EL TIGRE -- Jose Efrain Mora lived in a house on the steep bluffs above the River Guamuez for 30 years until the night last month when a stranger's hands shook him awake. Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest guerrilla insurgency, ordered him to get up, and he quickly awoke his wife and three children. Outside more than a dozen men, working quietly in the darkness, laced dynamite to the 350-foot bridge spanning the wide river below their house. [continues 686 words]
Fighting Spikes in Province Despite Anti-Drug Program EL TIGRE, Colombia -- Jose Efrain Mora lived in a house on the steep bluffs above the River Guamuez for 30 years until the night last month when a stranger's hands shook him awake. Members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, the country's largest guerrilla insurgency, ordered him to get up, and he quickly woke his wife and three children. Outside, more than a dozen men, working quietly in the darkness, laced dynamite to the 350-foot bridge spanning the wide river below their house. [continues 1607 words]
Colombian Ex-Rebel Fights to Forget Haunting Memories of Childhood BOGOTA, Colombia -- Morning arrives through a sooty window, and Fabian Tamayo rises from a mattress with no sheets. Within minutes, he is nudging his motorcycle between the homicidal buses of rush hour, across a paved landscape as foreign to him as the rest of his cold new life. There is no money in the pockets of his gray flannel pants, and only a trickle of fuel in the motorcycle. But threading through the traffic, his Tweety Bird key chain slapping against the gas tank, brings respite from the remorseless memories of a guerrilla childhood. [continues 3142 words]
Report Complicates Efforts to End War BOGOTA, Colombia, June 25 -- A confidential assessment prepared for the president of Colombia on whether peace talks should begin with the nation's main paramilitary force has concluded that the group, which frequently fights alongside the Colombian military, is a drug-trafficking organization, according to a copy of the document. A six-month review commissioned by President Alvaro Uribe to evaluate the possibility of peace talks with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC and listed by the United States as a terrorist organization, reports that "it is impossible to differentiate between the self-defense groups and narco-trafficking organizations." The review also contends that paramilitary leaders seek to exploit peace talks to protect their drug-trafficking profits. [continues 1451 words]
U.S.-Sponsored Eradication Plans Spark Peasant Protests SAN FRANCISCO, Peru -- The mountain slopes that rise around this town in Peru's high eastern jungle were the site of a rare success story in the U.S. war on drugs. But the resilient Andean drug industry is flowing back into the Apurimac River Valley, testing a model partnership in Washington's increasingly aggressive counter-drug campaign. Once one of the world's largest sources of coca leaf, the valley was the focus of a U.S.-backed effort to intercept planes shuttling the key raw material in cocaine to processing laboratories in neighboring Colombia. Now U.S. eradication efforts in Colombia are squeezing the trade back toward Peru, causing deep social unrest, the threat of armed resistance to U.S. drug policy and political risks for a fragile Peruvian government responsible for implementing the most controversial elements of Washington's strategy. [continues 1130 words]
Involvement Will Decline After Hunt Ends For Americans FLORENCIA, Colombia -- One day last month, a U.S.-registered Cessna Caravan radioed a mayday call to report engine trouble as it approached this town from Bogota, the capital 240 miles to the north. Minutes later, the plane carrying four Americans and a Colombian army sergeant, who were embarking on an intelligence mission, crashed in the jungle. The Colombian sergeant and one of the Americans were killed by rebel gunfire immediately after the Feb. 13 plane crash. Since then, thousands of Colombian forces have searched for the three surviving Americans, apparently now in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerrilla group designated a terrorist organization by Washington. The United States sent 150 U.S. military and civilian officials to Colombia after the crash. The number of U.S. military officials in Colombia is now 411, the highest number ever stationed there. [continues 1819 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb. 13 -- A U.S. government aircraft crashed in southern Colombia today after its engine failed. The fate of the four Americans and one Colombian on board remained uncertain as night fell in the guerrilla-controlled zone where the plane went down. Colombian military officials said two unidentified bodies were found at the crash site and they warned that the passengers and crew may have been taken captive by members of the country's largest leftist guerrilla group, which regards U.S. government personnel as legitimate targets. The four Americans on board the Cessna 208 were contract employees of the Central Intelligence Agency at work on an anti-drug operation in the area, U.S. officials said. [continues 328 words]
Three Still Missing After Crash BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb. 14 -- Rebels shot and killed an American civilian working on anti-drug operations for the Pentagon and a Colombian soldier when their plane crash-landed Thursday in the southern jungle, U.S. officials said today. Three other American civilians on the plane were missing at the remote site in a region dominated by Colombia's largest guerrilla organization. The two bodies were found close to the plane's wreckage near the town of Puerto Rico, in Caqueta Province, about 220 miles south of Bogota, the Colombian capital, U.S. officials said. One man was shot in the head and the other in the chest. The fate of the three others on board the Cessna 208 was unknown. U.S. officials said they hoped the Americans survived and were able to elude capture by rebel forces operating in the mountainous area. [continues 811 words]
SARAVENA, Colombia -- The arrival of U.S. Special Forces trainers in this battered town last month signaled the beginning of a change that gives the U.S. more direct military involvement in Colombia's long civil war and could lead the country's two leftist guerrilla armies to broaden attacks against U.S. targets. Late last month, the smaller of the two Marxist-oriented guerrilla movements, the National Liberation Army, kidnapped a British and an American journalist in this rich oil region of eastern Colombia, saying the province has become a "war zone declared by the North American government and the Colombian state." Although meant as an explanation for the abduction of the journalists, who were released Saturday after 11 days in rebel hands, the warning stirred deep anxiety among Colombian civilians that the presence of U.S. troops will prompt a sharp response from the guerrillas. [continues 951 words]
Paramilitary Discord Imperils Anti-Drug Plan, Peace Efforts IN THE ABIBE MOUNTAINS, Colombia -- Drug trafficking has fractured Colombia's paramilitary army into a collection of potent regional factions that disagree over whether the financial benefit of protecting the country's vast cocaine trade outweighs the political costs and internal corruption it has brought the group. The split within the 15,000-member private army -- a leading player in Colombia's brutal civil war that derives a large portion of its financing from this country's drug trade -- significantly complicates President Alvaro Uribe's search for peace by adding at least one other armed group to a conflict that already features three irregular forces. It could also spell trouble for the U.S. anti-drug strategy here, particularly the aerial herbicide-spraying program that tacitly relies on paramilitary support in key coca-producing regions. [continues 1672 words]
BOGOTA Senior U.S. officials have asked President Alvaro Uribe to shield American military trainers in Colombia from prosecution by the International Criminal Court for any accusations of human rights abuses that may arise in connection with their work. The request, made by Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs, is part of a global campaign by the United States to prevent U.S. nationals from being tried at the international court. Arguing that future military aid hangs in the balance, U.S. diplomats have begun working here and with other allies to arrange such immunity agreements, which are allowed under the treaty setting up the court. [continues 388 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia, Aug. 14 -- Senior U.S. officials asked President Alvaro Uribe today to shield U.S. military trainers in Colombia from prosecution by the International Criminal Court for any human rights abuses that may arise in connection with their work. The request, made by Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman, is part of a global campaign by the United States to prevent U.S. nationals from being subjected to the international court. Arguing that future military aid hangs in the balance, U.S. diplomats have begun working here and with other allies to arrange such immunity agreements, which are allowed under the treaty setting up the court. [continues 661 words]
CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials have become more pessimistic about whether a popular U.S.- sponsored program that pays farmers to uproot coca and replace it with legal crops will have any lasting success against the drug industry. The program is the most socially oriented element of a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package approved almost two years ago by Congress with the goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005. [continues 339 words]
Alternative Program Fails to Win Over Colombian Farmers CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials have become increasingly pessimistic about whether a popular U.S.-sponsored program that pays farmers to uproot coca and replace it with legal crops will have any lasting success against the drug industry. The alternative development program is the most socially oriented element of a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package Congress approved almost two years ago with the goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005. Although it is only a small fraction of a package tilted heavily toward military assistance, alternative development has long been seen as the most politically acceptable part of a U.S. anti-drug strategy frequently criticized as a war plan targeting Colombia's Marxist insurgency. [continues 1436 words]
Diverging Views An Obstacle To Peace. Ignacio Choachi, a construction worker old enough to remember the day in 1948 when Bogota was burned in a spasm of political violence that has yet to end, attended Mass at the fading colonial Santa Barbara Church this morning in search of answers. Why had gunmen killed the archbishop of Cali on Saturday night? Why has Choachi's country known constant killing -- from peasants to political leaders -- in his 65 years? How would it end? [continues 1220 words]
SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia -- Returning to a base abandoned three years earlier to guerrilla forces, soldiers of the Colombian army's Hunters Battalion took a few moments to make it their own again. About 50 men, dressed in camouflage battle fatigues despite breathtaking heat, carefully trimmed the lawn with hedge clippers and painted the stones along pathways a gleaming white. The housekeeping duties may have seemed an odd priority only hours after the army swept into San Vicente del Caguan, a rebel haven during now-abandoned peace negotiations. But the business-as-usual attitude was a fair representation of Colombia's national mood at the outset of what officials say could be the decisive phase of the 38-year-old civil war. [continues 1050 words]
SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia, Feb. 23 -- President Andres Pastrana flew into this former rebel haven under heavy security today, as his senior commanders sought to follow up their largely unopposed seizure of rebel-held towns with broad strategic attacks that would mark a turning point in Colombia's 38-year-old war. Pastrana told about 1,000 people gathered in the town square that the rebels had ruined peace talks and would now be treated as terrorists. "And in that, the world supports us," he declared. Army sharpshooters kept watch from balconies and a church steeple during his speech. [continues 1023 words]
Paramilitary's Rise Unintended Outcome Of U.S. Assistance PARAISO, Colombia -- It is hard to imagine a place more misnamed than this village in northern Colombia's San Lucas Range. Paradise has had a difficult year. Months ago, President Andres Pastrana sent the army into Paraiso and the surrounding region to create a safe haven for peace talks with Colombia's second-largest guerrilla force.It was a politically risky move. Pastrana's orders to the army were unusual: Leave the guerrillas mostly alone, but focus on driving the right-wing paramilitary forces out of southern Bolivar province, where they had massed to block the peace plan. [continues 2379 words]
Fed Up With Troubled National Effort, 15 Mayors Sign Own Deal With Guerrillas EL PENOL, Colombia -- This town has seen its share of strife over the years. A government-sponsored dam project submerged El Penol 30 years ago, forcing 18,000 residents into a concrete replacement on higher ground. Today, it is Colombia's civil war that washes over El Penol and its neighbors. So Alidio Hoyos Galeano, El Penol's mayor, has joined 14 angry colleagues in a rebellion of their own. Tired of war and frustrated with the central government's failure to stop it, the mayors have signed a cease-fire agreement with the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia's second-largest guerrilla insurgency, that calls on the National Police to leave their towns. [continues 1320 words]
