WIDER WAR IN COLOMBIA AS MILITARY STEPS UP ATTACKS ON REBELS, CONFLICT
SPREADS TO ONCE-STABLE AREAS

TAME, Colombia -- After years as a distant rumor, war has reached this
lonely city on Colombia's eastern plains. Left-wing guerrillas have taken
to assassinating strangers in the streets. Roadblocks have gone up on the
edge of town where right-wing militiamen inspect cars and take names.
Police have sand-bagged their headquarters.

The two guerrilla armies that have enjoyed uncontested control of this
region for years have weathered a two-month campaign by the military. Now
paramilitary forces that work hand in hand with the army have moved in,
bringing what Tame's residents fear are the tactics of a dirty war that is
spreading across once-stable areas of Colombia.

"The people want to be left in peace," said Tame's mayor, Jorge Antonio
Bernal, who no longer keeps his office in town because of guerrilla death
threats. "But that is not going to happen anytime soon."

By almost any measure, more people are fighting more frequently in more
parts of Colombia than at any point in the four-decade conflict. Once
confined to a cluster of central provinces sliced by guerrilla
transportation routes, intense fighting now touches remote southwestern and
eastern provinces and has become a permanent feature of the southern
jungles where army and paramilitary forces are contesting rebel control for
the first time.

The forecast from army generals and guerrilla commanders is for more
fighting in the months ahead. The escalation is taking place despite
President Andres Pastrana's controversial peace negotiations with the
rebels, including a vast demilitarized zone in the south, and a $1.3
billion U.S. aid package designed to combat the flourishing drug trade that
helps finance leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary fighters alike.

"We are going to have a period of two or three years in which the situation
is going to become more acute before we find a way to peace," said Gen.
Fernando Tapias, head of the Colombian armed forces. "The state and society
must be prepared for this."

In Colombia's four-sided war, the main actors are two Marxist-oriented
rebel armies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the
National Liberation Army (ELN), pitted against the army and a
pro-government paramilitary force, the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia (AUC). Their clashes traditionally have occurred sporadically,
often under cover of darkness, through quick strikes against civilians,
sabotage and bombings or in accidental meetings in jungle settings.

But a number of factors are conspiring to change that. They include the
enhanced capability of the Colombian armed forces, due in part to U.S.
training and military aid that is by far the largest component of the $1.3
billion drug-fighting package. Added to that, a fading economy has
contributed recruits to the growing guerrilla and paramilitary armies. And
the U.S.-backed anti-drug effort has produced a balloon effect, in which
squeezing the war in one part of Colombia has sent it bulging into other parts.

To the north of Tame (TAH-mee), for example, sit fresh coca fields
controlled by the FARC, the country's largest left-wing guerrilla force.
Coca cultivation has doubled here in the past year as the rebels find new
places to plant cocaine's key ingredient, far from a U.S.-backed aerial
spraying campaign in the south of the country.

The Bush administration has undertaken a review of the U.S. policy here
that it inherited from the Clinton administration. A high-ranking
delegation of U.S. diplomatic and military officials came to Colombia last
week for talks to guide the reassessment. Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell is scheduled to visit Sept. 11-12.

The U.S. aid, mostly devoted to military transport helicopters and
training, was designed to help Pastrana's peace efforts by depriving the
rebel army of its slice of Colombia's $6 billion-a-year drug industry. The
peace talks have been fruitless so far, however, creating public
disenchantment with the process. But Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of
state for political affairs who led the U.S. delegation, restated support
for Pastrana on Friday, adding that Plan Colombia, the president's program
of negotiations combined with military pressure and social development,
"remains the only way to peace."

The training and new equipment have turned the Colombian military into a
more mobile and capable offensive force, encouraging predictions that
fighting will intensify before it can diminish. The improvement was
particularly visible last month in southern Colombia, where a rapid
deployment unit killed 50 guerrillas in a sustained air and ground attack
lasting two weeks.

But the FARC guerrillas and the rival AUC paramilitary forces are also
improving, and they are reaching into new parts of the country. So far, the
overtaxed military has shown an inability to stop the spread. A senior U.S.
official said the Colombian military can do "set pieces," regional military
operations like those in the south, but is not yet ready to take on the
armed groups nationwide.

"It is a fact that the Colombian military and the Colombian police are not
strong enough to provide security throughout the country," the U.S.
official said.

An acute downturn in Colombia's economy, which had been remarkably
resilient, has also contributed to intensifying violence. As unemployment
hovers near 20 percent and the economy fails to produce enough new jobs to
keep pace with population growth, the rebel and paramilitary organizations
have provided job opportunities for hundreds of young men and women.

Recently, members of the paramilitary army's governing body said the force
had grown by 5,000 members over the past year, a figure that if true would
mean the AUC now numbers 13,000 armed troops. The 18,000-member FARC, a
mostly rural insurgency that has fought the government since 1964, is also
expanding at a rate its leaders say is outpacing their ability to finance it.

"The reason is the crisis that this country is in -- the shortage of
schools, of spaces in universities, of employment," said Raul Reyes, a
leading FARC commander. "Everyone is asking to join us: journalists,
economists, politicians. One of the problems is that we are short of money
to buy arms, so we have told people they have to wait. If not for this, we
would be much bigger."

This town of 40,000 people, sitting on a treeless plain that runs north to
the Venezuelan border, is on the leading edge of the war's expansion. Until
recently, violence had rarely reached this place, 200 miles northeast of
Bogota, the capital, and town residents had learned to accommodate passing
guerrilla armies.

But last spring the main paramilitary leader, Carlos Castano, announced
that his troops would control Arauca province, where Tame is located, by
the end of the year. Since then, killings in the province have doubled.

The murders have included about 25 itinerant salesmen shot in Arauca city,
the provincial capital, 80 miles to the northeast; police officials suspect
they constituted an advance guard of paramilitary organizers and were
killed by guerrillas. Last month in the town of Saravena, a door-to-door
salesman, previously wounded, was pulled from a hospital bed by members of
the FARC and shot 15 times.

"This town's opinions are very divided," said Bernal, Tame's mayor. "Some
are afraid of the arrogance and death these paramilitary groups bring, but
others are sympathetic because of the destruction and unemployment caused
by the guerrillas."

The history of the guerrilla presence in Arauca is as complicated as in any
other part of Colombia. The first guerrilla group to arrive was the ELN,
Colombia's second-largest Marxist insurgency, which now numbers about 5,000
members. The ELN was drawn by the financial possibilities presented by a
cross-country oil pipeline that began operating in 1986.

The guerrillas made money from the Cano Limon pipeline in two ways: They
were paid not to blow it up, and they controlled companies hired for repair
work after they did attack it. A portion of roughly $4 billion in oil
royalties, paid by Occidental Petroleum and the state-run Ecopetrol to the
provincial government, flowed into unions, government agencies and civic
associations controlled by the ELN.

But military officials said the FARC, which has roughly 1,500 troops
operating in Arauca and two neighboring provinces, began asking the ELN for
a share about two years ago as part of a national search for funds. When
the ELN refused, the FARC began blowing up the pipeline, something it has
done more than 120 times this year alone. The pipeline has been inoperative
for all but a month this year.

While competing for money, the FARC and ELN have formed military alliances
here and in other strategic areas across the country to confront the army
and paramilitary forces. In recent weeks, the guerrillas joined to bomb the
heavily guarded 18th Brigade headquarters in Arauca city.

The military has been growing in Arauca and now tops 5,000 soldiers. But on
any given day, according to Gen. Pedro Lemus Pedraza, who runs the 18th
Brigade, 80 percent of his resources are devoted to protecting the flow of oil.

As the army has guarded the pipeline, vast new tracts of coca crops have
emerged. The FARC has started ordering local farmers to grow a maximum of
six acres of coca, according to government officials and sources close to
the FARC. Coca is also appearing in other parts of the country for the
first time -- in the Uraba region in the north and Narino province to the
southwest, among others -- bringing with it an increased guerrilla
presence, matched by paramilitary forces who arrive in reaction.

Most of the fields here have emerged between Tame and Saravena, another
guerrilla stronghold. In the past year, officials say, the land under
cultivation has risen from 10,000 acres to more than 25,000 acres.

Reyes, the FARC commander, said the guerrilla group charges drug
traffickers a fee only to transport the coca base from guerrilla-controlled
areas, although the Colombian government says the group is more deeply
involved. But even if the FARC took only one cut from the coca proceeds,
the crop in Arauca alone could bring the guerrilla group $50 million a year.

"The army says that all of this coca is essentially moving up from the
south because of Plan Colombia," said a government ombudsman who asked to
remain anonymous for safety reasons. "The spraying in [the southern
province of] Putumayo is not killing the coca, just shifting it. So now we
are a coca zone."

Despite the drug violence, Tame residents are most alarmed by indications
of an impending paramilitary offensive similar to those that have recently
swept through nearby guerrilla strongholds. Since the middle of August,
paramilitary forces from neighboring Casanare province have been operating
on the outskirts. They have established regular roadblocks, untouched by
army forces stationed less than 30 minutes away, and assembled lists of the
truckers, taxi drivers and others who pass to and from Puerto Rondon, about
50 miles southeast of Tame. Those stopped are asked to bare their shoulders
so the paramilitary troops can check for the telltale sign of guerrilla
membership: marks left by rifle straps.

The roadblocks appeared soon after the army's rapid deployment force
withdrew from Tame after a two-month offensive against joint ELN and FARC
forces.

"Why does the army always head out and find guerrillas, but never
paramilitaries?" asked Juan Carlos Pacavita, a local musician who lives in
a tin-shack village of displaced families on the outskirts of town. "I
really want to know this. These groups are 15 minutes away and heading into
our town."