Two years after the inauguration of the most promising peace initiative in the history of Colombia's fratricidal wars, the talks between the government of President Andres Pastrana and the oldest, most powerful guerrilla force, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), have reached a critical juncture.
Nobody ever said that making peace in Colombia after four decades of civil war, involving several protagonists operating on shifting fronts simultaneously, would be easy. Especially when FARC imposed conditions for holding talks while the war continued to rage. Its escalation of guerrilla violence has undercut political support for the peace process at home and abroad and stripped FARC and its cause of credibility.
Yet, Mr Pastrana's stubborn refusal to budge from his commitment to solve the endless blood-letting through political negotiation has kept the process alive and achieved substantially more than his critics admit. In the last two years, the negotiators have reached a mutually agreed agenda that addresses the fundamental political, social and economic causes of the insurgency. This agenda, which has been on the table since May, implicitly denotes acceptance that what is at stake in the negotiations is nothing less than a redistribution of Colombian political and economic power.
Mr Pastrana's unprecedented diplomatic campaign has won him crucial international support for peace, especially in Europe, and has enabled the international community to become actively involved, for the first time, in assisting the Colombian peace process.
These important gains are now at risk. The talks have been in limbo for two months since they were frozen by FARC last November to protest at the government's failure to control the right-wing paramilitaries who massacre FARC supporters and selectively assassinate progressive civilians with impunity. And on January 31st, the legal status of the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that Mr Pastrana temporarily ceded to FARC two years ago expires. Mr Pastrana faces a crucial decision: he must decide whether to renew FARC's authority within the zone. But as the DMZ goes, so goes the peace process. Closure would be the equivalent of an official declaration of war against FARC.
It is undeniable that FARC has abused its tenure of the DMZ. It has acted like an army of occupation, intimidating the urban civilian population, and according to its critics, it uses the territory to hide hostages, stockpile weapons, process and ship out cocaine, recruit minors, launch attacks in neighbouring regions, and execute those FARC intelligence identifies as agents of the army or paramilitaries.
Yet it has also used the zone in just the way the government intended: to provide a safe venue for meetings between the guerrilla leaders and international and Colombian visitors. Since last spring, over 26,000 individual Colombians have trekked, at their own expense, to meet FARC leaders and present their ideas and proposals for that distant dream known as "the New Colombia".
The DMZ has been the most central, as well as the most controversial element of Mr Pas trana's peace policies. At the time it was established, Mr Pas trana's decision to withdraw temporarily Colombian troops from a jungle territory in southern Colombia the size of Switzerland, to create a safe venue for the talks, was bitterly opposed by the Colombian army. It also infuriated President Clinton's powerful drug czar, Mr Barry McCaffrey, and his allies among conservative US Republican Congressmen, who viewed the peace process in general, and this concession to FARC in particular, as an unwarranted interference with the prosecution of the US drug war in Colombia.
Since then, Washington's opposition to the Colombian peace process has produced Plan Colombia, the Clinton administration's massive new military aid programme. Presented as a programme for combating drugs, Plan Colombia is virtually a carbon copy of the US strategy for fighting a proxy war against the Salvadoran guerrillas two decades ago.
By strengthening the hardliners on the left and the right of the Colombian divide, Plan Colombia's impact on the peace process has been devastating. The right-wing establishment no longer feels pressured to assume the costs of a future peace settlement, and FARC's kidnapping and extortion campaigns went into immediate overdrive to pay for an arms and recruitment build-up, with the predictable human rights and political costs.
Most disturbingly, Plan Colombia has also strengthened the paramilitaries. Washington's silence on right-wing terrorism and narco-trafficking has convinced FARC that, as was the case in Nicaragua, US strategy in the coming war in Colombia includes using the paramilitaries as shock troops in search and destroy operations.
Two weeks ago, as Mr Pastrana struggled to reinvigorate the stalled talks with FARC, on the one hand, and to open a second, smaller demilitarised "peace zone" to get talks going with the second guerrilla force, the smaller Army of Liberation (ELN), a Washington Post editorial called on the President to close down the DMZ and admit the defeat of his peace policies. In Colombia, the Post editorial was seen to reflect the views of the Pentagon and conservative Republicans who want President-elect Bush to support a war of extermination against FARC in the name of the US national security interest.
It is clear that neither the government nor the guerrillas wants to break off talks. In a move calculated to give Mr Pastrana cover to keep the zone open a while longer, FARC recently announced the surprise release of over 100 soldiers and police prisoners for February. Two days ago the "thaw" began. After their first formal meeting since November, the negotiators issued a joint communique on Thursday night announcing further meetings to analyse where the peace process has gone wrong and make proposals for reopening talks before January 31st. Nevertheless, the government has failed utterly to respond to the most recent paramilitary atrocities. It remains clear the paramilitary issue will not be solved.
According to Colombian Defence Ministry figures, the paramilitaries are growing two-and-a-half times faster than FARC, and since July have been conducting a mass recruitment drive. They also pay better - commanders can make up to $4,000 a month.
Mr Pastrana has cashiered more army officers for paramilitary links than any previous Colombian president. But in relation to the gravity of the threat, government action has been totally inadequate. Since the start of the year paramilitaries have committed 26 massacres in 11 regions of Colombia in which over 170 people have been slaughtered.
The paramilitaries are the shock troops of a well organised conspiracy, ruthlessly determined to drive Colombia to war, and they are gaining the initiative.
Meanwhile the Colombian Minister of Defence announced that the first 18 US helicopters will arrive on Monday to begin Plan Colombia operations.