Dogs of war are loose in Colombia

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned . . "

The words of W.B. Yeats might seem like an odd introduction to a report from this distant Latin-American city high in the Andes mountains but his prophetic vision of the descent of the 20th century into darkness has haunted me ever since I arrived here a month ago, and I can find no better way to convey the mood of despair which has seeped into this isolated, deeply troubled city.

Bogota has always been a dangerous, lawless place. But since I was last here four months ago, the powerful FARC guerrillas, those same people with whose leaders the government of Andres Pastrana has been holding peace talks, have been closing in on the city and the residents are feeling besieged. A new and insidious fearfulness, mingled with resignation, pervades the atmosphere. Sightings of FARC roadblocks within 10 minutes of the city outskirts are not unusual.

Ever since the guerrillas initiated random mass kidnappings on the roads, people no longer dare take a spin out of town at the weekend. Family Sunday lunch in the country house or roadside cafe is a thing of the past. The country houses on the beautiful savannah stretching north from the city are empty.

Between 800 and 900 people a week are leaving for the US. They are the lucky ones: doctors, architects and engineers who already had valid visas. Those who apply for a visa at the US embassy now must wait for a year to get an appointment. Until recently, for most of the upper- and middle-class residents, the people who essentially run the country, the insurgency war was something they watched on their televisions at night. It was a virtual, sittingroom war occurring in some other country, some far-off tropical jungle on the other side of the Andes.

As long as the carnage affected only campesinos and villagers, it did not connect to their lives. Year after year, the war remained invisible and the root causes were ignored.

Today it is the peace process which is seen to exist in the virtual world, insulated from a violent, deeply confusing reality.

What goes on in the conversations and the lunches between the FARC commanders and the VIPs the government brings to meet them in a model village in the jungle which has been spruced up and painted in bright fashion colours bears no relation to the mayhem in the rest of Colombia.

When, in the early 1990s, the FARC built a powerful peasant army on the proceeds of the drug crops grown by peasants it controls, and this guerrilla army started to overrun army bases, taking soldiers and police hostages, the shocking scenes on the nightly news triggered the realisation that the Colombian army might not quite cut the mustard.

But that worry remained someone else's problem. No middle-class son or daughter enlisted to fight in this messy, undeclared war among peasants.

Now the guerrillas' new strategy has changed things radically. The intimidating presence of the barbarian at the gate has brought the rural war to the city, and the intensification by the guerrillas of their indiscriminate kidnapping and extortion campaigns has projected the civilians on to the brutal front lines of a war in which terrorism, directed at the civilian population, has become the chief strategic weapon.

Like many modern cities, Bogota is really two cities - a well-off northern enclave and a southern slum. Between the two, downtown Bogota is a no-man's land. Decayed, overcrowded, chaotic. On a clear, moonlit night, from the slopes of the northern mountains where the people with money live in pleasant, fortress-like apartment blocks, protected by private security, you can see clear across this city of eight million people to where a myriad naked light-bulbs shimmer in the teeming slums.

Of course, the guerrillas have always been in that city, organising, recruiting, controlling crime, dispensing "revolutionary justice," making alliances and building a clandestine urban militia. Today, the shadowy presence of that militia is what frightens people in the north the most.

If the stories about the maid who was discovered bringing suitcases of weapons into the apartment, or about the ransomed kidnap victim who came face to face at the supermarket checkout with her "guard" are true, then the FARC has infiltrated into the most exclusive neighbourhoods.

In the past year, the government of President Pastrana has been buffeted by one crisis after another and the authority and credibility of his presidency have been dangerously eroded. Now in the 20th month of his four-year term, many seasoned political analysts are worried about the stability of his besieged presidency.

The fratricidal, territorial war between the FARC and the right-wing death squads, known as "paramilitaries", continues to rage. Every day, the paramilitaries continue to turn the Colombian countryside into a human slaughterhouse.

Paramilitary massacres, last year and this, have occurred on average once a day. In the phrase of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, all of the massacres in Colombia have been "foretold". Despairing appeals for protection in the days leading up to the torture and the butchery have been ignored by army and police commanders stationed in the immediate vicinity.

Two weeks ago, Mr Anders Kompass, the highly respected Swedish diplomat who directs the Colombian office of UN Human Rights Commissioner Mrs Mary Robinson, laid the responsibility for what he called "the magnitude and complexity of the paramilitary phenomenon" directly at the door of the Colombian government. He claimed it had failed to develop any active policy to combat them.

Asked by the press what recommendations he could make to tackle the horrific human rights crisis in Colombia, he went right to the point: "To the government: combat the paramilitaries. To the FARC: stop kidnapping and release all those in their power."

There is little chance that either message will be acted upon. The government is too weak to take on the paramilitaries. The FARC's use of indiscriminate kidnapping and extortion is intimately connected to its long-term ambitions, which it has never denied, to take power by force if the negotiations fail. Besides, today the FARC has yet another reason to step up its fund-raising.

Next week, the US senate is expected to clear a $1.6 billion package of military aid for "counter-narcotics" operations in FARC-controlled territory. Washington's obsession with fumigating drug crops in faraway places will draw the US another fateful step closer to the vortex of the war and into direct conflict with 40,000 coca farmers.

Even before the senate votes, the FARC has taken action. In the Putumayo coca fields where US-trained and equipped counter-narcotics battalions will support the Colombian police teams when they fly in to fumigate, the FARC is arming and training the coca farmers to resist.

All the elements of a major tragedy are in place here. The US action provides the militarists in the FARC with precisely the excuse they need to withdraw from the negotiations at minimum political cost. The war will spread to new areas, with new actors, at the precise moment when changing conditions in the coca fields offer a unique opportunity to get rid of the coca peacefully, with the active collaboration of the farmers.

In Putumayo, and other areas also, the Colombian farmers who grow the coca are looking for a way out. They are tired of the war, violence and death which their crops bring. But they are trapped, by the FARC and by the paramilitaries. Both depend on the coca to finance their war.

What the farmers desperately need is government protection: soldiers capable of providing a shield between them and the FARC and the paramilitaries. And then they need a guaranteed subsidy from the government for their produce: a commitment to fly in and purchase at market rate whatever they produce.

Theirs is not a mega-dollar plan. The structural development of the Putumayo, the roads, schools, clinics and markets which they need, can come later. But they face an emergency situation. They are in great danger from all the violent players in the area.

There is very little time left before the US scenario closes the escape hatch and the way out from drugs and fumigation and war will be lost.

For the past 16 months, President Pastrana has stubbornly sought to keep open the door to a rational settlement of the political violence which is tearing his country apart. On the surface, the talks have often appeared to be on the point of breaking new ground. The promise has never held.

This may be the crunch moment, when only the international community can help. The FARC wants belligerency status. It also wants a big meeting in the coca fields with all the governments to explain how they would eliminate coca.

Perhaps this is the time to exchange international recognition in return for signing on to international humanitarian law and abandoning kidnapping. There may not be another chance to put some brake on the savagery of this war.

Ana Carrigan is the author of The Palace of Justice, a study of conflict in Colombia in the 1980s.