Pubdate: Mon, 25 Feb 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: International
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Juan Forero
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

COLOMBIAN REBELS SABOTAGE PEACE HOPES

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia --- Just a month ago, there was a 
breakthrough in troubled peace talks here between the rebels and the 
government. But in the last week, the rebels hijacked a plane and kidnapped 
a senator, prompting President Andres Pastrana to take back a big block of 
land granted to the rebels as a kind of fief free of army intervention.

On Saturday, the very day that the president visited this formerly 
rebel-held town to demonstrate the government's authority, the rebels 
struck again, kidnapping a high-profile presidential candidate.

These events, Colombians are well aware, mean an intensification of the 
38-year civil war.

People in this gritty jungle town and across much of Colombia have cast 
blame squarely on one group: the rebels, whose string of bombings, 
kidnappings and other violations eventually led President Pastrana to break 
off negotiations abruptly last week. The kidnapping on Saturday of the 
presidential candidate, Senator Ingrid Betancourt, long a critic of the 
rebels, was like an exclamation point on the week's events.

"The government was making offers, but the guerrillas did not reciprocate, 
they just were not willing," said Jorge Alberto Gonzalez, a 45- year-old 
pharmacist. "They did not understand everything that they had been given at 
that moment."

What the rebels had was a prize that no other Latin American guerrilla 
organization had ever enjoyed: its own dominion, granted by the government.

To induce the rebels to negotiate, in November 1998 President Pastrana 
ceded this town and a vast region around it as a venue for talks. The 
military was withdrawn, and the rebel group, which had its origins in a 
peasant uprising nearly four decades ago, was granted control of everything 
from the courts to road-paving to the municipal police force.

But almost from the beginning, the process that began with such high hopes 
began to unravel. On the first day of talks, Jan. 7, 1999, the rebel 
leader, Manuel Marulanda, failed to show up, leaving Mr. Pastrana alone on 
a dais in the center of town. Such lapses persisted for three years, while 
the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or the FARC, 
its Spanish acronym), was increasingly accused of using the enclave to plot 
military offensives, hide kidnapping victims and store arms.

The end came last Wednesday when Mr. Pastrana, who had promised to make 
peace his top priority, broke off talks after rebels hijacked an airliner 
and kidnapped a senior senator on board. The air force followed up with 
bombing runs aimed at dispersing the rebels, and soldiers are moving in to 
establish government authority.

For many residents, people accustomed to hardships like power failures and 
indifference from the central government, the demise of the peace process 
has been taken in stride. They had hoped the region would serve as an 
incubator for talks, but several concluded early on that the rebels were 
not really committed to negotiations.

"I do not think they ever had a willingness for peace," said Robert 
Hermosa, 26, a farmer. "Across the country, all we saw them do was acts of 
violence and terrorism."

Unlike many of their countrymen outside the zone, residents are not bitter 
at the guerrillas.

This region was spared much of Colombia's violence because the army was 
banned and the overwhelming guerrilla force prevented renegade death squads 
from establishing a presence.

But the people here said they had expected more from a guerrilla group that 
called itself the Army of the People. "They never came out with any 
proposals, anything," said Jairo Cuellar, 35, another farmer. "So it was 
their fault. The government put it all in their hands, and they did not do 
anything with it."

The outlook, in Colombia and abroad, was far different in 1998, when the 
zone was ceded. Foreign diplomats, particularly from European countries, 
saw some justification then for rebellion within Colombia, a highly 
stratified and often corrupt country that has shut most people out of any 
say in government.

Urban Colombians, though long suspicious of the rebels, were cautiously 
optimistic that the group was serious about negotiations. After all, Mr. 
Marulanda, the group's leader, had met with Mr. Pastrana when he was 
running for president in 1998, an encounter that helped solidify Mr. 
Pastrana's image as the peace candidate.

"They were considered, in many quarters, legitimate interlocutors working 
on a peace process that was something necessary," said Eduardo Gamarra, 
director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida 
International University in Miami.

But, he added, the rebels quickly lost that legitimacy by stepping up their 
violence while failing to take advantage of the pulpit that the 
demilitarized zone provided to offer their political proposals to 
restructure Colombia.

Marc Chernick, a Georgetown University professor who has studied the peace 
process here and elsewhere, said the rebels could have gained political 
capital by setting up agricultural programs, for example, to highlight the 
flaws in rural development in the rest of the country.

"The FARC are very resistant to the politics of gestures, symbols, unlike 
the Zapatistas, who are masters of that," explained Mr. Chernick, referring 
to the media-savvy rebels of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. "They say it's 
not up to them to give gestures of peace, and it's not up to them to play 
symbolic politics."

The group did make it difficult for outsiders to see much of the region 
past San Vicente. Rebel commanders did little to dispel government reports 
about murders and the growing of coca, the raw material of cocaine. Critics 
like Human Rights Watch were lambasted by the rebels as puppets of Washington.

The rebels, who have been dispersed from this town and other areas by the 
army offensive, have continued to insist that they remain interested in 
negotiating. "We maintain our will for peace," Marcos Leon Calarcar, a 
rebel representative in Mexico, said in a report by the Reuters news 
agency. "We still hold in our hands the flag of peace."

Today, though, few people seem to believe this.

"One has to conclude," said one foreign diplomat who has strongly supported 
the peace process, "that the FARC are primitive and perhaps never committed 
in good faith to negotiations."

And even if the group were willing to open a dialogue with Mr. Pastrana's 
successor, the winner of presidential elections in May, as guerrilla 
commanders said in a recent communique, the political climate has changed 
considerably.

Colombian society has shifted sharply to the political right, with polls 
showing most people here having lost faith in the peace process and in the 
rebels. Polls also show that most Colombians will vote in May for Alvaro 
Uribe Velez, who has harshly criticized the rebels as terrorists and drug 
traffickers.

Internationally, the outlook is also different for the rebels. European 
governments have refused visas to the same guerrilla commanders who once 
toured their capitals. the United States is considering offering 
intelligence on rebel activities to the Colombian Army; until now 
Washington has been barred from involvement in counterinsurgency operations.

"They lost the international political battle, in this country and abroad," 
Mr. Pastrana said recently. "Today, there is a complete union of forces 
against them, from all institutions and the international community."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jackl