REBELS PUSH COLOMBIA TOWARD ANARCHY

Guerrillas Have Killed Officials And Ravaged Property To Try To Force The
Government Back To The Negotiating Table.

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia -- News of his impending execution came to
Mayor Nestor Leon Ramirez on a white sheet of paper.

A guerrilla commander handed the note to a farmer, who delivered it to
Ramirez. It read: "For the good of your health, you must leave the city. If
you do not, you will become a military target."

But Ramirez, leader of this bustling town, decided to ignore the message,
which arrived this month.

Now, death shadows him like a dark halo. He sits at his desk and wonders:
When will they come. And how.

"Today, I am able to work," Ramirez said. "I can't say what will happen
tomorrow."

Since the collapse of peace talks in February, democracy itself has become
the primary target in Colombia's 38-year-old guerrilla war. Attacks on the
symbols of state are part of a new guerrilla strategy designed to plunge
vast swaths of the country into anarchy.

Every mayor in the country--more than 1,000--has been ordered to resign by
the rebels or face death. Scores have quit. Some have fled to govern from
fortified army bases. One of Ramirez's colleagues was killed in a nearby
town this month.

The guerrillas have also destroyed roads and bridges, crippling public
transport. They have attacked power, telephone and television towers,
halting media and communication transmissions.

The rebel attacks have served to showcase one of the most fundamental
problems in this nation's increasingly barbaric war. More than 180 years
after Colombia's founding, the government has yet to impose control over
its sprawling territory.

It is Colombia's lawlessness that has allowed the guerrilla war to fester
for four decades. It also fostered the explosion of the drug crops here
that now provide most of the cocaine and much of the heroin available on
U.S. streets.

Before the collapse of peace talks, the rebels had maintained an uneasy
coexistence with local officials in areas they dominated. Now, they have
decided to wage a campaign to prove the state's impotence, embarrassing the
government in a bid to force a return to negotiations.

Colombia's guerrilla war pits the army and growing right-wing paramilitary
forces against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
and a second, smaller rebel army.

"We're in the beginning of a new phase," FARC organizer Juan Pablo said as
he relaxed at a restaurant in a riverside town a few miles from San Vicente
del Caguan, in the heart of the former rebel zone. "We're going to
demonstrate that we're in the position to control certain areas and that we
can push that control to an extreme."

The problem is especially serious in Colombia's southern plains, where the
guerrillas have long held sway. A weeklong tour found a region abandoned
and chaotic. City councils have resigned en masse. Dozens of towns now lack
judges, prosecutors or local police officials. Commerce has been strangled.

National government officials resist the idea that the guerrillas are
successfully ridding the area of civilian control. But interviews
throughout the region--which never had a strong government
presence--indicated that it has descended into chaos.

What little order exists is imposed by the heavy military and police
presences in urban centers. Beyond is a no man's land where leftist rebels
run tollbooths, patrol destroyed roads and impose their own brand of law.

The problem has become so serious that U.S. aid officials are considering
suspending development programs in the region designed to wean locals from
drug crop profits by building new infrastructure like roads, wells and dams.

Such a suspension, in turn, would imperil U.S. efforts to halve the amount
of cocaine produced here by 2005--one of the chief goals of the
$1.3-billion Plan Colombia, launched two years ago.

The cinder-block Town Hall in Puerto Rico is mostly empty these days.

The mayor is gone. He quit this month, reading his resignation aloud in the
town square after receiving a death threat. The City Council fled too.
There are no judges or prosecutors.

The bridges around town have been blown up. The power substation lies in
rubble. The phone exchange is damaged. The roads are under the control of
guerrillas. There has been no electricity, water or phone service for
months. There isn't even a town ambulance.

In short, there is little to indicate that this woeful town in the heart of
southern Colombia has any connection to the rest of the country.

"We are completely alone," said the police inspector, one of the few town
officials left.

Towns such as Puerto Rico in these sparsely populated plains have long been
under the influence of the FARC, a guerrilla army of 17,000 mostly poor
rural peasants who are nominally Marxist.

The guerrillas' de facto domination of the region was recognized in 1998
when the Colombian government ceded a big chunk of the country to the
rebels for peace talks. The demilitarized zone was to be the catalyst for a
new and brighter future.

All that changed when the talks collapsed and President Andres Pastrana
ordered the army to retake the zone, about four times the size of Los
Angeles County. The guerrillas went on a rampage of destruction.

The suffering grew worse after elections in May, when Colombians selected
Alvaro Uribe as their next president. Uribe, who is scheduled to take
office in August, won largely as a result of promises to get tough with the
guerrillas.

To the guerrillas' chagrin, most of the towns in the region voted for
Uribe--a very public reminder of their lack of popular support. Polls have
shown that only 1% to 2% of Colombians back the rebels.

The guerrillas responded by demanding the removal of mayors in three
departments in Colombia's south--Caqueta, Putumayo and Huila. The demands
later spread to Arauca, Norte de Santander and Santander in the nation's
northeast, as well as elsewhere.

The common thread: The departments are located in areas rich in the coca
and poppy crops that produce cocaine and heroin, respectively. Roughly half
the FARC's $300-million to $500-million annual income is believed to come
from drug profits.

These are also areas where the FARC has a strategic advantage. Sparsely
populated southern Colombia is militarily costly to control and has little
legitimate economic value to the nation. The opposite is true for the
rebels, who can exercise their power with scattered attacks and benefit
from the illicit resources.

The guerrillas' devotion to clearing the region by violence was underscored
by one rebel squad leader. Standing alongside a barbed-wire fence on a road
leading out of San Vicente, he patted the black-metal barrel of his AK-47.

"Everything we have," he said, "we got through this."

The result of the stepped-up attacks has been misery for hundreds of
thousands of Colombians.

In most towns, electricity comes only from portable generators droning
outside stores and restaurants. Phone service is nonexistent. In San
Vicente del Caguan, tens of thousands of residents try to make calls
through 27 existing satellite phone connections.

Repeater towers needed to broadcast television and radio signals also have
been destroyed. The only sources of media are local radio stations and
places lucky enough to have satellite television service.

More serious problems involve attacks against health and public transport.
The rebels have seized two ambulances from local communities in the last
few months. In the case of Puerto Rico, a prematurely born baby died after
his mother was forced to get out of the ambulance and hitch a ride to the
nearest hospital.

"They are trying to destroy the institutions of the country and widen their
zone of control," said Omar Varon, mayor of Doncello, a community near San
Vicente. "It's an attack against the state ... [and] civil society is
paying for it."

Guerrillas dismissed the claim. Juan Pablo, who organizes clandestine
guerrilla fronts that operate in cities, called the misery "suffering
light." He noted that the rebels could easily cut food and fuel supplies
but have not, instead only making such deliveries more difficult.

"The idea is to break the normal rhythm of the economy," Juan Pablo said.

The guerrillas have also become increasingly brutal during military
confrontations. Last month, nine soldiers on leave were stopped at a rebel
roadblock outside San Vicente del Caguan. Their mutilated bodies were found
days later.

Army Col. Cesar Delacruz said some of the men's genitals were cut off.
Others among those killed were found without fingernails. The account could
not be independently confirmed.

"They have lost all respect for life," said Delacruz, commander of the
local battalion in San Vicente del Caguan, where the men were stationed.

Military officials have responded to the rebel offensive by successfully
taking control of most local cities and towns.

Streets and cafes throughout the former rebel zone are now filled with
soldiers and police. A gunfight outside a hotel one recent night was
quickly quelled by a squad of soldiers firing their rifles.

Outside the urban centers, however, control is nearly nonexistent. A squad
of guerrillas eating lunch under a tree near the town of La Sombra smiled
when asked about recent battles with the army.

"How can we fight anyone when the army doesn't ever come by." the squad
leader asked.

Colombian army officials acknowledged that small squads of guerrillas still
roam the zone. But they portrayed the rebels as the last remnants of a
mostly vanquished force.

There are skirmishes on an almost daily basis, the officials said. U.S.
trained counter-narcotic brigades have played a significant role, because
many of the guerrilla fronts in southern Colombia are linked to the drug trade.

In addition, the U.S. has given "technical intelligence" support to the
effort to retake the zone, Delacruz said. He did not explain further, but
after peace talks collapsed, the U.S. lifted restrictions that limited
intelligence sharing to narcotics operations. It began providing rebel
target coordinates to the Colombian military.

There are signs that the army's offensive has had an effect: The guerrillas
seem hard up for cash. They held an auction last month to sell off stolen
cars. And they have begun rustling cattle, according to a local rancher.

Also, the army has managed to block any large-scale invasion by right-wing
paramilitary forces. Many had predicted that the zone would become a bloody
battleground between rebels and paramilitary groups after three years of
guerrilla domination.

The national government has responded to the threats against civilian
authority by refusing to recognize the mayors' resignations. Instead,
Interior Minister Armando Estrada Villa offered to step up protection, with
bodyguards and bulletproof cars.

That has done little to appease local officials, however. In Doncello, one
City Council member rejected the government offers and said he had already
prepared his resignation slip.

On Tuesday, one of the councilman's colleagues was killed.

"This life," he said, "is a living death."