FOUR-WAY CIVIL WAR MAKES COLOMBIA A NIGHTMARE

Drug Trade Funds Violent Insurgents

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA This is a country slowly watching itself die.

Almost 2 million Colombians have fled their homes to escape the violence of
civil war.

More than half the world's kidnappings occur in Colombia, where Marxist
guerrillas ransom some 3,500 people every year for sums averaging $500,000.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 are killed in combat every year. Some 25,000
Colombians died violently last year - the equivalent of 175,000 Americans
in terms of the population ratio.

Political executions - mainly by right-wing militias - account for 4,000 of
the deaths. People are afraid to talk. Both sides have assassinated 34 town
mayors in the past two years and another 50 are trembling over their death
notices.

By comparison, the Palestinian intifada is just a rumble between two rival
gangs.

The elites have left for other countries in Latin America, Europe and North
America or bought homes there. The middle classes are beginning to drift
away, too.

Colombians Leave In Droves

In the past five years, almost 1 million Colombians out of a population of
40 million have emigrated. Lines snake around the block near foreign
consulates where people stand in line all night seeking visas. A tourist
visa for the United States takes about nine months. Spain has been overrun
by Colombian illegals and is now rounding them up for deportation.

The brain drain is being felt at all levels of society.

Businesses are in constant fear of kidnappings and extortion. State
authority and the maintenance of public order outside the capital, Bogota,
have become meaningless.

Country houses are inaccessible: The roads are peppered with would-be
kidnappers waiting in ambush.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National
Liberation Army (ELN) have been designated as foreign terrorist
organizations by the U.S. government. State Department advisories warn
against travel to Colombia:

"Violence by narco-traffickers, guerrillas, paramilitary groups and other
criminal elements continues to affect all parts of the country, both urban
and rural. U.S. citizens of all age groups and occupations, both tourists
and residents, have been victimized.

"Bombings have occurred throughout Colombia, including urban areas. There
is a greater danger of being kidnapped in Colombia than in any other
country in the world."

The U.S. government does not pay ransom to kidnappers.

Four Wars Are Going On

Colombia's armed forces are fighting four different wars simultaneously -
against the Marxist FARC and ELN, the right-wing United Self Defense Forces
of Colombia (AUC), and the narco-traffickers.

Plan Colombia, to which the United States is contributing $1.3 billion over
two years, including $800 million in military assistance, seems inadequate.

The United States lost 3,800 helicopters in 10 years during the Vietnam War
- - most of them shot down over South Vietnam by a peasant guerrilla army.
Now Washington is supplying Colombia with 60 helicopters - including 18
sophisticated Black Hawks - for an area seven times larger than South Vietnam.

The Clinton administration specified that the helicopters and the three
battalions of Colombian army special forces that the United States has
trained are to be used for counternarcotics operations, not
counterinsurgency against the FARC or ELN.

But everyone in Colombia knows the two are intertwined. The distinction is
widely criticized as another case of Congress micro-managing foreign policy
into unworkable programs.

FARC guerrillas, flush with narcotics "taxes" imposed at each phase of the
process, from harvesting the coca leaf to the takeoffs and landings of
small planes that fly the cocaine out of jungle airstrips, maintain secret
interests in everything from fried-chicken outlets to Caribbean banks.

An Arms Dealer's Dream

Estimates of the FARC's annual booty range from $500 million to $1.5
billion. It is the richest insurgency in the history of guerrilla movements.

The FARC is currently the best customer of international arms dealers.
Intercepts of its encrypted electronic traffic shows it is now in the
market for shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. Plan Colombia's
helicopters are the obvious targets.

The FARC's arms are smuggled in along jungle trails from Venezuela and
Brazil. The weapons include light and heavy machine guns and 60 mm mortars,
mostly from stocks of Soviet-made weaponry in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet republics.

Peru's former intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, on the run since
autumn, was involved in some of the arms traffic via the common border with
Brazil, Colombian intelligence officials say.

In 1985, the FARC, with some 3,000 guerrillas, was active on 25 "fronts."
Today, with almost 20,000 heavily armed men and women, it is active all
over Colombia. It has used the Switzerland-size sanctuary in the south,
conceded by President Andres Pastrana as a sweetener for peace
negotiations, to recruit and train more fighters.

Government forces stumbled across the FARC's strategic plan in a hastily
evacuated jungle headquarters. The group's legendary 70-year-old leader,
Manuel Marulanda, ordered a buildup of his guerrilla army to 35,000
guerrillas by 2003. Colombian intelligence estimates that for each
guerrilla, there is a logistical tail of 10 people.

Reclusive Leader Is Popular

In public opinion polls, the FARC has never scored higher than 4 percent.
Comandante Marulanda, on the other hand, is affectionately referred to by
his nickname - Tirofijo, or Sureshot - even by Mr. Pastrana.

Tirofijo has never set foot in Bogota or any other major city in his entire
life. He has never seen a shopping mall or a movie theater, but his
movement has a Web site, serviced by satellite from the jungle. He has
outlasted nine Colombian presidents, including Mr. Pastrana's father.

The FARC's Marxist-Leninist leadership has not only survived the collapse
of the Soviet empire, but it communicates by e-mail from its jungle
hideouts with friends and sympathizers in Europe's leftist parties. It also
enjoys cheering sections in such journals as the Nation. The FARC advocates
drug legalization, and its members find succor in the anti-globalist
demonstrations they hear about on their shortwave radios.

ELN guerrillas sit astride the oil pipeline in the northeast. The border
crossing between San Cristobal in Venezuela and Cucuta in Colombia is
controlled by the ELN by night and the government by day. The pipeline has
been dynamited more than 1,000 times in recent years. It is currently out
of commission.

Barrancabermeja, a northern industrial center of 300,000 residents on the
Magdalena River, is "Showdown at the OK Corral" several times a day. It is
the country's most violent city. AUC death squads have been retaking the
city house-by-suspected-guerrillahouse. The army is battling both sides.

At nightfall, army Humvees and armored vehicles move slowly along dusty
streets, followed by automatic-rifle-toting soldiers in flak jackets. They
occasionally dart from behind the vehicles and burst into a cantina or a
private home looking for weapons.

Massacres, now perpetrated for the most part by right-wing paramilitary
units, involve savagery that defies description. Hacking the victims limb
by limb with machetes is not an unknown method of execution.

These militias systematically kill those they suspect of helping the
Marxist guerrillas with supplies - anything from medical treatment to boot
repairs. Both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries understand that the
purpose of terror is to terrorize. Government statistics credit the militia
with 70 percent of the massacres and ascribe 28 percent to the guerrillas,
blaming 2 percent on the narco-traffickers.

Originally encouraged by the Colombian military and security services, the
paramilitaries are now outside any legal framework, a power unto
themselves, with the occasional collusion of local police or military officers.

Bogota Tourists Cautioned

On the surface, all seems normal in Bogota, a city of 6 million at an
elevation of 8,600 feet. With almost as many buses and rickety minibuses
belching smoke as there are cars, the capital rivals Bangkok for traffic jams.

Foreigners are warned to stay off the streets and out of the Zona Rosa, the
nightclub district, where kidnappers prowl for wealthy-looking targets.
Dressing down is de rigeur.

Criminals use scopolamine, an incapacitating drug that is slipped into
drinks and cigarettes at bars, or in powder form as tourists are asked for
directions. They also use police uniforms and say they want to check a
foreigner's money for counterfeit dollars.

Cartagena on the Atlantic coast appears to be the only safe city in
Colombia, as all sides vacation there. Baranquilla is a port under the
control of narco-trafficking pros.

When the Medellin and Cali cartels were broken up in the early 1990s, major
victories were claimed in the war against drugs. Since then, the
traffickers have agreed among themselves to avoid the cartel route.

Now some 300 loosely connected families control the trade. Colombia
accounts for some 80 percent of all the cocaine produced in the world and
two-thirds of the heroin consumed in the United States.

Victories Against Drugs

The past month has produced dramatic victories in the "war against drugs."
Some 71,660 acres of coca-leaf plantations - of a nationwide total of some
370,650 acres - have been sprayed from the air and taken out of production
in Putumayo province adjacent to the border with Ecuador.

U.S. surveillance aircraft fly out of Ecuador and provide the Colombian
military with precise coca growing locations. Helicopters then fly in
U.S.-trained Special Forces troops to run perimeter security against the
guerrillas while the fields are fumigated.

If government claims are correct, more than 100 tons of pure cocaine will
not find its way to the streets of America and Europe. Colombia produces
about 800 tons of pure cocaine a year worth about $13 billion, and drug
users in the United States consume about 300 tons - worth $4.5 billion
before the white powder gets "stepped on," or diluted, and sold for twice
that amount.

In the 24,000-square-mile "zone of exclusion" turned over to FARC
guerrillas, some 34,600 acres of coca is under cultivation.

This translates into about 60 tons of cocaine worth about $1.5 billion. The
FARC's take in taxes levied at each step of production is anyone's guess.
At a minimum, this is estimated by Colombian intelligence reports at $300
million.

Political Deal Is Dangerous

But the FARC's forcible levies and kidnap ransoms are imposed countrywide.

As Mr. Pastrana conceded in an interview last week, a four-front war is
"Mission: Impossible" for the government. During his remaining 18 months in
office, his strategy appears to be to seek a political solution with the
two Marxist guerrilla movements before tackling the AUC militias, which he
calls "a cancer in the body politic" and which are growing more powerful by
the day.

The president's detractors do not believe he has a strategy. They call it
ad hoc appeasement.

Mr. Pastrana himself thinks a political settlement with the FARC and ELN is
now a distinct possibility, and after that, government forces can regroup
to tackle the paramilitaries.

If this is indeed Mr. Pastrana's strategy, it overlooks strong feelings in
the armed forces against the FARC's privileged sanctuary. These are bound
to run even higher in the event of a political settlement that would bring
the FARC closer to a power-sharing arrangement at the national level.

An armored column of government forces was on full alert 24 miles from San
Vicente, a FARC-ruled town in the zone of exclusion where Mr. Pastrana
spent the night before a second round of negotiations with Comandante
Marulanda last week. The mission of the armored column was to liberate San
Vicente if the talks broke down and Mr. Pastrana decided not to renew the
FARC's privileged sanctuary.

Landowners Back Militias

Despite government denials, the AUC paramilitaries enjoy widespread support
from property owners - even small landowners - who fear the emergence on
the national scene of Marxist hard-liners who will continue to make their
mark with class warfare, backed by powerful guerrilla forces. The FARC may
agree to a cease-fire in the coming months, but it certainly will not lay
down its arms.

Paramilitaries were protected by law from 1965 to 1989, when they were
declared unconstitutional. A deal viewed by the military as dangerously
one-sided runs the risk of reviving the old alliance between the armed
forces and the AUC.

In two days of talks between Comandante Marulanda and Mr. Pastrana last
Thursday and Friday, the FARC leader pressed the president to form an
alliance against the AUC. If you are really serious about fighting the AUC,
the guerrilla chief said, then let's join forces.

Such an alliance would be political suicide for Mr. Pastrana.

In the 1990 presidential campaign, four presidential candidates were
assassinated by Pablo Escobar's hit men. The late Medellin cocaine cartel
kingpin, who was gunned down by security forces, used to say: Choose your
metal - silver or lead. People at all levels - the military, judiciary,
Congress, the media - preferred to take the bribe. A minority demurred and
got bullets.

Possible Outcomes Examined

A rerun of this scenario - with the AUC picking off those perceived as
guerrilla appeasers - is all too possible.

The Colombian people are so war-weary they are ready for peace at almost
any price, one senior minister said.

He was not being facetious when he said that if a sellout deal offering
FARC and ELN 40 out of 100 Senate seats in return for peace were submitted
to a referendum, the people would vote overwhelmingly in favor. Congress is
seen as corrupt anyway, said the minister, so no one really cares.

The man most likely to succeed Mr. Pastrana next year is Horatio Serpa. He
is seen by many observers as the populist - he was in Havana with Cuban
President Fidel Castro last week - who will make the final deal with Mr.
Pastrana.

No one knows how the younger cadres of the FARC would react if Comandante
Marulanda decided to quit short of total victory. He might then find
himself in the unenviable position of Yasser Arafat defending concessions
against the combined opposition of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, Plan Colombia is producing the first tangible results in
Washington's "war against drugs." Since 1981, the United States has spent
$25 billion on international drug-interdiction efforts, mostly in Latin
America.

So successful was the interdiction campaign in Bolivia and Peru that the
industry moved lock, stock and barrel of precursor chemicals to Colombia.
Cocaine production continued to grow, even after the cartels were dismantled.

Now, drastic eradication appears to be making a real difference in the
supply chain. From Mr. Pastrana on down, every senior official and
journalist echoed the same theme: The rest is up to the U.S. to rein in demand.

Less than one quarter of the annual $19 billion federal drug-control budget
goes to treating drug abusers.