REBELS SAY COLOMBIA PEACE PROCESS IS 'DYING'

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's fragile peace process hung in the balance on
Wednesday, as the government faced fallout from a mass kidnapping staged by
rebels and the case of an alleged cop-killer who hijacked a commercial
airliner into a guerrilla sanctuary.

``Crossroads and Crisis in the Peace Process'' read one headline in Bogota's
El Espectador newspaper, a reference to calls on President Andres Pastrana
to toughen his negotiating stance with Colombia's two main Marxist rebel
groups or break off widely criticized and so-far fruitless peace talks.

Pastrana has had to overcome formidable obstacles to keep the peace process
on track in the past. But political analysts said the hijacking earlier this
month, and last Sunday's kidnapping of around 80 people by rebels outside
Colombia's second-largest city, have built up enough pressure in the
military and local and national power elites to derail the process
altogether.

The twin crimes underscore what many Colombians see as the intransigence of
war-hardened insurgents unwilling to compromise their radical socialist
demands and bent on seizing power by any means necessary.

They also prompted an unusual call from leaders of Pastrana's own
Conservative Party on Wednesday. The party's leaders said they would demand
a ballot initiative in local elections on Oct. 29, to ask voters whether
they approve of the government's handling of efforts to end a conflict that
has taken 35,000 lives since 1990.

Pastrana has low popular support and recent polls have consistently shown an
overwhelming majority of Colombians disapprove of the way he handles
practically everything.

Sunday's kidnapping, along a stretch of mountain highway outside the
southwest city of Cali, has been blamed on the Cuban-inspired National
Liberation Army (ELN). Ironically, it came just as the rebel force, the
Andean nation's second-largest with about 5,000 combatants, appeared close
to winning its demands for a troop pullout from a 2,400-square-mile area of
northern Bolivar province so it could host a ``national congress'' of
government and non-government groups.

The congress would have led to official peace talks with the government,
mediated by Cuba among others. But Luis Carlos Villegas, a close Pastrana
ally who heads the powerful National Industrialists' Association, joined a
growing chorus of public figures on Tuesday who have urged the president to
suspend all negotiations with the ELN.

Pastrana himself had put negotiations with the ELN on hold until recently,
because of its kidnapping of 160 worshippers from a church in Cali in May
1999. That abduction came just a month after the ELN took kidnapping to new
heights by hijacking a commercial airliner and snatching its crew and
passengers.

Most kidnappings in Colombia, which reported a record total of nearly 3,000
cases last year, are blamed on the ELN and 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), which use ransoms to finance their war effort.

``The Process Is Dying''

The FARC, Latin America's oldest and most powerful insurgency, issued a
statement last weekend saying its peace talks with the government were in
``intensive care'' because of the U.S.-backed anti-drug offensive in
Colombia, aimed at eradicating illegal drug plantations in rebel
strongholds.

In a statement late Tuesday, the FARC changed its prognosis to say ``the
process is dying.'' It blamed the government's insistence that it hand over
a FARC rebel serving time for a policeman's death, who was being transferred
between jails when he hijacked a plane on a domestic flight on Sept. 8.

The hijacking has caused a national uproar because the convict, Arnobio
Ramos, forced the plane and its 22 passengers and crew to land in the
Switzerland-sized zone of southern Colombia that Pastrana granted the FARC
to jump-start negotiations in 1998. ''We're not going to hand the comrade
over,'' rebel chieftain Carlos Antonio Losada said of Ramos, ignoring
government claims that the FARC has turned the 16,000-square-mile
demilitarized zone into a safe haven for criminals and a launchpad for
kidnaps and military strikes across the country.

``We understand this is a right he had, and it is the duty of all
revolutionary prisoners to escape from the regime's prisons,'' said Losada,
former commander of the FARC's urban commandos in Bogota.