COLOMBIAN PEACE PROCESS COULD BE "BLOOD-SOAKED" IN 2001

PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL Intervention by the United States in Colombia and
continued aggression by right-wing paramilitaries could leave the peace
process "blood-soaked" in 2001, a spokesman for the country's largest rebel
group said Saturday.

Javier Cifuentes, the foreign relations secretary for the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was here Saturday, attending the World
Social Forum, an alternative to the neo-liberal World Economic Forum in
Switzerland this weekend.

"It will certainly be a very difficult year. The military is out of control
and will try, with crime and terror, to drown the peace process in blood,
to shock Colombia and the world. That is the plan of the United States,"
Cifuentes told AFP.

He was speaking just four days before a deadline expires by which Colombian
troops are bound to remain outside a vast demilitarized zone in southern
Colombia, currently a safe-haven for the FARC.

The zone will lose its special status if FARC fails to "unfreeze" peace
talks by January 31, and Colombian troop deployment is already visible on
the edges of the enclave.

The 42,000 square kilometer (16,200 square-mile) area was negotiated with
the President Andres Pastrana government in November 1998 as a precursor of
peace talks with the Marxist group.

FARC broke off talks in mid-November last year stating that the government
needed to toughen up its stance with the ultra-right wing paramilitaries,
sworn enemies both of FARC and the other major leftist rebel group the
National Liberation Army (ELN).

Cifuentes, nonetheless, foresees a year of successes for the 12,000-strong
FARC, and warned the rebels were prepared to step up the 37-year armed
conflict if favorable conditions for peace negotiations were out of reach.

"Our guns are drawn," he said. "Confrontations will be almost certainly
fatal for both us and the instigators of this war; it will not turn out
well," he said, hinting that Colombian citizens would be the victims.

FARC maintains the United States, in providing some 1.3 billion dollars in
tactical and technical aid to the wildly ambitious anti-drug Plan Colombia
and encouraging Europe to contribute two billion dollars, is fomenting a
war against Latin America, specifically against the Amazon region, and rebels.

"They want Colombia to contribute the victims," Cifuentes said, adding
however that expressions by the new George W. Bush administration in the
United States that the content of the US contribution may now be less
military, was positive.

Plan Colombia aims, over the course of three years at a cost of 7.5 billion
dollars, to eradicate thousands of hectares planted with coca plants, which
serve as the seeding grounds for 90 percent of the world's cocaine market.

Cifuentes expressed hope US President Bush would expand the US role
politically, not militarily, giving Colombia control over its own destiny,
noting that Colombia remains, nonetheless, the United States' "back yard."

Surrounded by a retinue of bodyguards, Cifuentes opined that the spirit of
the forum here, "to build a better world," was identical to the spirit of
FARC, which prompted the revolution some 40 years ago in Colombia.

"It has been said ideas are dead and neo-liberalism prevails, but society
is not resigned to this, I think; socialism and humanity will prevail in
this century," Cifuentes said. "Hopefully the rest of the world will not
have to resort to wars like ours, paying such a high price in blood."

"Idealism has a high price; good things never come for free."