armed fighters. The group is unlikely to fight Army forces as they move in to reclaim the demilitarized zone, but are likely to withdraw to the jungle hideouts they used before the talks began. Jason Hagen, a Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, predicts that the guerrillas will intensify their trademark actions: kidnappings, bombings, and the destruction of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, he says, the right-wing paramilitaries have nearly doubled to some 8,000 troops, and are expected to direct their attacks exclusively against the civilian population.

Government forces have received $1.3 billion in US military aid, mostly in the form of combat helicopters. The aid was given in the name of the US war on drugs, but with both rebels and paramilitaries depending on drug money, the lines between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency have grown increasingly blurred.

"In a war that hits particularly the civilian population, it'll be more of the same, but with a wider scope and intensified," Mr. Hagan says. "More intense and crude."

Analysts say that despite US backing, the Colombian military still is not strong enough to defeat the FARC on the battlefield. Although the rebels have little support in urban areas, they currently operate in around 70 percent of the country's rural hinterland, where centuries of neglect by the central government has left a fertile ground for the revolutionary cause.

Despite a last-ditch intervention by the United Nations, Pastrana has rejected a rebel proposal to resume peace talks. As government forces massed outside a rebel enclave, a United Nations peace envoy admitted that intense weekend negotiations with the FARC had failed.

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