Colombia abandons peace effort

Marking the end of attempts to bring peace to Colombia after nearly four decades of civil war, President Andrés Pastrana returned over the weekend to the same dusty town where, three years ago, he launched a negotiation process with the country's left-wing rebels.

He flew into San Vicente on Saturday, just hours after elite army troops marched into the town, while government war planes flew round-the-clock bombing sorties against dozens of guerrilla targets.

An angry Pastrana had earlier given the rebels two-and-a-half hours to withdraw from the region, which was ceded to the rebels in 1998 as a setting for the peace talks.

The ailing negotiations collapsed last week, after rebels hijacked a domestic airplane. But Mr. Pastrana, who built his presidency around the promise of peace, insisted that he remains committed to a negotiated settlement.

"The book of peace has always been open; the chapter where we close it is when we sign a peace deal," Pastrana told hundreds of townspeople gathered in the plaza.

But with presidential elections looming in Colombia, few of Mr. Pastrana's political rivals are willing to identify themselves with a new peace effort. One of those presidential candidates, Ingrid Betancourt, an outspoken critic of the guerrillas, was abducted by rebels Saturday as she drove toward San Vicente, about 170 miles south of Bogotá, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, there are signs that the US is eyeing a deeper involvement in Colombia's complicated civil war.

"For now, the voices of peace have been silenced," says Congressman Gustavo Petro, a former commander with the defunct M-19 guerrilla group, which signed a peace deal with the government in 1991.

The sudden decision to end the moribund peace process talks came after two pistol-wielding rebels hijacked a local flight early Wednesday and forced the pilot to land the plane on an isolated mountain road. The hijackers bundled Senator Jorge Gechen Turbay, president of the Senate peace commission, into a truck and disappeared into the hills.

The remaining 29 passengers and crew were freed unharmed, but the hijacking caused outrage among many Colombians who have grown increasingly skeptical that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) was serious about making peace. The government and the rebels were supposedly drawing up cease-fire deals to present in April, but the hijacking came amid a nationwide wave of FARC bomb attacks.

Over the weekend, as US-made Black Hawk helicopters circled over San Vicente, Pastrana blamed the rebels for sinking the peace talks. "They were the ones who made the decision to break away from the negotiating table," the president declared. "The Colombian president never abandoned his seat at the peace table."

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