COLOMBIA'S GUERRILLA, DRUG WOES ARE HIGHLIGHTED BY ATTACKS ON U.S.

In Columbia, no stranger to drug-related and political violence, the global
alarm about terrorism comes when many Colombians and the U.S. government
are already frustrated with Marxist guerrillas' reluctance to end the
region's longest-running insurgency.

The U.S. has committed $1.3 billion, along with military advisers and
contract pilots, to fight drug trafficking in the region, as part of "Plan
Colombia." The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC -- the
region's largest guerrilla group, fielding an estimated 17,000 fighters --
finances operations through the cocaine trade and kidnapping.

Myles Frechette, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, sees the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks in the U.S. cutting both ways in the 37-year-old
Colombian conflict. "On the one hand, there's the traditional fear [Latin
Americans have], when something big is going on, that they are going to be
lost in the shuffle," he says. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who
was visiting neighboring Peru at the time of the attacks, had to cancel a
trip to Colombia to return home and manage the crisis. On the other hand,
Mr. Frechette says, the attack has raised the hope of some Colombians "that
since Colombia can't seem to resolve its problems, perhaps we'll come in
and resolve them for them."

There has been great reluctance in Washington toward a more direct U.S.
role in Colombia's drug and guerrilla wars. But Mr. Frechette notes that
the U.S. now may push harder for Colombian President Andres Pastrana, and
the administration that succeeds him after next year's presidential
elections, to begin producing results to end the conflict.

President Pastrana has until early October to formally announce whether the
government will extend an agreement allowing the FARC to control a swath of
territory in southern Colombia the size of Switzerland. The so-called
demilitarized zone was created nearly three years ago as an inducement for
the rebels to come to the bargaining table. Mr. Pastrana has staunchly
defended the extension of the territorial agreement with the rebels, even
though "Colombians have been asking what, besides humiliation, have we got
in return," says Russell Crandall, a Davidson College political scientist.

Both the Colombian military and the U.S. point to ample proof that the
guerrillas are using the demilitarized zone as a staging area for training
and new missions. In August, three members of the Irish Republican Army
were caught by Colombian security officials leaving the rebel zone. The
Colombian government maintains that the IRA men were training FARC
guerrillas in bomb-making.

Three armed groups in Colombia have made the U.S. State Department's list
of terrorist organizations. Both the FARC and the National Liberation Army,
a smaller Marxist group, have been identified as terrorist groups. The U.S.
this month added the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing
paramilitary group that also has profited from the cocaine business.

In a statement over the weekend, the FARC condemned the attacks in the
U.S., while also blasting the U.S. as an "imperial state that spreads death
and violence."