VIOLENCE AS A WAY OF LIFE

The bare facts are disturbing enough. Colombia is America's third-largest
recipient of military aid. Yet leftist guerrilla and rightist paramilitary
groups roam the countryside, the latest combatants in a 50-year conflict
that has taken some 35,000 lives in the past decade alone, creating along
the way some two million refugees. Various attempts at negotiation have
failed, and outlaw groups grow ever more powerful, their followers fueled
less by ideology these days than by drug trafficking. In an unholy embrace,
American cocaine and heroin consumers stoke the killing while our aid seeks
to suppress it. It is altogether an appalling state of affairs.

Yet somehow it sits at the margin of public awareness, another distant
battle zone in America's war on drugs . Robin Kirk brings Colombia back to
center stage in "More Terrible Than Death" (PublicAffairs, 311 pages,
$27.50), a vividly written and often mesmerizing first-hand account of the
violence there. "Colombia is, in its way," she writes, "a great laboratory
of human feeling, pushed to the limit of what is bestial, monstrous,
unthinkable. But delivered with unmistakable elan. It is a beautiful car
with a body in the trunk. It is incongruous, hideous, but has style to burn."

Too often the people who write about Colombia, including human-rights
workers on the scene, come off as apologists for the left-wing guerrillas,
bewailing government violence while playing down the abuses on the other
side. Ms. Kirk will have none of that. She is indeed a human-rights worker,
for Human Rights Watch, but she writes with admirable political balance and
honesty, even about herself. "As I write this," she says at one point,
having described her belief that time and hard work would show her good
intentions to skeptics who saw her as a mere meddling Yanqui, "I'm dismayed
by the naivete that shines through. Of course, I was naive. I am American
to the core, guilty by passport."

The current violence is merely history's latest turn of the wheel. The
origins of the main guerrilla group (known by its acronym as the FARC) --
and of its 70-something founder, Pedro Antonio Marin (known by his adopted
name of Manuel Miranda) -- lie in "La Violencia," a civil war that occurred
in the 1950s between the country's two mainstream parties. It was a bloody
affair, claiming 200,000 lives. In the countryside, Mr. Marin emerged from
the killing with a disdain for the leaders of both parties, who from the
safety of the cities, he claimed, engaged in politics as a parlor game and
source of patronage while differing little ideologically. Mr. Marin
migrated to Marxism, but his political identity has become less distinct in
recent years, and arguably less important.

"The powerful logic that had rescued Marin from the senselessness of La
Violencia had become an end in itself, as stuck in place as the trigger of
a rusted gun," Ms. Kirk writes. "The same qualities that allowed him to
survive treachery -- an animal caution and a loyalty only to those closest
to him -- prevented Marin from examining the cost of this war to Colombia
and his increasingly remote chance of ever seizing power."

The aspirations of his younger recruits, Ms. Kirk notes, are anything but
ideologically ascetic. This rising generation is perhaps best epitomized by
Marin's likely successor, the 30-something Jorge Briceno Suarez, "a jolly,
vicious, fun-loving murderer who drives a flashy vehicle with his pistol on
his hip, girls on the running boards, and a rum bottle at the ready."

The genesis of the main right-wing paramilitary group, known as the AUC,
was a civilian irregular force set up by Colombia's military in the 1960s
to fight the guerrillas with their own tactics. In its various forms, it
has been both legal and, as now, illegal. The social views of its outlaw
leader, Carlos Castano, sound remarkably like those of the guerrillas, from
whom the AUC has ruthlessly retaken rural territory and drug business in
recent years.

The price of all this violence has been paid by civilians caught in the
middle. In Ms. Kirk's striking words: "Had a store owner bought from or
sold to a guerrilla? Death. Had a telephone exchange operator placed a call
for a paramilitary? Death. Had a teenage girl danced with a teenage boy who
happened to be an army recruit? Death."

Unlike many of her human-rights colleagues, Ms. Kirk supports U.S. military
aid. She hopes that Washington will use it as leverage, to force the
Colombian military to fight the highly unpopular guerrillas ethically and
- -- this is the hard part -- to turn on the paramilitary forces as well. Her
larger hope is that such leverage will force all sides into a negotiated
resolution. Colombians would seem to want this too, having voted
overwhelmingly last year for Alvaro Uribe, the new hard-line president who
is building up the army and who has demanded a ceasefire before negotiating
with anyone.

For all its virtues, "More Terrible Than Death" might have offered more in
the way of policy prescriptions, and it is weak on economics, overlooking
the great growth of Colombia's urban middle class. But Ms. Kirk does not
claim to be writing an analytical treatise. She wants to capture the
reality of the violence itself, and she does so splendidly. And despite the
bleak picture she paints, she is guardedly optimistic. A Colombian friend
tells her that "to give up is more terrible than death." Ms. Kirk agrees.

The friend was later assassinated.