ROADBLOCKS ON PATH TO PEACE

Colombia: An Exchange Of Prisoners Between The Government And FARC
Guerrillas Seemed To Be A Good Sign, But One Of The Ex-Captives Says He Saw
No Indication The Rebels Want To End Their War.

BOGOTA, Colombia - Edgar Bueno, a soldier in the Colombian army, made a
four-day journey last month with a nylon leash tied around his neck and a
rifle pointed at his back.

He traveled on foot and by boat through rain forests, his starting point
being behind the barbed wire surrounding a prison camp of Colombia's most
powerful insurgent army.

He and 54 other soldiers were freed in a landmark prisoner swap between the
government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. In
exchange, the government released 14 ailing rebels held in Colombian jails.

The trade - the first concrete result of more than two years of stumbling
peace talks to end the nation's 37-year-old war - was a prelude to the
release last week of about 300 other servicemen captured by the FARC during
the past four years. The FARC calls the release a "peacemaking gesture";
critics say it's a public relations show.

Show or not, Bueno was happy to be home. But about 50 officers are still
being kept by the FARC to serve as leverage in talks with the government.

"We believe those officers should be with us a while longer," FARC leader
Manuel Marulanda said last week.

Sitting in the bedroom of his mother's home, in a working-class
neighborhood of Bogota, Bueno, 25, feels a twinge of guilt for being free
while others remain in captivity: "It makes me very sad because I know how
they live."

The FARC rose up against the state in 1964 as a ragtag band of Marxist
ideologues but has evolved into Latin America's best-armed and most
powerful rebel group, with 17,000 fighters. While other guerrilla forces
have disappeared because of lack of support, the FARC is flush with cash
from extortion, kidnapping and "taxes" collected from producers of cocaine
and heroin.

The United States is pouring more than $1 billion into Colombia in mostly
military aid and training to fight drug production and undermine FARC
financing, as part of a government initiative known as Plan Colombia. FARC
considers the American aid a form of U.S. intervention in the country's
affairs.

Bueno tells his story while sitting near a photograph sent to his mother
from the prison camp as proof that he was alive and wrings his hands. He
was among 52 soldiers captured Aug. 4, 1998, after running out of
ammunition while trying to fight off a rebel attack on the Miraflores
military base, in the jungle-covered flatlands southeast of Bogota. He had
arrived at the base 15 days earlier as a conscript.

The rebels rounded up the survivors, divided them into three groups, and
led them to a nearby river where boats waited to take them to prison camps.
The townspeople, whom Bueno thought he had been defending, applauded the
rebels.

He shared camp with 38 other captives. At first, they held out hope for a
quick release or a rescue by government forces. When they heard an airplane
overhead, they thought they were saved. Instead, the Colombian air force
jet bombed the camp, and the 200 or so rebels took their prisoners deeper
into the jungle.

The captives soon realized they would be held indefinitely. "At least a
prisoner has a sentence, and he knows that after five or six or 10 years
he'll get out," Bueno says. "But for us it was so unpredictable."

Labeled prisoners of war by the rebels, and hostages by the military, Bueno
and his companions whiled away the days playing chess and poker and
rereading letters that arrived every three or four months from their
families via the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Bueno has 250 letters that he kept as a memento of his days in captivity.
He also kept the nylon leash that the rebels would tie around the necks of
the captives when moving them to different camps, or as punishment. Each
soldier was connected by the cord to several others; anyone who lost his
footing or tried to flee risked choking his companions: "It was like being
taken along like a dog."

Any attempt to do exercise was seen by the rebels as preparation for an
escape attempt; the guerrillas confiscated a barbell the soldiers had made
by filling cut-off pant legs with wet sand.

Bueno, who was 22 when he was captured, said he fought to maintain his
dignity throughout his captivity and has emerged from the experience with a
deeper conviction to fight the rebels.

"Before, I fought to defend my life. Now I would fight to defend my
country, I now have ideals to fight for," he says.

The government and the rebels described the prisoner swap as a breakthrough
in the peace process in the hopes of rallying dwindling public support for
peace talks. But President Andres Pastrana, who was elected on a promise
that he would bring peace to this war-ravaged country, acknowledged that
the release was not technically part of the negotiation agenda.

"Colombians are beginning to gain confidence in the peace process, but I
want to insist that now the road we have to take with the FARC is to reach
accords on the issues on the [negotiating] table," he told reporters.

Bueno says he doesn't believe in the will of the FARC to negotiate an end
to the war and said the release of the captured servicemen was no
humanitarian gesture.

Critics of the peace process, while celebrating the releases, agree,
pointing to recent FARC attacks as proof that the nation is moving closer
to all-out war rather than peace.

At the same time it announced the mass release, the FARC launched an
offensive, killing 30 soldiers in an attack on a military base in Putumayo
province and freeing 98 inmates - including 19 rebels - in a raid on a
Bogota prison.

"If the FARC continue at this pace, I think the government will have to
reconsider the peace process because at this rate we are heading toward an
escalation of the war and not toward peace," government peace negotiator
Luis Guillermo Giraldo said.

But for former national security adviser Alfredo Rangel, the offensive was
predictable and follows the warped logic of Colombia's war.

"The FARC fears nothing more than to be considered weak or soft.

"That's why their gestures of peace will always be accompanied by
demonstrations of force. So we can expect the worst after the mass release
of the soldiers," he warned in a newspaper column last week.

Unlike many other soldiers released by the FARC who say they've had enough
of the war, Bueno wants to be part of the government forces that continue
fighting the rebels and hopes to return to the army as a professional soldier.

But he said the decision would depend on his family, which, together with
the relatives of other soldiers, lobbied tirelessly for the government and
the rebels to reach a prisoner swap accord.

"I have to talk to my mom. If she tells me not to go, I won't," he says. "I
can't contradict her after all she fought to get me out."