FOR REBELS, IT'S NOT A DRUG WAR

VILLA NUEVA COLOMBIA - For nearly 40 years, Colombians rarely saw the faces
of the men who run the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the
country's most powerful guerrilla group. Today, they are hard to avoid.

Manuel Marulanda, the rumpled, 69-year-old founder of the FARC, as it is
known by its initials in Spanish, appears regularly in the Colombian media,
meeting with government officials and business leaders here in the
Switzerland-size demilitarized zone the government has turned over to the
rebels as a venue for peace talks.

Bearded, bespectacled Raul Reyes, another member of the seven-man FARC
leadership, began a recent interview by inviting e-mail messages to his
Hotmail account. Commander Joaquin Gomez promised to introduce foreign
visitors to local peasants growing coca, the raw material of cocaine.
Reyes, Gomez and other rebel leaders calmly discussed the finer points of
peace and their objections to a proposed $1.6 billion emergency U.S. aid
package that could bring Washington deeper into Colombia's civil war.

But there is a through-the-looking-glass quality to life inside the
demilitarized zone. Outside, in the rest of Colombia, the guerrillas have
stepped up a campaign of killing, kidnapping and extortion. According to
the government, they "assassinated" 42 police officers and 39 soldiers in
the first three months of this year. The FARC continues to reject a
cease-fire. And it is making more money than ever from cocaine smuggled to
the United States.

It is concern over the drug connection that the Clinton administration says
motivates its aid proposal, approved largely intact last month by the House
of Representatives but now having a rough ride in the Senate. Most of the
aid, which represents a major escalation of U.S. involvement in Colombia,
is intended to train and equip special military and police forces to move
into remote, coca-growing areas in the southern part of the country,
fumigate the drug crops and establish a permanent government presence.

Although the United States has no declared quarrel with the guerrillas, as
long as they don't interfere with the anti-drug campaign, most of the areas
targeted for U.S. aid are under FARC control. And officials such as White
House drug policy director Barry R. McCaffrey, the administration's chief
salesman for the Colombia aid package, routinely describe the rebels as
indistinguishable from drug traffickers. McCaffrey calls the FARC "the
narco-insurgents, narco-guerrillas, narco-terrorists."

"There's no question about what's happening down there," McCaffrey said at
a congressional hearing last month. The war in Colombia is simply
"struggling over money out of drug production."

The administration's allies in Colombia wince at such language. While
lobbying desperately for the U.S. aid, they say the violence tearing apart
the country has deeper roots than the drug trade that fuels it. The drug
war and the civil war in Colombia may have common fronts, Colombians say,
but they have different long-term solutions, especially as related to the
guerrillas.

In peace talks started last year, President Andres Pastrana has attempted
to make the FARC part of the solution, offering it a voice in formulating
wide-ranging reforms and an opportunity to participate in the political
process--a strategy for which there is historical precedent. At least once
a week, senior Colombian officials fly from Bogota to the town of San
Vicente del Caguan, and drive into the hills to this government-built
village they have christened New Colombia. If all goes as scheduled, the
reform plan will be completed and put to a vote nationwide 18 months from now.

The negotiations imply that the government has decided to take the FARC at
its word when it promises to help eliminate coca production as long as the
peasants it claims to represent are protected, given money and trained to
develop an alternative crop. But the Colombian government says it
recognizes that its approach reflects a broader agenda than that of its
American backers, and envisions a role for the FARC that few in Washington
seem prepared to acknowledge.

"In American terms," said Jaime Ruiz, in charge of overall implementation
of Plan Colombia, the government reform program that includes U.S. military
aid, "they want to see the problems of Colombia through the prism of El
Salvador, or human rights, or guerrillas, or left versus right. Or through
the prism of drugs--that the guerrillas are narco-traffickers and the
problem is drugs."

European Tour

Earlier this year, several FARC commanders embarked on an unprecedented
tour of European capitals accompanied by their negotiating counterparts in
the government. After years of isolation, members of the FARC delegation
resembled Rip Van Winkle when they described their encounter with modern
social democracy.

"The most important thing that we saw . . . is that there is a really good
relationship among the state, the private sector and the workers," Raul
Reyes recalled. "Because there is tolerance. There is income distribution.
There is money to spend on the unemployed, on the illiterate, the homeless.
There is medical attention, and enough hospitals. There are subsidies for
those who work the land. In Colombia, it's just the opposite."

Like most of its contemporaries among 20th century Latin American guerrilla
groups, the FARC was born in the convergence of domestic politics and the
Cold War. According to revolutionary lore, Marulanda took to the hills of
southern Colombia with 48 fellow peasants in 1964, after their demands for
local autonomy and development aid were met with repression. The repression
was funded in part under a U.S. program.

Unlike its contemporaries, the FARC neither sought nor received much
ideological or financial input from the Soviet Union or Cuba. Instead, it
owed its survival to the fact that Colombian governments, and their
military forces, were largely bound to the cities and the more wealthy
agricultural areas and rarely came after them. For sustenance, the rebels
extorted money from the wealthy and threatened isolated large landowners.

In exchange for fealty and recruits, they offered peasants the promise of
eventual political power and, more immediately, protection from the
government and from the growing "self-defense" paramilitary organizations
that today are the guerrillas' most brutal and, in some cases, effective
adversaries.

The FARC's political agenda, a 10-point plan that talks about land
distribution, social benefits and political access for the rural poor, has
changed little in nearly four decades. "It's very clear in its fundamental
principles--the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor--and very
ambiguous in its details," said Daniel Garcia-Pena, who served as peace
commissioner under the government that preceded Pastrana's.

Despite an early alliance with the Colombian Communist Party, the FARC has
always been an essentially rural movement that attracted few of the
university intellectuals and liberal theologians who flocked to more
doctrinaire guerrilla groups.

"They still say they're Marxist-Leninist," said Garcia-Pena. "But it's like
religion. It's like saying you're a Catholic, but you get an abortion and
don't go to church."

According to Reyes, "Marxism is a guide, not a dogma," along with the
liberation philosophy of Colombia's first president, Simon Bolivar.

As the FARC grew in strength over the decades, there were periodic
cease-fires and peace negotiations, most of which fell apart due to
guerrilla intransigence or, more often, government betrayal. During the
1980s, the FARC attempted to enter the political process as part of a
leftist coalition, but thousands of its candidates and adherents were
killed. While others point out that the FARC continued armed combat
throughout this period, few dispute its basic analysis of what happened.

The years of isolation have created a sort of time warp for rebel leaders.
During one meeting not too long ago, a Western diplomat said, "they started
the discussion talking about United Fruit," the Boston-based company that
during the 1950s and 1960s was the symbol of controlling U.S. economic
interests in Central America. The company has gone out of business, its
influence replaced by cooperative local ownership and international trade
agreements.

"They have a lack of understanding of the 21st century world, and where
Colombia fits in," the diplomat said.

"We're looking for a model," Reyes said of the European tour. "Something we
can apply here in Colombia. . . . We also want to find out more about Latin
America, and we'd like to go to the United States, and to Canada."

Although the FARC is on the U.S. government's list of terrorist
organizations, a Clinton administration official met with the guerrillas in
late 1998, at the Pastrana government's request. Reyes and fellow guerrilla
Olga Marin, traveled to Costa Rica for sessions with Phillip T. Chicola,
the State Department's director of Andean affairs.

"They wanted to tell us they are not narco-guerrillas, and that they want
peace," said an administration official familiar with the talks. The
Americans, the official said, responded that they supported Pastrana's
peace process, and that Colombian democracy and an end to terrorism were
not negotiable.

Reyes told Chicola the FARC wanted to set up back-channel communications
with the Americans. Telephone numbers and e-mail addresses were exchanged.

The first chance to use them came in March last year, when three American
humanitarian workers disappeared in northeastern Colombia. Chicola sent an
e-mail message to Marin, who called him at home to say she knew nothing of
the disappearances. Several days later, according to the administration
official, the FARC acknowledged they had the Americans; a week later, Marin
told Chicola the Americans would be released.

The next day, the three bodies were found just inside Venezuela.

When the FARC official called back, Chicola said that unless those
responsible for the deaths were brought to justice, there was nothing more
to discuss. Later, the FARC announced it had detained several low-level
guerrillas. The FARC has sent further e-mail messages, but administration
officials say they have gone unanswered.

Army Outmaneuvered

What it may lack in political sophistication, the FARC makes up for in its
ability to surprise and outmaneuver the conscript-heavy and poorly trained
and motivated Colombian Army.

Last month's FARC attack on the small town of Vigia del Fuerte, 230 miles
north of Bogota, was a classic rebel operation - a surprise assault on a
lightly defended, isolated garrison with few, if any, guerrilla casualties.
The army said 21 police officers and nine civilians died. The civilians,
including the mayor and two young children, apparently were victims of the
"gas bombs" favored by the guerrillas - homemade mortars that fire a
propane tank through a length of pipe stolen from an oil pipeline. Many of
the police officers were reportedly killed with a single bullet to the head.

Holding the FARC leadership directly responsible for the deaths, army
commander Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora lashed out in a press statement that
reflected the military's ambivalence about the government's negotiating
strategy. "These are the same people that the most important leaders of the
country are seen embracing on television," Mora said.

The FARC has grown to an estimated 15,000 armed combatants. Although
government officials acknowledge their own tactics have driven peasants
willingly into the arms of the guerrillas, and the rebels' pay is
reportedly attractive, the FARC's ranks also include some who are
teenagers, and there are increasingly widespread reports of forced recruitment.

Unquestioned political leadership comes directly from the organization's
secretariat, and the FARC has long been known for its hierarchical
discipline. But with evermore far-flung units - there are now at least 60
combat "fronts," each with at least 150 guerrillas, organized under eight
regional blocs - outsiders see local commanders as increasingly and
alarmingly autonomous.

Each front is assessed a regular monetary contribution by the central
office, but it is largely up to local commanders to determine where the
money comes from. Although some outsiders who deal regularly with the
guerrillas say the leadership frowns on indiscriminate kidnapping for
ransom, there has been no public criticism from on high.

The leadership denies any loss of control over its troops. "We are a
revolutionary organization that has control over all its units," said
Reyes. Those who imply otherwise, "are trying to justify more U.S. aid."

But the FARC acknowledges that the killing of the American civilians last
year was "a mistake . . . one of the things that happens in war, like the
U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy" last year in Belgrade, said Gomez.
"One of our commandos killed them. We've acknowledged this to the world,
and we've apologized to the American people."

Although much of the FARC's weaponry is seized from government forces, the
central leadership handles bulk weapons purchases, usually from Central
American black markets. To the ongoing puzzlement of U.S. intelligence,
which prepares twice-yearly assessments of FARC strength, the guerrillas
have remained low-tech.

"They tend to be dressed better, trained better, paid better and armed
better than the Colombian army," a senior U.S. official closely involved
with the proposed aid package said. Guerrilla troops on guard duty around
this village on a recent visit were in crisp camouflage uniforms, armed
with knives and machetes and a variety of automatic rifles--U.S.-made
AR-15s, Israeli Galils, Soviet-designed AK-47s.

"If they're making as much money . . . as everyone says they are . . .
they're certainly making enough to buy some decent mortars" or
surface-to-air missiles, said the U.S. official. But with the limited
effectiveness of the Colombian military, he said, the FARC's current
arsenal seems to be "good enough for their purposes."

Fueled by Drug Money

The FARC predated the cocaine industry in Colombia, and most Colombians
believe the rebels are capable of surviving its demise. But the money that
flowed from the expansion of the drug business was like jet fuel to
virtually all parties fighting on the war's multiple fronts.

Since the mid-1970s, frequently shifting alliances, and the rise and fall
of the major drug cartels, brought the traffickers together with the FARC
and other, smaller, guerrilla organizations as well as with the military
and the paramilitary groups fighting the insurgents.

A bonanza fell into the FARC's lap in the 1990s, when successful anti-drug
programs closed down much of the coca cultivation in nearby Peru and
Bolivia. Traffickers moved their crops into the remote, government-free
areas of southern Colombia that have long been the FARC's home base.

For the guerrillas, whose political identity is tied to representing the
peasantry, coca was lucrative for all concerned. But the FARC insists it is
a limited business relationship.

The FARC's overall interests "are basically incompatible with the
narco-traffickers," Reyes said. "They work with the army to kill
progressive people. We charge them a tax. We don't do them any favors, and
they don't do us any.

"In Caqueta, Guaviare and Putumayo," three southern Colombia provinces,
Reyes said, "the economic base is coca, so that's what we tax - not the
traffickers directly, but their intermediaries. In other regions . . . we
tax the cattle ranchers, the sugar growers, the businesses."

Gomez described what he called the "dialectic" of drug trafficking:

"As long as there is someone consuming it, there is going to be someone
selling it. And as long as somebody is prepared to sell it, there is going
to be someone to grow it," he said. The problem with Americans, he said, is
that "they make no distinction between the narco-traffickers, the Colombian
peasants who grow coca leaves as their only way of surviving, and the
insurgency."

"We invite any American to come to the coca-growing sector," Gomez said.
"We'll take full responsibility for their security - they can talk to the
peasants, ask them why they grow coca, what they make from it, who they
sell it to, how it's processed."

"When the [fumigation] helicopters come," he said, "we shoot at them. We
disagree with the whole idea of fumigation. . . . It's killing not only the
coca but everything else." The result, he said, is that a peasant farmer
whose five acres of coca are sprayed simply moves on to five more acres,
many times destroying virgin jungle.

Besides, said Reyes, "they're the same helicopters that come to bomb us."

Despite the view of some leading officials in Washington, outsiders who
frequent the coca-growing areas say the FARC's role in the cocaine
industry, with some exceptions, is largely as its leaders describe it.

"The guerrillas are something different than the traffickers," said Klaus
Nyholm, who runs the U.N. Drug Control Program in Colombia. Representatives
of the U.N. agency, along with Colombia's rural development agency, travel
into coca-growing regions and the much smaller highland areas where
heroin-producing opium poppies are cultivated to persuade small farmers to
switch to other crops and give them the money and tools to do so.

In some areas, Nyholm said, FARC units are more intimately involved with
cocaine processing and export than the leadership admits. "It's far from
general, but we've seen it. . . . The local fronts are quite autonomous.
But in some areas, they're not involved at all. And in others, they
actively tell the farmers not to grow" coca.

"I wouldn't use the term 'narco-guerrillas,' " he said. "I still consider
the . . . guerrillas political. They need the money to finance their war."

Ready for Talks

Asked why the FARC, having done so well on the battlefield, would now want
to talk peace, Reyes says only that "we have come to the conclusion that we
have to solve [Colombia's] problems through negotiations."

Other Colombians have a more cynical view - that after nearly 40 years in
the jungle, the guerrillas will only give up when they decide they can't
win. The guerrillas' primary goal, said political analyst Alfredo Rangel,
remains "taking complete power. Second best is peace negotiations" that
would provide political and economic reform, and a share of power. The
final decision, Rangel said, "will be made the day before they sign a peace
agreement."

But even Rangel believes a deal eventually will be struck. "Colombians kill
each other at the drop of a hat," he said.

"But they also make agreements," he said, referring to the negotiated end
of a 1945-65 period of political violence that resulted in 300,000 deaths.

"One day, they said, 'Enough. Okay, let's make a deal,' " Rangel said. "The
FARC are Colombians, too."