COLOMBIA'S ELITE WEARING BLINDERS TO FARC'S POWER

What I found most amazing during a visit here last week is that much
of Colombiaís ruling class - starting with the government - seems to
be in denial about the severity of the war that is destroying this
country and threatening to spill over into other Latin American
nations.

President Andres Pastrana, top opposition politicians and leading
newspapers seem to downplay the growing strength of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, other Marxist guerrillas and right-wing
paramilitary groups.

According to a recent Rand Corp. study, the FARC has grown from 350
fighters in 1966 to 7,000 guerrillas in 1995 and up to 20,000 today.
The rebels' goal is to create a 30,000-strong force, which they might
soon achieve thanks to their fabulous annual income from the
protection of drug traffickers and mass kidnappings.

Since 1998, when they got a Switzerland-size "demilitarized area" in
south-central Colombia as a gesture of goodwill from Pastrana to
encourage peace talks, the FARC has turned the area into a virtual
state.

Overall, Colombia's guerrilla war has claimed 35,000 lives over the
past decade, according to conservative estimates.

Yet when you talk with leading political figures, much of what you
hear is that things are not as dramatic as seen abroad. They
emphasize that despite the FARCís recent vow to take the war to the
cities, it is being largely fought in a remote part of the country
and poses no threat to urban centers.

One of the few members of the political class whom I found to be more
realistic was Alfonso Gomez Mendez, who has been Colombia's attorney
general for the past four years. He stepped down last week and talked
pretty candidly in an interview on his first day as a private citizen.

"The war has not been assumed as such by Colombian society," Gomez
Mendez told me. "Deep down, people in Bogota still think that the
guerrillas will remain in the FARC-controlled southern Colombia
Caguan zone, where there are no golf courses anyway."

Indeed, both the government and opposition politicians talk about the
war with euphemisms. Pastrana often scolds reporters for saying that
there is a "civil war" in Colombia, arguing that it is an "internal
conflict," as if that would change anything. Pastrana refuses to call
the rebels "guerrillas," describing them instead with the somewhat
more respectable term "insurgents." And despite evidence of the
FARC's ties to drug traffickers, Pastrana and opposition politicians
refuse to call them narco-insurgents, presumably because this would
put them in the uncomfortable situation of supporting peace talks
with drug traffickers.

Even guerrilla attacks are sanitized in Colombia's official jargon.
When the FARC recently kidnapped 53 soldiers and kept them tied with
ropes around their necks, an angry Colombian government minister
denounced the media for calling the action a "kidnapping." It was a
"retention," he said.

Part of Colombia's problem, according to former attorney general
Gomez Mendez, is that its war has not touched the upper classes.
There are no upper-class Colombians in the military, let alone in the
battlefield.

Indeed, more than most armed conflicts I have seen, this is a war
fought by poverty-stricken youths who take up arms for both sides as
an alternative to unemployment while the rest of the nation watches
from the distance.

"We should reform the military statute and make the draft an
obligation to everyone, and not just of workers and peasants, as it
is in effect now," said Gomez Mendez.

There is no nationwide commitment to win the war, even if the polls
show that only 5 percent of Colombians support the FARC rebels, the
former attorney general said. He cited the case of 30 army soldiers
who were killed in a June 22 guerrilla attack on an army garrison in
the remote Putumayo region. In most other countries, there would have
been a day of national mourning, and streets, schools and hospitals
would have been named after the fallen soldiers, he noted. In much
less dramatic cases, such as the hostage-takings in Iran or the
recent detention of U.S. pilots in China, Americans put up yellow
ribbons and held prayer sessions. Yet none of that happened in
Colombia.

Granted, the Colombian army has a long way to go to win a popularity
contest. It has an awful history of human rights abuses, and it
remains to be seen whether the $1.3 billion in U.S. military
anti-narcotics aid will turn it into a more law-abiding service. But
it will be hard for Colombia to win the war, or to expect others to
step up their help, if its own ruling class continues watching it as
a distant problem. Living in denial will only make things worse.