COCAINE WAR A special report. (Part IV of V)

THE PEOPLE

Ever-Present Violence Creates Nation of Fear

To the average Colombian, it appears that while the government and rebel
negotiating teams quibble over procedural issues, the F.A.R.C. is building
up its military might and its drug-trafficking capabilities.

As a result, cartoonists now routinely portray Mr. Pastrana as a shrunken
figure too small for the presidential sash and his shirt and pants.

F.A.R.C. leaders quickly converted their area, bitterly referred to by
locals as "Farc landia," into a major cocaine production center complete
with airstrips for exporting the product. Now, the second largest left-wing
guerrilla group, the Army of National Liberation, known by the Spanish
acronym E.L.N., wants its own demilitarized zone.

In recent interviews in Caqueta, the province adjoining the F.A.R.C. haven,
peasants -- none of whom were willing to be identified -- also complained
of being ordered by local F.A.R.C. commanders to grow coca. Other peasant
farmers in the region who were already cultivating coca say they are now
forced to sell to a guerrilla-controlled monopoly at a price that is about
half what their crop would have fetched on the open market a year ago.

The paramilitary death squads controlled by Carlos Castano and closely
allied with elements of the Colombian Armed Forces have acted no
differently. These paramilitary troops were originally protected by law,
defending businesses and landholders from leftists guerrillas, and aiming
their assaults at civilians they suspected of aiding the rebels.

The paramilitary units lost their legal status more than a decade ago, and
moved heavily into the drug trade. Three years ago, the D.E.A. described
Mr. Castano "as a major narcotics trafficker in his own right," and in a
startling interview on Colombian television on March 1, the paramilitary
chieftain acknowledged that the bulk of his group's money now comes from drugs.

As the conflict deepens, the situation for ordinary Colombians has grown
worse. At least 35,000 people have been killed over the past decade, and
more than 1.5 million people, most of them peasants, have been forced to
leave their homes.

"First the paramilitaries came and told us to leave or they would kill us,
and then when we were resettled, the guerrillas came and at gunpoint forced
two of my sons to join them," said Javier Gonzalez, a refugee from Cordoba
province in the northwest. "For the past three years, we have been sent
from one place to the next, but everywhere we go, we are mistreated and
abused."

In addition, at least 2 percent of Colombia's 40 million people -- some
800,000 mostly middle-class people -- have left the country since 1996,
most of them for the United States. Investors are also fleeing in the face
of extortion demands by guerrilla and paramilitary groups, and unemployment
is at a record rate of one worker in five after a recession that shrank the
economy by more than 5 percent last year.

A recent poll shows Colombians worry most about the pervasive violence that
accompanies the drug crisis.

Colombia's murder rate is 10 times that of the United States, and its
kidnapping rate is the highest in the world, thanks in large part to
spectacular mass abductions like the E.L.N.'s raid on a Roman Catholic
church service in Cali last year that resulted in more than 150 hostages.

"It feels like we are besieged, with an enemy just outside the castle walls
waiting to pluck anyone who comes into their grasp," a doctor who lives in
Cali said recently. "There is no longer anywhere you can go where you are
safe."

More than five million people marched last fall in support of the "No Mas"
civic foundation, which is demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities.
But the leader of that movement, Francisco Santos, was forced to leave the
country in mid-March after the F.A.R.C. threatened to kill him.

"There is a tendency to see the Colombian conflict as a table with two
legs, the government versus the guerrillas," thereby ignoring the
aspirations of civil society, Mr. Santos said recently in Miami.

NEXT CHAPTER: The Hard Questions, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n528/a02.html