A LOOK INSIDE A COLOMBIA REBEL HAVEN

LOS POZOS, Colombia -- Flying into this FARC guerrilla enclave in southern
Colombia aboard an armed forces-run airliner is almost as bizarre as being
able to telephone the rebels on their toll-free line.

Then there are those FARC motivational highway signs -- "Don't Cut Down
Trees" -- and that teen-age rebel who clasps her hair clip on the barrel of
an AK-47 assault rifle while she combs her ponytail.

Los Pozos, a village of some 40 wooden houses, is the political heart of
the huge chunk of territory that President Andres Pastrana yielded to his
largest guerrilla foes in 1998 as an incentive to begin peace talks.

The 17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, now
controls the area, almost one-third the size of Florida, with the military
and police forbidden from entering but civilians free to cross its boundaries.

No need to call ahead on the FARC's toll-free line. Just drive in or take
any of three flights a week that Satena, an airline owned and operated by
the Colombian armed forces, offers to the area's biggest town, San Vicente
Del Caguan, 177 miles south of Bogota.

That is just the opening bit of strangeness about a place that some
visitors have described as a virtual rebel theme park, or a kind of
political petting zoo where visitors can safely sidle up to guerrillas
instead of gorillas.

Billboard Proclamations: The 43-mile washboard dirt road from San Vicente
to Los Pozos is dotted with FARC billboards denouncing the Colombian
government and its U.S. allies.

A U.S. map half-stuffed into a boot seems odd -- until one notices that the
boot is crushing a tiny map of Colombia.

Other billboards are recruiting posters for the FARC's version of the U.S.
Special Forces, the elite Teofilo Forero Column. "Join the Revolution,"
they proclaim to passers-by.

But the signs that most stand out are the 18x14-inch sheet-metal placards
nailed to roadside trees every half a mile or so, proclaiming some of the
FARC's abridged dictums for a better society.

Among them: "Protect the Children," "Guard the Waters," "Don't Cut Down
Trees," and "Protect the Fauna" -- messages from rebels who regularly bomb
oil pipelines around the country to extort money for their operations.

In Villa Nueva, just outside Los Pozos, lies a complex of barracks- like
buildings, huts and tents where government and FARC negotiators meet twice
a week to talk peace. While Pastrana's negotiators shuttle in from Bogota,
the FARC is always here, with senior comandantes strolling around the
complex, assault rifles draped over their backs, and a large rebel
encampment in a nearby thicket.

Girls With Guns: About one-third of the FARC rebels in the complex are
women, mostly teen-agers like Maritza, a chubby-faced 16-year-old who said
she joined when she was 13 and has three battles under her belt. "I grew up
with guerrillas," she said simply.

They wear camouflaged uniforms far too big for their tiny frames and carry
AK-47 assault rifles almost as tall as they are. But they accessorize with
colorful hair pins, ponytail wraps, bracelets, shiny necklaces and nail
polish designs.

"It's a girl thing," said the shy Maritza, who sported a string of tiny
plastic flowers woven through her hair and kept her purple hair clip
clasped on the barrel of her AK-47.

Comandantes are unfailingly polite, even jovial, despite the FARC's
orthodox communist ideology and its record of kidnappings, extortions,
links to drug traffickers and the use of homemade mortars so inaccurate and
indiscriminate that even the innocent are often victims.

"Want an imperialist cigarette?" Comandante Andres Paris joked as he
offered a Marlboro to a journalist. Comandante Gabriel Angel sold his book
of short stories to visitors -- $7.50 per autographed copy -- while another
peppered a visiting American with questions about U.S. policy on Colombia.

The next day, on the way out of the FARC zone and to the city of Florencia
110 miles away, taxi driver Enrique Montalvo launched into an intriguing
story as he drives past the prosperous town of Doncella.

Doncella was a no-account village, he said, until Pablo Escobar and other
Medellin Cartel drug lords arrived in the 1980s and turned the stunningly
beautiful countryside into vast fields of coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Money flowed like water, Montalvo said, and he was hired to make seven or
eight trips to Medellin and bring back shipments of $500,000 to $1 million
each in cash -- money to buy semiprocessed coca paste.

"It was the best of businesses, smuggling money," he said.

Maybe his smuggler's background caused him to seem unconcerned when I
slipped a thin sheet of metal -- the sign I had taken earlier -- under a
pile of old newspapers strewn around the trunk of his car as we left San
Vicente.