COLOMBIA STRUGGLES TO BREAK REBEL'S GRIP

President Andres Pastrana of Colombia has cancelled his plan to hobnob with
the elite at the Davos world economic forum this weekend. His attention is
consumed at home by - to put it bluntly - the life's work of an ageing
guerrilla leader.

Mr Pastrana is just the latest leader of his country to find out that
getting rid of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) is no easy
task.

As the Farc likes to tell its story, it was nearly 37 years ago that Manuel
Marulanda Velez led a few dozen other disgruntled campesinos in demanding
roads and schools for their region and was met with a military blitz by the
government.

In fact the Farc's origins go back even further, to peasant self-defence
groups arising from Colombia's wave of political violence in the 1940s and
1950s. But it has survived to become the western hemisphere's largest and
most powerful guerrilla army, helping to make Colombia potentially the
biggest regional headache for the new US administration.

Mr Marulanda, their 70-year-old leader, born Pedro Antonio Marin and
nicknamed Tirofijo (Sureshot), has outlasted nine Colombian presidents,
including Mr Pastrana's father.

Few among Colombia's notoriously oligarchical and exclusive political class
seem to have had much idea about how to deal - either at the peace table or
on the battlefield - with Mr Marulanda and his forces, drawn overwhelmingly
from the country's rural poor and shaped by former Colombian Communist
party ideologues.

The approach has been an unsuccessful mix of carrot, stick and just hoping
the Farc will wither away. Yet so far the group has proved remarkably
impervious to all the above, while remaining a mystery to many.

With minimal popular backing but considerable powers of persuasion, their
the group's Marxist-Leninist ideology has survived the fall of the Berlin
Wall. It is seen as being out of touch, but corresponds by e-mail from its
rural hideouts and a website brings its views to the world.

The organisation comprises more than 60 autonomous regional fronts but its
seven-man ruling secretariat keeps a tight rein. Daniel Garcia-Pena, a
former government peace envoy, says the Farc is complex internally, with
debate among those favouring peace and those holding a harder military
line, but is careful not to show divisions. Indeed, the organisation
usually seems more politically astute than the government.

It calls for legalisation of drugs and rejects narco-trafficking but makes
millions from taxes on the illegal trade and, according to its opponents,
even trafficks itself.

In a post cold-war world it sees its struggle vindicated in protests
against globalisation, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade
Organisation.

"We are not something exotic in the world," says Simon Trinidad, a Farc
commander and a former bank manager.

Most contentiously, its human rights record is appalling. The Farc kills
and kidnaps hundreds of civilians each year, justifying these tactics as
either unfortunate mistakes or necessary tools in a war on Colombia's
democratic government.

Mr Pastrana has arguably been the Farc's most patient interlocutor among
Colombia's leaders. However, his peace efforts are drawing closer to
seeming failure. The Farc is reluctant to re-enter stalled talks and he
must decide whether to continue to allow the rebels to control a large
demilitarised area beyond January 31.

There are few signs that the guerrillas, estimated to number some
15,000-17,000 men and women, are prepared to reciprocate with concessions
to achieve peace.

Alfredo Rangel, a political analyst in Bogota, the Colombian capital, says:
"I think they are looking to get an army of around 35,000 and increase
their military capacity so they can fight an open war with the state in a
relatively short term - around five years. And their plan to get closer to
the cities is going towards this."

It was money from the drug business that helped the group expand, -
although Malcolm Deas, a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, says it
also became a competent military organisation.

"They have devised means of military expansion that do not depend on hearts
and minds or public support. They have become very efficient at taxing and
multiplying their number of fronts," Mr Deas says.

Many in Colombia and in the US - which is backing anti-drugs efforts with a
Dollars 1.3bn plan - believe the Farc are little more than
narco-terrorists. Mr Rangel counters: "Anyone who thinks that, because they
use criminal means to get economic resources, they have lost their ideology
is making a big mistake."

Yet Mr Deas says the Farc's agenda is not clear. "No one pays any attention
to the programme: it is not what the struggle is about. It is about power
and recognition - and this is what makes it so difficult to solve."

An international official says the Farc seems to have a different concept
of time and a different historical memory. Some of its leaders have
virtually grown up in the movement; Mr Marulanda still rails against the
government for stealing his chickens 40 years ago.

A strong sense of class warfare pervades the organisation. Their peasant
origins and historic interest in land reform also differ from some of the
more intellectual, middle-class concerns of other guerrilla groups.

A former leader of another such group says: "We had more interest in
politics, that there should be democracy. They have little interest in
opinion. They use force more than persuasion."