Uphill Battle

RAVAGED COLOMBIA SEES GLINT OF HOPE AS KILLINGS FALL OFF

A Dogged President, Helped by U.S., Boosts the Army, Deals Guerrillas
a Setback

Death of Notorious Kidnapper

CARTAGENA DEL CHAIRA, Colombia -- In 1994, guerrillas blew up the
police station and killed the police chief of this jungle town on a
bend of the Caguan River.

For the next nine years, no police officer or prosecutor set foot on
Cartagena's streets. The local judge was kidnapped. A mayor was
murdered. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Latin
America's oldest and most powerful guerrilla army, imposed taxes and
dealt out a harsh justice. In time, the guerrillas took over the
flourishing cocaine trade. From here, the FARC launched devastating
attacks on isolated Colombian army posts.

But times have changed.

Five months ago, as part of a campaign by President Alvaro Uribe to
extend state control throughout Colombia, elite army troops set up a
base in a cavernous warehouse outside town. In June a prosecutor was
reassigned to Cartagena, which isn't to be confused with the big port
city also called Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. A judge arrived a
few days ago. "The police are here to stay," says Capt. Alexander
Collazos, the town's young police chief, who arrived here with some 70
officers in December.

Townsfolk who have lived through the violent ebb and flow of
Colombia's four-decade-long civil war have their doubts. And many
obstacles remain before Colombia is at peace -- among them the threat
from right-wing paramilitary groups and the challenge of replacing
coca-leaf cultivation with other kinds of jobs. But dramatically lower
political violence, strong economic growth and a revived military
under a strong president suggest that Colombia just might have turned
a corner in its civil war.

For the U.S., any progress in Colombia is good news. Almost three
times the size of California, this country of rugged Andean mountains,
sophisticated cities and jungle rain forest produces some 90% of the
cocaine that reaches the U.S.

Washington has invested $3.3 billion here since 2000 to fight what it
calls narco-terrorism. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. and
Colombia are grappling with such issues as whether there are enough
"boots on the ground" to hold territory wrested from insurgents and
how to bolster a fragile state in the face of terrorist attacks.
Perhaps most important, the U.S. and Colombia are slowly learning how
to win the hearts and minds of a suspicious population.

As Mr. Uribe took power in August 2002, many felt Colombia was a
failed state -- a view strengthened when FARC guerrillas fired a
barrage of mortar rounds during his inauguration ceremony, killing and
wounding scores of bystanders when some rounds went astray. Four
hundred and twenty town mayors, about 40% of the total, had fled for
their lives after the FARC issued an ultimatum: resign or die.
According to government figures, police had been run out of 168 of
Colombia's 1,098 county seats. In the two years before Mr. Uribe
assumed power, guerrillas attacked 94 Colombian towns. The ranks of
internal refugees swelled by more than 6,000 families each month.

Today, only about half a dozen mayors are still in exile, according to
the national mayors' group. The government says there are police
contingents in all of the country's county seats. In Mr. Uribe's two
years in office, guerrillas have attacked only 11 Colombian towns. And
the refugee flood has been cut in half, although three million of this
country's 42 million people are still displaced. Kidnappings fell 44%
to 1,737 in the 12 months ending in May, while homicides dropped 20%
to about 21,000 in 2003.

Why the success? Generous U.S. aid has sharpened the effectiveness of
a formerly demoralized and sedentary army. And the U.S.-assisted
aerial spraying of coca plants with herbicide in large swaths of the
country has struck at a key funding source for the rebels: drug money.
Currently some 400 U.S. military advisers and 400 private contractors
are working in Colombia, a figure that Congress may increase this year.

Beyond the U.S. help, though, Colombia owes much of its progress to
the 52-year-old Mr. Uribe. A workaholic lawyer and longtime regional
politician, he won an overwhelming victory in the presidential
election of May 2002. With it came a mandate to vigorously prosecute
the war against the FARC, which killed his father in a failed kidnap
attempt in 1983, and other insurgent groups. During his first week in
office, he declared a 90-day state of emergency, under which the
military was granted special powers, and pushed through a one-time
$800 million tax on the nation's wealthy to help pay for the war.

"My objective is to bring peace to Colombia, finish with terrorism one
way or another, and negotiate in good faith with those who want to,"
says Mr. Uribe, who has survived more than a dozen assassination
attempts including two since assuming power.

Wealthy and middle-class Colombians who fled the country are
returning, driving economic growth. Last year, private-sector
investment was almost double that of 2002. In the first quarter of
this year, new foreign direct investment soared 73% to $546 million,
driven by ventures in oil and mining. Economists project growth will
top 4% this year.

But the president, speaking of the FARC, warns that "the snake is
still alive." The last month has seen an uptick in attacks by the
left-wing guerrillas, who have about 13,000 men in arms. Right-wing
paramilitary warlords control another 13,000 gunmen.

Last year, the paramilitary bands, loosely organized in an umbrella
group known as the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, agreed to a
unilateral cease-fire and entered disarmament talks with the
government. But the bands kept killing. When talks neared collapse in
April, Mr. Uribe sent them an ultimatum. He accused the warlords of
planning to kill him and said the army would fight until they were
destroyed. Negotiations then resumed.

Private Armies

Some paramilitary groups were formed with government approval two
decades ago to protect cattlemen and others from guerrilla extortion.
But virtually all turned into private armies for drug traffickers
fighting the FARC for control of drug routes. They are responsible for
some of the worst atrocities of the war, and the U.S. wants to
extradite many of them for drug dealing. But the warlords want
recognition as political players. In late July, Mr. Uribe allowed
paramilitary commanders to address Colombia's Congress, a move that
was harshly criticized by the U.S. and others. As the negotiations
continue, Mr. Uribe must strike a difficult balance between the
contrary demands of justice and peace.

Mr. Uribe, who has a 79% approval rating, is pushing for a
constitutional change that would allow him to run for re-election in
2006. Currently, presidents can serve only one four-year term. That
effort has met considerable opposition from politicians in the
capital, and even some supporters believe Mr. Uribe would better spend
his time fighting the war and pursuing economic development than
negotiating with the legislature over the constitutional amendment.
But many analysts believe the president will end up getting his way
and win a second term. "People see Uribe as a redeemer who has come to
save the nation," says Daniel Garcia-Pena, an adviser to Bogota's
left-wing mayor, one of Mr. Uribe's chief political opponents.

Just a few years ago, the nation seemed lost. Colombia's state and
army seemed so weak that many thought the FARC could soon take Bogota.
In 1998, the guerrillas had scored victory after victory. Not far from
Cartagena in the jungle, the rebels ambushed an elite but
understrength army battalion and killed or captured most of its 154
men.

And the FARC was at Bogota's gates, intent on strangling the capital,
says Gen. Hernando Ortiz, who commands the army's Bogota-based Fifth
Division. To venture just a few miles outside Bogota was to risk being
snagged in the FARC's kidnapping net. Motorists by the dozens were
captured and held for ransom. In 1999, a whole church congregation in
Cali, Colombia's third largest city, was kidnapped.

Mr. Uribe's predecessor, Andres Pastrana, was elected in 1998 with a
mandate to seek peace. Mr. Pastrana ceded control of a
Switzerland-size demilitarized zone to the FARC, hoping the concession
would jump-start negotiations for a peace treaty. But over the next
three years, guerrillas kidnapped and murdered top Colombian political
figures, and once even landed a hijacked commercial plane in their
sanctuary. Talks went nowhere.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pastrana worked to get U.S. aid to strengthen the
demoralized Colombian army. In 2000, the U.S. Congress approved $1.3
billion in aid to Plan Colombia, most of which went to security forces
and coca eradication. A key component of the package: 67 helicopters,
whose use was at first limited to counternarcotics missions. After
Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. allowed the Colombian army to use the
helicopters in counterinsurgency operations on a case-by-case basis.
Congress has continued to fund Plan Colombia with about $700 million a
year.

A frustrated Mr. Pastrana ended negotiations in February 2002. In May,
Mr. Uribe, who had long criticized the peace process because he
thought the guerrillas weren't serious about laying down their arms,
swept into power.

'Happy Hour'

A hands-on commander-in-chief, Mr. Uribe travels to a different region
of Colombia every Monday to review the local security situation with
area commanders. He peppers generals with telephone calls about the
progress of military operations, a practice known in the palace as
"Happy Hour." Last year, he moved the government for a week to a
military base in the beleaguered town of Arauca, where a car bomb went
off close to a school two hours after Mr. Uribe was there.

Mr. Uribe built on military reforms started by Mr. Pastrana's
generals. He boosted the size of Colombia's relatively small military
and police forces by about a third to about 350,000. He increased the
number of professional soldiers by 8,000 to 62,000. He worked to
reverse a much-criticized record of human-rights abuses. The army also
created battalions of "peasant soldiers" commanded by professional
officers.

Most important, Mr. Uribe has doggedly pushed army commanders to
pursue the war aggressively. Last year, Gen. Ortiz, helped to break
the FARC's virtual siege of Bogota, flushing an estimated 2,000
guerrillas out of mountain canyons near the city.

In the process, the army killed one of the top FARC commanders, known
only by his nom de guerre, Marco Aurelio Buendia, similar to the name
of the protagonist in Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One
Hundred Years of Solitude." From his mountain hideout, Mr. Buendia ran
one of the FARC's most profitable kidnapping rings. Mr. Buendia was
buried in a common grave along with 14 of his comrades. "He went to
his tomb with the secret of his real name," says Gen. Ortiz. Since Mr.
Buendia's death, kidnapping in the area has almost disappeared, he
says.

This year, the army has sent some 22,000 soldiers into the sparsely
populated swampy jungles of southeast Colombia, the heartland of the
guerrillas and a place where they have long controlled the cocaine
trade. In February, helicopters from a U.S.-trained counternarcotics
battalion swooped down at night to capture Nayibe Rojas, alias Sonia,
who allegedly ran the FARC's cocaine trade in southern Colombia.

It will take more than military victories to achieve peace and
progress in the countryside. With U.S. help, Colombia has been trying
to expand social services and give people a livelihood outside of coca
cultivation. But a report released by the U.S. Government
Accountability Office last week says the efforts are inadequate and
underfunded at a time when U.S. aid money is being swallowed up in
Iraq and Afghanistan. "That's the great Achilles heel of all of this,"
says Gabriel Marcella, an analyst at the U.S. Army War College.

In Cartagena del Chaira, most residents are wary. Some say they are
tired of the arbitrary and brutal ways of the guerrillas. But the
FARC's drug and military operations have provided jobs in an area with
few other opportunities. Many people have family ties with the rebels
and no experience of central-government rule. "The FARC lives in the
hearts of many people here," says one sympathizer. Although the
Colombian navy patrols the Caguan River, guerrillas still man
occasional river checkpoints a few miles downstream from Cartagena.

For years, rivers of cocaine money flowed through town. Cocaine was
sometimes used as currency, residents say. But the aerial spraying of
herbicide has devastated the coca economy here. "Coca doesn't provide
any profits for the farmer," says one former grower.

Corn, cattle or fishing could replace coca, locals say. But to wean
Cartagena from coca, the area's peasants need to have access to
markets in the district capital, Florencia, now a five-hour drive by
mostly unpaved road. The town also needs more and cheaper electricity.
Cartagena isn't connected to the country's electric grid. Locally
generated energy is available only part of the day. People are in dire
need of social services.

On a recent weekend, the army tried to fill the vacuum. It choppered
in two dozen doctors, who examined hundreds of townsfolk lined up by
the gates of Cartagena's hospital. Across the street, nutritionists
weighed malnourished children, giving their mothers bags of enriched
flour.

At the hospital's gate, Lt. Yolanda Lopez, an army reserve doctor, cut
a path through the crowd for a skinny woman holding a newborn. "The
baby is vomiting and has a fever. She needs to see a doctor right
away," said Lt. Lopez.

On the town square, an army master of ceremonies put on a dance
contest for kids and teenagers. "Kids are getting flags, and people
are getting food," said Humberto Bermudez, a restaurant owner who
watched impassively. "Will it get people closer to the army? Time will
tell us."