COLOMBIA : Rebel Campaign of Violence, Like a Bad Movie, Drags On

The victim was a well-known peasant leader, dragged from home and shot at midmorning in front of his family, but the guerrilla hit men didn’t bother to flee. Instead, they calmly telephoned police and lay in ambush for the judicial team sent to collect the body.

When the judicial caravan arrived three hours later, the guerrillas blew up one vehicle with dynamite and riddled three others with automatic weapons fire from both sides of a highway. Eight people died--a doctor, a judge, three legal secretaries and three police officers.

Barely noticed outside Colombia, the year-old rebel offensive is no serious threat to the civilian government. But it has defied the most promising steps in three decades toward pacifying this chronically violent nation.

Last June, the world’s deadliest cocaine trafficker, Pablo Escobar, surrendered to authorities under a promise of leniency. A new constitution guaranteeing expanded rights for political minorities took effect in July, drafted with help from members of four recently disarmed rebel groups.

In their first direct peace talks in six years, the two holdout guerrilla bands--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, and the National Liberation Army, the ELN--began meeting with Colombian representatives June 3 in Caracas, Venezuela.

But negotiators called a three-month recess Nov. 10 after failing to agree on terms for a cease-fire. Then came a FARC attack at Usme, a violation of the rebels’ pledge at the last round of talks to stop targeting civilians.

“Just as some promising new developments are emerging, (the rebels) are replaying a bad movie that Colombians have already seen,” a frustrated President Cesar Gaviria said.

Many Colombians are equally puzzled about why the 7,000 or so guerrillas keep fighting, despite Gaviria’s policy of conciliation at home and the fall of Communist idols abroad. Part of the answer is that their leaders are hardened men fighting since the 1960s in a conflict that now transcends ideology.

The ELN is commanded by Manuel Perez, 53, a Spanish-born former Roman Catholic priest who was never tied to a political movement. Demanding full nationalization of Colombia’s oil industry, the ELN blows up petroleum pipelines almost weekly. But it also thrives by extorting oil company jobs for its followers in the jungle areas it controls.

FARC, led by Manuel (Sure Shot) Marulanda, a man in his 60s, took orders from Colombia’s urban-based Communist Party until it became an independent rural force in the 1980s, profiting from kidnap ransoms and cocaine traffic. Some recruits get salaries of $250 per month, three times the minimum wage.

“The men inside the FARC are no longer revolutionaries,” wrote conservative newspaper columnist Carlos Lemos Simmonds. “They are shareholders in a lucrative industry that they are not ready to give up.”

Whatever their ideals, the guerrillas maintain extensive rural support by protecting peasant followers from the notoriously brutal army and murderous right-wing paramilitary groups. The peace talks are stalled in part over a rebel demand that scores of such groups disband in advance of a cease-fire.

Gaviria named Colombia’s first civilian defense minister, and his government issued the first official report ever to detail human rights violations by the army and police. Two large paramilitary organizations have begun to disarm but that isn’t enough for the rebels.