Rebels Were Divided On Giving Up Haven

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

LAS DELICIAS, Colombia -- A line of abandoned camps along the dusty road leading out of Las Delicias provides vivid testimony of the relative comfort that
Colombia's rebel commanders enjoyed for the last three years inside their protected haven.

Magazines, including one with the U.S. ambassador's photo defaced with a blacked-out tooth, lie near wood-plank bunks in groves of jungle. Heads of lettuce and
boxes of hot sauce still sit inside a tarp-covered kitchen. A small blue notebook shows a guerrilla's lessons, including a neatly drawn table listing how far to lead
helicopters, transport aircraft and warplanes to shoot them down.

But in their hasty departure, prompted by President Andres Pastrana's decision Wednesday to end peace talks and take back the 16,000-square-mile region he
ceded to them three years ago, the guerrillas left behind more questions than answers about rebel strategy. Chief among them is the question confounding many
Colombians and diplomats involved in efforts to halt the long-running civil war: Why has the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC as the guerrilla
group is known, relinquished the safe zone and invited a larger conflict?

By hijacking a commercial plane and kidnapping a prominent senator last week, the guerrillas scuttled a tenuous peace process. They must now give up official
control of a vast region that has afforded them protection, comfort and extraordinary military value as a staging ground and training site.

Pastrana gave them the zone in December 1998 as an incentive to begin negotiations to end a war that dates to 1964. Now he has ordered his military to take it
back. This may seem like a setback for the rebels, but guerrilla leaders, at least publicly, have instead welcomed the return to a military course unrestrained by
peace-table politics.

"The FARC thinks war is good for them. It forces people to choose sides, and they believe many will choose theirs," said a diplomat who has sat with the FARC at
peace talks over several years. "And they believe that the worse off the country gets, the stronger their position is."

According to guerrillas interviewed along the road between Las Delicias and La Sombra, about 180 miles south of Bogota, that analysis essentially captures the logic
behind the FARC's thinking.

Guerrilla negotiators have always been largely inscrutable on the question of whether they are ready under any circumstances to give up arms and, if so, what those
terms might be. Now the guerrillas are in a stronger position than they were three years ago, and they say they are ready to take on a Colombian army they do not
believe has improved as much as they have over that time.

Since coalescing 38 years ago from a collection of ragtag rural protection groups, the Marxist-oriented rebels have grown to a force of roughly 18,000 troops --
about a 10 percent increase from 1998 -- in addition to an unknown number of civilian supporters. While its support in opinion polls is abysmal -- largely because of
frequent assaults on rural towns and electricity towers, a tactic that has left much of this zone in darkness since Friday -- the FARC has established a presence in
every Colombian province and large city.

Moreover, the FARC is richer than ever, thanks in large part to the "taxes" it imposes on coca farmers who supply the raw material for 90 percent of the cocaine
entering the United States. Those proceeds reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In addition, the rebels benefit from money collected through
kidnappings and extortion.

The FARC calls that income the proceeds from "revolutionary taxes." Its leaders have decreed their own law, making it legal to collect such "taxes" from the
country's richest businesses and individuals.

But the former government-sanctioned haven here, roughly the size of Switzerland, was both a blessing for the guerrillas and a point of tension among the FARC
leadership, according to diplomats and military officials familiar with the rebels.

A group of military-minded commanders, many of them fighting far beyond the comforts of the zone against the army and its paramilitary backers, believed the haven
had become a place where the leadership was growing complacent. Manuel Marulanda, the FARC's top commander who has been fighting the state for four
decades, lived a few miles west of here in a brick house that resembles a Silver Spring split-level. The hard-line commanders, including the influential Western Bloc
commander Alfonso Cano and Northwestern Bloc commander Ivan Marquez, were outraged when FARC negotiators made a rare concession to the government in
January to keep peace talks alive and preserve the zone.

On the other side, arguing for preserving the zone, was a mix of politically oriented and military-minded commanders. They believed its uses for training and for
propagandizing students, business and union leaders, and foreign visitors brought here for "public audiences" far outweighed its perils. Many analysts and diplomats
here now agree with Colombia's military leaders, who say the FARC talked peace mainly to benefit from the haven's military uses.

"This was never a place of rest," said Commander El Pija, leader of a mobile patrol operating 15 miles west of here, who contended that the FARC gained strength
over the life of the zone. "The war brings dialogue and dialogue has brought war. They are inseparable."

The rebel camp here belonged to Joaquin Gomez, a FARC peace negotiator and head of its powerful Southern Bloc, with military responsibility for the enclave.
Gomez, who joined a mostly youthful guerrilla force at 36 years old, represents both the FARC's military and political impulses.

The son of peasants who were FARC sympathizers, Gomez studied for a dozen years in the former Soviet Union and gained a doctorate in agronomy. His thesis was
on artificial insemination methods for the Ceibu cattle that roam these humid pastures. He is one of the FARC's more committed Marxist ideologues.

Diplomats who have sat with him at the peace table say he is among the most politically astute negotiators, and also one who made clear that he was ready, even
eager, to abandon the zone and assume daily command of his military bloc. His house here was made of varnished plywood, one of the first buildings in a camp
covering an area about the size of a football field.

There is little personality left inside the walls of his house, and only a little among the lines of about 50 wooden bunks whose only shelter is jungle canopy. The foot of
one bunk is covered in magazine clippings, including a Cosmopolitan cover and article entitled "99 Things You Should Do to a Naked Man." A photo of a perfect
white-crescent Caribbean beach is pasted next to it.

Less frivolous artifacts were also left behind. A magazine picture of Consuelo Araujo, a former culture minister kidnapped and killed by the FARC in September, has
a front tooth blacked out, as does a picture of Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia. A notebook belonging to a guerrilla trainee named Oscar, alias
"The Rock," contains the transcripts of radio news reports, calculations on mortar elevations and a table showing that at a distance of roughly 100 meters, a weapon
needs to be fired 7 1/2 meters ahead of a moving helicopter to hit it.

Farther up the road, at a dry hot camp once occupied by Simon Trinidad, a FARC negotiator and Caribbean Bloc second-in-command, a report printed from the
U.S. Embassy Web site was left behind. Titled "Terrorism: An Evaluation of the Threat, Preventative Measures and Policies," the report underscores the FARC
preoccupation with U.S. involvement in Colombia, particularly a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package that mostly benefits the Colombian military.

Since last week, the United States has also been sharing intelligence -- once restricted to anti-drug operations -- to help the military pick guerrilla targets in its
campaign to reassert government control in the zone. The FARC is on the State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations, a designation that undermines its
standing as a political insurgency with admirers in Europe.

"The people ask themselves, 'If the gringos come here, how do we take them out?' " reads a message left on a chalkboard at another rebel camp. "With a . . .
guerrilla war and an organized people."

So far, the Colombian army has yet to venture far from the former haven's urban centers. Any effort to root out the FARC from the mountains -- where the rebels
have enjoyed a military advantage and popular support for decades -- will likely not materialize for weeks, if at all. And if it does, Faiber, a FARC soldier and
member of the mobile patrol operating near here, is awaiting the army with little fear.

"This is not a war where we will defend positions. It's one of small arms, quick strikes and explosives," said Faiber, who has spent five years in guerrilla ranks and is
now 23. "The army will be here. But this is what we are used to. Before the zone existed, we lived here just like now."

                                               © 2002