BOGOTA (Reuters) -- President Andres Pastrana is hoping to galvanize
support for Colombia's fragile peace process when he travels to Havana
on
Thursday for talks with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan
President-elect Hugo Chavez.
Pastrana, whose government opened preliminary talks with his country's
main
Marxist rebel group last week, will be the first Colombian head of state
to visit
the communist-ruled island.
Castro and Chavez, the failed coup leader who won a landslide election
victory last month, have already pledged their backing for efforts to end
Colombia's long-running war, which has killed more than 35,000 people,
most
of them civilians, in the past decade.
But political analysts say they are seen as commanding figures who wield
considerable influence over Colombia's leading guerrilla groups.
Pastrana has indicated that he may ask both of them, or certainly at least
Castro, to play a direct, hands-on role in brokering any eventual peace
accords.
"The support that the Cuban president can give to the peace process is
fundamental," Pastrana told reporters this week.
Pastrana has made peace the top priority of his 5-month-old government.
But Manuel Marulanda, veteran leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of
Colombia (FARC), snubbed the 44-year-old president by refusing to meet
him
at a ceremony last Thursday launching the formal start of the peace talks.
The sense that negotiations had gotten off to an inauspicious beginning
was
reinforced by Marulanda's right-hand man, Jorge Briceno, who infuriated
Pastrana this week by saying the FARC would kidnap leading politicians
and
"oligarchs" unless the government bows to rebel demands for a controversial
prisoner exchange.
Pastrana and Castro have met twice before, most recently in October at
the
Iberoamerican Summit in Oporto, Portugal. But the threat that Colombia's
peace process could unravel, even before it gets started in earnest, has
given a
sense of urgency to their latest face-to-face talks.
Colombian Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez de Soto has sought to play
down the importance of the Cuban visit, saying Colombia's peace process
needs the support of everyone, including the United States, Mexico and
Spain.
But political analysts stress that the FARC and the Cuban- inspired National
Liberation Army, Colombia's second largest guerrilla group, see Castro
and
Chavez in a much different light than they do U.S. President Bill Clinton
or the
neoliberal leaders of Mexico and Spain.
The election of Chavez, a stunning defeat for politics-as- usual in Venezuela,
was hailed by FARC leaders as a victory for the underclass across Latin
America.
Rebels are certain to have taken note of the fact that Chavez-- who has
the
image of a radical populist and champion of the poor-- paid his first visit
to
Cuba in 1994, shortly after his release from prison for his botched coup
attempt two years earlier.
Castro, meanwhile, is seen as the crusading leader of the last bastion
of
communism in the Western hemisphere, even though he has gone on record
as
saying the days when leftist insurgencies could seize power through armed
struggle are long over.
"There is an immense significance to the fact that the maximum leader of
the
Cuban revolution, someone who has been accused on repeated occasions of
promoting subversion in Latin America, supports reconciliation in Colombia,"
said Antonio Yepes Parra, a former Colombian ambassador to Cuba.
"It's evident that at one time the Cuban government had close contact with
the
country's guerrilla groups," he added, speaking in an interview with Medellin's
El Colombiano newspaper. "Those ties, which were once a cause for discord,
could help a great deal on this long and difficult journey we're embarking
on."
If Pastrana fails to wins political support for the peace process-- Colombia's
first in seven years-- he may appeal to a higher authority on Feb. 1. Aides
say
he is to be received at the Vatican on that date by Pope John Paul II.
Copyright 1999 Reuters.