FARC GUERRILLAS ARE REBELS WITHOUT A CLEAR CAUSE

Colombia -- Sometime in the next few weeks, Colombian soldiers will fly
into the country's southlands on a mission from the drug war: to reduce the
country's acreage of coca plants, from which cocaine is made.

The soldiers, trained by American military and civilian advisers, will make
their flights in helicopters supplied though a $1.3 billion U.S. aid
package to reduce cocaine production and improve rural infrastructure.

When the military phase of Plan Colombia gets under way, the American drug
war will meet the Colombian civil war -- in jungles the rebel forces control.

Colombian military commanders expect their troops will encounter resistance
from a seasoned and sizable guerrilla army that calls itself the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym as the
FARC.

One right-wing and five left-wing guerrilla armies today are competing to
overthrow the Colombian government, but the 20,000-strong FARC is the key
player among the insurgents -- who together control about 40 percent of the
country.

The Colombian army, a force of 120,000, outnumbers the guerrilla group
6-to-1, but for 36 years the FARC has grown mightier despite the odds.

"I don't think that the FARC will take over our government," notes Antonio
Navarro Wolff, a Colombian congressman who was a member of another
guerrilla group, M-19, that laid down arms more than a decade ago. "But the
impressive thing is that its leaders seem to have evolved, without really
studying it, the whole practice of what is called 'protracted war,' the
strategy that led Mao and the Chinese communists to power."

The guerrilla army's greatest obstacle probably is not the military, but
its own reputation. The FARC is more feared than loved; not many Colombians
welcome the prospect of its victory.

Even Colombia's poor tend to regard the FARC as brutal, as a beneficiary of
the cocaine trade, and as lacking a clear vision of what it would do if it
were to win the power it is battling to gain. The story of its rise is a
tale of isolation, ideology and drugs.

Countryside Neglected:

Colombia, about the size of Texas, New Mexico and Arkansas combined, is
intersected along north-south lines by three parallel Andean mountain
chains. The highlands are developed economically, but the lowlands are
victims of historic nonperformance.

"The negligence of the government, the lack of a rule of law and poverty
are responsible for the success of the armed groups and the drug
traffickers in the rural areas of Colombia," the Center for International
Policy, an American think tank, noted earlier this year.

The absence of government presence in rural areas is evident to any
American with an atlas.

Pavement, for example, connects Colombia's Andean cities to each other and
to the cities on the country's Caribbean coast. But few paved roads exist
between the western Andean chain and Colombia's Pacific Coast, or along the
nation's border with Panama, and there are fewer than 300 miles of pavement
across 10 states south and east of Colombia's eastern Andean mountains.

Southeastern Colombia, a region of vast jungles and tropical plains, is
bereft not only of roads -- two of its states have no roads at all -- but
of almost everything else. No TV stations broadcast there, and electric and
telephone lines are rare, too.

Yet this expanse, whose chief products are oil, cattle and cocaine, is not
uninhabited. More than 2 million people, half of them illiterate, live in
the region -- enough to staff an army whose foot soldiers are enraged that
they've been left out of the country's plans.

That army is the FARC, whose hold on southeastern Colombia now is a
seemingly inalterable fact of life.

FARC guerrillas are the only armed forces in an area of southeastern
Colombia that is about the size of Switzerland and is euphemistically
called the "demilitarized zone."

This region -- "Farclandia" to its opponents -- was created two years ago
when the government of President Andres Pastrana withdrew all other
military and police forces as an inducement to the FARC for opening peace
talks. But negotiations have not produced a cease-fire or pact. Instead,
they have given the FARC a launching pad for raids into bordering areas,
and a safe haven for the drug trade.

Proponents of the demilitarized zone point out that the FARC controlled the
area for years before the army and police withdrew. As in other places
where they have dominated, the FARC's guerrillas established order,
patrolled streets and rivers, and collected taxes on economic activity --
in some locales, for the first time in history.

"The government soldiers that they shoot at are the only government
employees they've ever seen," American writer Patrick Symmes noted in a
recent article in Harper's magazine.

Colombia's biggest guerrilla army is nominally a communist organization
whose minimum program calls for agrarian reform, and whose maximum program
calls for socialism.

But, in the years since it was founded in 1964, it has not promulgated any
land or income distribution in the areas that it controls, including the
demilitarized zone, which it controls absolutely.

Colombia's National Cattlemen's Federation in December called for the
arming of the country's rural populace as a means of halting the guerrilla
advance.

Indeed, the FARC has been able to spread across the map of Colombia in part
because a government policy of gun control has combined with poverty to
deprive Colombian households, even in sparsely settled regions, of
.22-caliber rifles, shotguns and six-shooters.

As the National Rifle Association would say, Colombia is a country where
"only outlaws have guns," the outlaws, in this case, being drug-runners,
FARC revolutionaries and paramilitaries.

The absence of household gun ownership makes it relatively easy for small
bands of armed raiders to capture a farm, a ranch or a village. Soldiers
sometimes come to retake captured territory, but when they do, the
guerrillas simply disappear for a few days, knowing the army won't be in
the area for long.

Pictures of Marx and Lenin alongside those of Simon Bolivar, who led
Colombia's 19th-century war for independence from Spain, hang in FARC
offices, but the group produces no doctrines, no manifestos and very few
media bulletins.

The FARC's most frequent publications for the population at large are
bulletins that carry warnings such as, "Civilian vehicles on the highways
should keep a minimum distance of 500 meters from military caravans and
vehicles."

Its ongoing propaganda efforts are limited to a half-dozen musical CDs and
to broadcasts on the pirate FM stations it has founded in remote regions of
Colombia.

The FARC's leadership offers no explanation for the fall of socialism in
the Soviet Union. Its guerrillas are, in the main, terribly naive, and even
its most advanced cadre are historically and ideologically evasive.

"We read Marx and Engels and Lenin and Mao and even Leon Trotsky, but the
main thing is, our job is to bring socialism to Colombia," a commandante
named Lucas Iguaran explains.

The FARC's lack of an aggressive or fully articulated ideology, and the
striking ignorance of its rank-and-file, have led critics to charge that it
is today a drug-running outfit, not a communist fighting force.

"They are not fighting for an ideology, but for drugs," former U.S. drug
czar Barry McCaffrey, who left office this month, said during a December
visit to Colombia.

"There are three things that Colombian guerrillas don't have," Colombia's
leading columnist, Manuel Gomez Buendia, has asserted: "a political
program, a social base and a national presence." As Gomez and others would
have it, the FARC is a lapsed communist organization with only regional appeal.

FARC Replaces The Cartels:

Founded by fewer than 100 fighters from several ragtag peasant militias,
FARC guerrillas now wear uniforms -- most of them made in the United States
- -- and carry new AK-47 rifles.

None of the group's guerrillas is paid a salary and, as the saying inside
their ranks goes, "there are no discharges from the FARC." All of the
organization's combatants are pledged to fight until victory or death --
and that means desertion is the only way out of the war.

Some of the FARC's guerrillas have been drafted, but most are volunteers.
As many as a quarter of them are women, and a great number are younger than
18, the minimum age for military duty, according to international protocols.

In a December action, the Colombian army captured 55 FARC guerrillas, 30 of
whom, it said, were underage. Plenty of 20-year-old Farianos, as they call
themselves, first donned guerrilla uniforms at age 10.

Some of them were runaways with little or no political instincts. Others,
from among the desperately poor, signed on because, like drug dealers in
American ghettos, the guerrillas commanded status and guns. In towns where
the FARC holds sway, small children often line up behind the FARC's
teen-age soldiers, following them like chicks behind a hen.

FARC commanders are nonplussed by critiques of their use of children in
war, just as they are unmoved by accusations that the FARC has been made
rich by the drug trade.

"If capitalism is so concerned about children," grunts the Fariano
commandante and spokesman Julian Conrado, who calls himself by his nom de
guerre, "why are children sleeping in the streets of Bogota?"

His charge is not entirely accurate -- street urchins are evident only in
El Cartucho, Bogota's most decadent district -- but like most Fariano
commanders, Julian, 18 years a guerrilla, hasn't seen the streets of a city
in more than a decade.

The FARC is organized into 60 "frentes" or "fronts," of about 300 armed
combatants, with each one responsible for its own financial survival. In
southeastern Colombia, where the majority of the country's coca is grown,
the FARC has become notorious for its role in the drug trade.

"The FARC and the paramilitary groups are functioning in Colombia like the
big cartels that used to exist in the country," U.S. Ambassador Anne
Patterson told the Colombian media in December. "They control the whole
process of exporting and also the routes used to take the drug outside of
the country," she charged.

By the FARC's own admissions, it derives a great deal of its income from
taxes it levies upon the production of coca leaf, coca base and refined
cocaine.

Yet the FARC claims to be opposed to drug-running.

"The drug traffic is a plague of capitalism," it declared in an August
statement. "We are going to publicly challenge American imperialism to
pledge itself to legalizing drug consumption, so that it can seriously
struggle for the elimination of the drug trade."

The FARC draws income, its spokesmen say, from a 10 percent tax, a "vacuna"
or "vaccination," levied on farmers, cattlemen and business operators in
the areas that it controls. When cattlemen, the elite of Colombia's rural
areas, refuse to pay the vacuna, the FARC takes over their holdings,
sending the cattle to auction, just as ranch owners would.

Like the smaller guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, the
FARC also finances itself by kidnappings for ransom. When businesses and
travelers are robbed in Colombia, nobody knows whether common criminals or
guerrillas are to blame -- and the FARC doesn't deny taking part in such
"liberations," either.

As the FARC would have it, in rural areas its job is to protect peasants
from their enemies, whoever they might be. Thousands of small farmers in
Colombia grow coca leaf, the only reliable cash crop in many regions;
without it, their poverty would be extreme.

Government forces, with American backing, have for 15 years tried to
eliminate coca fields by aerial fumigation. When crop-dusting aircraft fly
over, the FARC comes forward with its guns, not to defend drugs, it says,
but to defend the peasantry's standard of living.

"The cocaine traffic is important to only three states. The FARC has
frentes in every state," spokesman Iguaran argues. "There was a FARC before
the drug traffic came to Colombia, and there will be a FARC even if it
disappears. Drugs are not the secret of our success."

Rebuilding Trust:

As a part of Plan Colombia, U.S. officials are putting together a military,
political and public works package that they believe in time will slow
Colombia's drug traffic. But the aid may come too late.

"One of the very real problems of this country is that it hasn't invested
in the rural areas, has not delivered services in the rural areas and has
not brought the people along in the development process," says George
Wachtenheim, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development,
which during the next two years will build farm-to-market roads in parts of
the region.

"Among the rural population," he admits, "the government may have to
rebuild trust, and that will take time."

The FARC has declared that it is not opposed to the economic improvements
that Wachtenheim and Plan Colombia will bring. But it has promised to
obstruct the fumigation of coca fields, in which American helicopters and
American-trained troops will play a role.

The guerrilla army has faced helicopter squads, and as long ago as 1964,
even American advisers, during an operation that was called LASO, for
"Latin American Security Operation."

One of the reasons for its growth, its apologists argue, is that American
aid to the government allows the FARC to picture itself as a defender of
Colombian independence from foreign control. Today, FARC leaders are
unimpressed by Plan Colombia's blueprint for an escalated war, says
comandante Ivan Rios.

"When the helicopters come," he says, "we'll give them lead, just like always."