Analysis: Elections Reveal 'Two' Colombias
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

BOGOTA, Colombia The results of regional elections read Sunday night like
the Xray of a fractured country, and exposed the declining health of the
government's control over rural areas threatened by Marxist rebels.

What mattered most in the voting was not who won or what the candidates
stood for, but rather how many people could vote at all in an election that
in effect revealed the existence of two Colombias: one where people could
choose their mayors, and another where democracy was so frail that they
could not.

In most cities, residents turned out in large numbers to cast ballots. But
in the remote rural areas controlled by the rebels, votes could be counted
in the scores instead of the thousands. Many peasants stayed home and
appeared to heed a boycott demanded by the guerrillas.

In some areas, victorious candidates are expected to refuse to take office
because of death threats by the guerrillas. In others, the losers are likely
to demand new elections because of the low turnout. While voting in state
capitals was largely unhindered, losers might still argue that their
supporters outside the capital were unable to vote.

In Murindo, a battleground for paramilitary and rebel forces, the mayor won
with a single vote.

The government has not yet said how it will address doubts about the vote's
legitimacy. It may well call new elections in some areas, but is expected to
do all it can to avoid appointing local officials, as it did until 10 years
ago.

"The situation here will become even more of a farce," said Rodrigo Losada,
a political science professor at La Javeriana University. In large tracts of
the country under guerrilla control, he said, a government may be formed,
"but in fact, the ones who call the shots will be the guerrillas."

At a time when all other Marxist movements in Latin America have either been
defeated or negotiated peace accords with the governments they once battled,
South America's largest and oldest guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, spearheaded the election boycott, and mounted what
may be its most audacious challenge to the government's authority.

The boycott reinforced earlier advances by the guerrillas. In June,
government forces evacuated a large part of the southern region of the
country a condition the rebels set before they would hand over 70
soldiers and marines, most of whom had been taken prisoner during an assault
on a remote army base.

In part, the guerrillas' endurance can be traced to the support they draw
from protecting the coca and poppy fields of peasants. The head of the
United States' antidrug efforts in the region, Barry McCaffrey, who visited
here last week, said the guerrillas collect $60 million a month in
connection with the drug trade, although not all guerrilla fronts are
involved, he said.

But in Colombia, drug money contaminates parts of every sector of the
society, including the guerrillas' archenemy the rightwing paramilitary
forces. Earlier this month, a paramilitary group ambushed a 54member
judicial commission that was in the state of Meta to seize the estate of a
convicted drug dealer, killing 11 commission members. In a threehour
gunfight, three paramilitary soldiers were killed, and their truck was
seized with more than 700 pounds of cocaine.

But the guerrillas' real strength appears to lie in the long neglect of the
countryside by the Bogota government, worsened under the presidency of
Ernesto Samper, who has spent much of his energy surviving charges that drug
dealers financed his election campaign.

The guerrillas' denunciations of the United States, moreover, resonate with
peasants whose coca fields are being destroyed in eradication programs
sponsored by Washington.

The peasants complain that virtually no American aid is spent on crop
substitution. The guerrillas have justified the election boycott as a way to
halt the false promises, political favors and corruption that have been
endemic here.

And the rebels say that the elections are, at any rate, not truly
democratic. The political party launched by the rebels, the Patriotic Union,
has seen more than 3,000 of its members and leaders killed in what the
InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights describes as "genocide." The party
attributes the killing to military and paramilitary forces.