COLOMBIA RUNS LOW ON HOPE

LOS POZOS, Colombia -- In the eyes of the rebels, this is the "new Colombia," where perfumed soldier girls sell souvenirs touting revolution, roadside signs ask passers-by to be kind to animals and disgusted Colombians come to air their grievances against a government that the guerrillas would like to destroy.

A short drive from the rebel-held territory, in the government-run town of Puerto Rico, most folks don't view the insurgents so kindly. They see them as heavily armed thugs who control the drug trade and neighboring countryside by force and engineer kidnappings of prominent locals, including their mayor, who was abducted last weekend.

This is the Colombia divided by four decades of civil conflict. And it`s a part of Colombia that President Clinton will not see this week when he makes his largely ceremonial visit to the relatively calm resort of Cartagena, more than 500 miles north.

But this is the Colombia that the United States hopes to rescue with more than $1.3 billion in aid in a war against drugs and the rebels who protect the coca and opium growers.

"Senor President [Clinton]: Please don't leave us alone," begged Julio Correa, a retired schoolteacher from Puerto Rico who was with the town's mayor when rebels seized him during a Saturday outing. "Colombia is already taken by the devil. Only the U.S. can help us."

Throughout Colombia, from the muddy coca fields to the trendy streets of big cities, Clinton`s visit is on many minds. Not since President Bush came to Cartagena in 1990 for a regional drug summit has a U.S. president set foot on Colombian soil.

Clinton, along with several U.S. congressional leaders in his entourage, will be protected by more than 2,500 Colombian soldiers and police. He will go nowhere near areas of fighting between rebels and government soldiers. He will not see the fertile fields of coca and opium. He will not meet with guerrillas who control huge swaths of the country.

Instead, Clinton will lunch with Colombian officials in a resort with a shimmering view of the azure Caribbean Sea and may tour two U.S.-run social programs in Cartagena.

Still, Clinton`s appearance -- even though it will last just eight hours -- is largely seen by Colombians as a sign that the Clinton administration and the U.S. Congress are dedicated to helping Colombia out of its terrible times.

"It`s a very clear signal that [Clinton] wants to show his commitment," President Andres Pastrana said in an interview last week.

More than 1 million Colombians have been uprooted from their homes in recent years because of civil war. More than 1,000 people were kidnapped and are held hostage by anti-government forces.

More than 23,000 Colombians are murdered annually -- many the victims of feuds over the drug trade. Colombia produces more than 80 percent of the world`s cocaine and a large share of the heroin sold on U.S. streets.

The U.S. aid package, approved by Congress this summer and known as Plan Colombia, provides 60 helicopters for the Colombian army and police to fight insurgent troops protecting the drug fields and narcotics-producing labs.

It also includes money for drug eradication, the planting of alternative crops for coca and opium growers, and programs to teach the sometimes-brutal Colombian army how to behave.

The U.S. commitment is part of a $7 billion international-aid program designed to cut cocaine production in half over six years.

"We can't keep carrying this load by ourselves," said Jaime Ruiz, a Pastrana aide who helped devise Plan Colombia. "Drugs are the fuel for violence. We have to put a stop to this."

But many Colombians are skeptical that the plan trumpeted by Clinton will bring them stability. In the news media, in the big-city cafes, in the town squares and on the farms, there is endless debate about whether Uncle Sam's help will fuel the civil war or curtail the drug trade.

"If we want peace, why are we going to invest money in war, in more choppers, in more weapons?" asked Hugo Molano, a former police inspector who fled the rebel fighting in Los Pozos. "Plan Colombia was imposed by the gringos. It is not the solution."

For more than three years, Molano has lived in a shack made of burlap walls in a riverbed tent city of war refugees outside Neiva in central Colombia. When skirmishes broke out between rebels and government soldiers, Molano left with just the clothes on his back in 1997. A sister and several relatives remain behind in Los Pozos under rebel control.

Molano doesn`t see how Clinton's visit -- or the U.S. aid package -- will make it safe to return to Los Pozos soon. He survives on $65 a month as a health aide in the clinic serving 279 displaced families.

"The old Colombia -- living off the land -- is lost forever," he said. "It will take a lot of blood to get that back."

Clinton's visit is being watched especially closely in the cattle-grazing and coca-growing land of southern Colombia where Molano lived for more than a dozen years.

The region is divided between government and rebel control, and civilians are caught in the middle of this uneasy detente.

As part of a much-criticized interim peace deal, the Colombian government in late 1998 ceded an area the size of Switzerland to the rebels. Since then, the rebels -- known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC -- have ruled with an iron hand. They impose their own laws and taxes on the more than 60,000 campesinos in the region.

In an encampment just outside the hamlet of Los Pozos, rebels have established a headquarters complete with a room jammed with computer equipment. Signs tout it as Villa Nueva or "New Town," in the "New Colombia."

As Clinton's visit approaches, the rebels are on a public-relations offensive. Cheery spokeswomen wearing bright-red lipstick and military fatigues greet foreign journalists with Colombian coffee. And they gladly set up interviews with top commanders and rebel fighters. "Uncle Sam: We want peace," reads a banner in Spanish hanging from a fence outside the headquarters.

The rebels are clearly nervous about Clinton's visit. They know Plan Colombia means that the Colombian forces will be beefed up to confront them even as the government continues to pursue peace talks with them.

To the rebels, Plan Colombia is a pretext for a U.S. military invasion. U.S. officials have said repeatedly that 500 U.S. soldiers will act only as advisers and that the United States has no plans to become embroiled in the Colombian civil war.

"We don`t want to make the U.S. our enemy," said Andres Paris, a top rebel negotiator who is sure U.S. troops will invade Colombia someday. "But if need be, we will defend our fatherland against a foreign invader."

The rebels, now 17,000 strong and bankrolled by drug money, are a formidable force against the ill-equipped and under-trained Colombian army. But rebels do not relish the thought of coming up against U.S. firepower and will monitor Clinton`s visit for signs of war rhetoric.

"One doesn`t minimize the military technology of the United States," said Fernando Caicedo, a rebel commander.

The rebels would love for Clinton to visit their territory so they could show him how "people live in peace," Caicedo said. Crime rates are down significantly since they took over, rebel leaders say. Residents are free of civil war because government troops do not dare enter the rebel-held land.

And to show they have broad support in Colombia, the rebels held a symposium on Colombia`s social and economic woes. Colombia is mired in a recession and has unemployment rates in excess of 20 percent.

Several thousand economically deprived Colombians from around the country traveled by bus for as much as 40 hours to spend last weekend at rebel headquarters and air their gripes.

"Life would be better under the rebels," said Santos Pina, 38, an unemployed dental assistant.

Pina and a few dozen neighbors from the northern Colombian city of Bucaramanga traveled through the night to tell the rebels they are in bad stead because most are jobless and government-backed loans for their houses went into default.

"The guerrillas would never let Colombians suffer the way the government makes us suffer," he said as his friends posed for pictures with armed rebels at a checkpoint.

But many residents in the guerrilla-held region say living under the rebels is hellish. People are not free to speak against the rebels or go against their policies. Miguel Angel Serna, a priest at the regional parish, wishes Clinton could see the oppressive conditions in the rebel region.

"This has turned into a concentration camp," he said. The rebels speak of a new Colombia, he said, "but they are not forging a new Colombia. They are destroying our Colombia."

Forty miles to the south, the town of Puerto Rico is the last outpost of government control on the edge of the rebel region. Many residents live in fear of the guerrillaswho roam freely in an undeclared buffer zone.

Last weekend, even as they were welcoming visitors for their economic forum in Los Pozos, rebels seized Mayor James Canas of Puerto Rico as he returned from visiting rural elderly residents. When the town`s police inspector, Fernando Loaiza, heard the news, he called the Colombian army for help. But soldiers will not venture into the buffer area or into the rebel territory.

"There was nothing we could do," Loaiza said. "We can't go into the zone."

As the mayor's relatives traveled on their own into guerrilla territory to plead for his release, the rebels accused Canas of violating "rebel law 003" by trying to extort money from local farmers. The mayor`s family says he is innocent.

They are hoping the mayor`s plight will reach Clinton's ears. But his kidnapping barely made a brief story in one of Colombia's largest newspapers. Canas is simply one of more than 1,000 kidnap victims in Colombia.

"Tell [Clinton] that this country is a farce," said Julio Correa, who was haunted by seeing his friend kidnapped. "The seeds that are destroying this democracy will be dispersed all over Latin America if other nations don`t help us."