While attention has focused on the implications for the Irish peace process of last weekend's arrest of IRA suspects, the consequences are likely to be far greater in Colombia itself, where the slide toward civil war has reached the point of no return.
Such a war would drag neighbouring Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela into a long and bloody conflict on a scale unseen since Vietnam. The US has already begun planning for such an eventuality, setting up elite counterinsurgency units disguised as drug combat units and establishing military bases in Ecuador and Peru.
Under the US strategy, called Plan Colombia, millions of dollars are spent on chemical sprays on to peasant farming communities while high-tech military backup routs rebels operating in the same territory. The five-year plan was developed in Washington without consultation with Colombian citizens or social organisations. Plan Colombia sent the message to Colombians that, rather than betting on the peace process, the United States was putting its money on escalating the war.
Meanwhile the Colombian government suspended civil rights this week, approving Law 684, the Law of Security and National Defence, which gives sweeping powers of arrest and interrogation to the nation's discredited armed forces, effectively legislating for war.
The move comes after a 30-month peace process with Marxist guerrillas failed to produce a ceasefire or even a lessening of hostilities. Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), with 16,000 members and 37 years of experience, still believes it can seize power by force.
The movement controls huge swathes of the countryside but has failed to make a dent on urban centres, where 70 per cent of the nation's 40 million people now live.
Over the past two years the rebels have enjoyed a 16,000-square-mile liberated zone, ceded by the government as an incentive to engage in peace talks.
The arrest of the three Irish men in Bogota last weekend fuelled speculation that the FARC is planning urban attacks to strengthen its hand at the bargaining table or perhaps hasten a military victory.
The smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), another left-wing insurgent group, cancelled dialogue with the government this week, dynamiting power pylons and launching raids on isolated military outposts.
Nowadays Colombians are voting with their feet, as two million are displaced from their homes and 1.5 million have fled the country in the past five years.
The most significant effort to end the cycle of war came in 1990 when the left-wing M-19 guerrilla movement disarmed in return for a major overhaul of state institutions. The country bristled with optimism as rebels joined delegates to rewrite the nation's constitution and prepare a new parliament.
THAT peace process was wrecked by the nation's powerful right-wing lobby, largely land-owners and business people, just 5 per cent of the population who control 60 per cent of the country's wealth. Colombia's right-wing forces have their own private army, the United Self-Defence (AUC), which has doubled its membership in the past two years, from 4,000 to 8,000.
The paramilitaries now have their own presidential candidate, Alvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC. Mr Uribe has said that, if elected in next year's ballot, he will create a civilian militia and arm a million rural Colombians to patrol the countryside and provide the army and police with intelligence. Uribe's poll ratings have increased from 3 per cent to 25 per cent in the past year.
Colombian peace activists have launched their own alternative to Plan Colombia, which would replace the spray with voluntary eradication of coca crops. However, the Colombian crisis requires national and international resolve to demilitarise the countryside and disarm the paramilitaries, a key prior demand to a rebel ceasefire.
The arrest of the three Irish men in Bogota last weekend has provided a pretext for those anxious to call off the stalled Colombian peace process. However, the logic of war was already firmly in place.
