CANADIANS TO TALK PEACE WITH TOP COLOMBIAN REBELS

Diplomats hold meeting in jungle to end violence

MEXICO CITY -- Two Canadian diplomats on a peace mission to Colombia's
southeastern Amazon jungle expect to meet today with top Marxist rebels in
their remote jungle encampment.

Guillermo Rishchynski, Canada's ambassador to Colombia, and senior embassy
diplomat Nicholas Coghlan are part of a 21-member team of diplomats sitting
down with leaders from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to
talk peace - and control the drug trade.

Two days of talks will try to find alternatives to "illicit cultivation" of
drug crops throughout Colombia's southern Amazon region. The main crops are
coca leaves for cocaine and opium poppies for heroin.

The FARC funds its war against the government with an estimated $750 million
annually from narco-trafficking. It also raises money through kidnapping,
making Colombia the world's per capita kidnapping capital.

Coghlan called the trip to the jungle lair of the country's biggest
guerrilla army "part of Colombia's magic realism."

"We work on the theory that it doesn't suit any armed group in Colombia to
bother a foreign diplomat," he said yesterday, before leaving Bogota in a
government plane.

The rebels control one-third of Colombia, a region the size of Switzerland
in a territory dubbed "FARC-landia."

In recent months, everybody from top United Nations officials to the
chairperson of the New York Stock Exchange has trekked into the jungle to be
welcomed by FARC comandante Manuel (Sureshot) Marulanda and "foreign
minister" Raul Reyes.

It's a dangerous trip.

Colombia is the hemisphere's bloodiest country. More than 35,000 people have
died in the past 10 years of civil war, most of them civilians.

The Canadian diplomats, who are staying in army barracks in the
cattle-ranching town of San Vicente de Caguan, are scheduled to fly into the
jungle in old army helicopters.

Players in the conflict include two main armed rebel groups - the FARC and
the National Liberation Army (ELN) - government troops and increasingly
powerful right-wing death squads, mostly operating in the north.

Death squads are responsible for horrendous violence, including
decapitations and spiking severed heads on fence posts to discourage
so-called rebel sympathizers.

Calling the targeting of civilians "the single most distressing aspect of
the Colombian conflict," Coghlan said the Canadian diplomats intend to raise
humanitarian issues, including the recruitment of child soldiers, kidnapping
and the extensive use of anti-personnel land mines.

Coghlan said Canada is known for focusing on these issues. In January, an
editorial in the respected Bogota daily El Tiempo contrasted a high-security
visit by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with a trip by her
Canadian counterpart, Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy.

While Albright stayed in Cartagena, with 3,000 troops on high alert,
Axworthy walked through the streets of Bogota with little fanfare.

Today's meeting is part of slow-moving peace talks initiated by President
Andres Pastrana with both the FARC and the ELN two years ago.

The U.S. has refused to participate in these talks, which include diplomats
from Europe and Japan, until rebels hand over fighters responsible for the
murder of three American indigenous leaders last year in northeastern
Colombia.

Pastrana hopes the meeting will help convince European Union members to
contribute to his "Plan Colombia" peace initiative. But European nations are
opposed to Washington's plan to pump $2 billion into Colombia, largely in
military spending.

European nations fear another Vietnam-style conflict in the making.

The key to stopping the violence, says Coghlan, is to get all sides talking,
but leftist rebels have refused to negotiate with right-wing groups.

"I am not optimistic the conflict will end in a year or even two years,"
said Coghlan. "But at the same time, there are positive things happening.
The peace process is moving ahead.

"Let's hope it is the darkness before the dawn."