COLUMN ONE : Violence Rules in Colombia : The threat is from all sides--rebels, vigilantes, drug traffickers. Despite efforts to stop the killing, a ‘Wild West’ mentality and abundance of guns send the murder rate soaring.

It was a chilling tale of death imitating art. Like the victim in novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” the Paez Indians of El Nilo lived their final days under conspicuous mortal threat.

For four years, a widow had let them farm part of her estate in the lush Cauca Valley while they petitioned for government land titles. But last Dec. 7, eight white gunmen and a lawyer came to announce that the land had been sold. Speaking for an anonymous new owner, the lawyer ordered the 70 squatters out. The gunmen burned down a few huts and left, promising to return.

A week of tension followed, punctuated by urgent appeals for the Indians’ protection. On Dec. 15, the mayor of Caloto, the nearest municipal seat, reacted. He promised an “exhaustive investigation.”

At 8 the next evening, as the tribe brewed coffee around a campfire, about 50 black-clad men wearing ski masks swarmed through the village with automatic rifles, setting fire to the rest of the homes. They bound and gagged 20 Indians--12 men, 4 women and 4 teen-agers--forced them to lie face down and shot them, one by one, in the back of the head.

Colombia, population 32 million, registered 25,582 homicides last year. But none more than the El Nilo massacre dramatized the frustration of its boldest steps in three decades to pacify the Western Hemisphere’s most violent society.

In mid-1991, Colombians had reason to hope. The government had disarmed four leftist guerrilla groups, opened peace talks with two others and jailed the head of the murderous Medellin cocaine cartel. On July 4, an elected assembly that included former guerrillas signed a new constitution with expanded rights for political minorities. “A peace treaty” for the new Colombia, President Cesar Gaviria called it.

But today the country seems adrift in its own blood. With guerrillas, paramilitary squads, drug traffickers, common criminals and neighborhood vigilantes still hard at work, Colombia’s 1991 homicide toll passed the record 24,267 set in 1990. It also exceeded the 1991 toll of 24,020 homicides in the United States, which has nearly eight times as many people.

“How death haunts this poor land!” thundered editor Enrique Santos Calderon in his newspaper, El Tiempo. “Of what ‘new country’ can we speak when they are exterminating indigenous people as in times of the (Spanish) Conquest?”

With so many groups contributing to the mayhem, the tragedy at El Nilo underscored the complexity of Colombia’s web of violence and the weakness of a government strategy that seeks to disarm one group at a time.

Quintin Lame, a 150-member guerrilla band formed by Paez Indians to defend their settlements, disarmed last June in exchange for a voice in the new political order. But that merely opened the Cauca Valley to violent, destabilizing newcomers--heroin traffickers who are seizing land for poppy cultivation and are suspected of ordering the massacre.

At the victims’ funeral, mourners applauded furiously when an indigenous leader spoke of promises betrayed and suggested that the Quintin Lame pick up its rifles again.

Julio Daniel Chaparro and Jorge Enrique Torres, journalists from the Bogota newspaper El Espectador, traveled to the gold-mining town of Segovia last April 24 to document the activity of guerrillas and paramilitaries who kill with impunity there an average of five times a day. The journalists went to a bar, asked questions, took a walk, shot some photos. By midnight they had become statistics of their own research, slain on a dark street by gunmen still at large.

Looking too closely into violence is a common cause of death in Colombia, especially for judges, journalists and human rights activists. Yet a specialized body of academics called “violentologists” has studied the phenomenon from a safe distance.

Paid to ponder how a democracy nurtured by one of the region’s soundest economies can shed so much blood, they offer a variety of explanations: weak civic and moral values, inequitable land distribution, the lure of quick riches from contraband, the “Wild West” ambience along vast, untamed frontiers, a legal system too cowed and corrupt to curb the killer instinct.

The violentologists’ body count starts in the 1940s and ‘50s, when warfare between the dominant Conservative and Liberal parties claimed more than 200,000 lives. The conflict ended with a power-sharing pact in 1958 but sowed the seeds of future conflict.

Leftists excluded from the two-party pact launched rural guerrilla campaigns against the state in the 1960s. This prompted landowners to form paramilitary armies that murdered the guerrillas’ real or imagined peasant allies, aided by elements of the army and police.

Cocaine traffickers joined the bloodletting in the 1970s, lining up with guerrillas in some regions and paramilitaries in others to protect their fortunes. In the ‘80s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin drug cartel formed its own army of sicarios, hired killers who murdered an attorney general, a justice minister, three presidential candidates and hundreds of judges and police in a terrorist assault against all legal authority.

Assuming the presidency in August, 1990, Gaviria retreated from his predecessors’ exhausted strategy of confrontation.

He offered the guerrillas seats in the constitutional assembly, and 3,292 laid down their weapons. He offered the drug bosses reduced jail terms, and 28 turned themselves in. With Escobar’s surrender last June 19, the worst of the terror--the bomb blasts aboard airliners and in shopping malls--was over.

The new constitution opened political life to former guerrillas and strengthened Colombia’s judiciary. Gaviria named a civilian defense minister and issued the first report by the government detailing its own human rights abuses. Murder charges were placed against eight army soldiers and 13 policemen for two massacres in 1991.

Because most Colombians were starting to feel safer, Gaviria weathered a storm of protest last year from a vocal minority opposed to leniency for Escobar. But now the pacification strategy is unraveling and, although the government looks unshaken, people’s sense of insecurity is rising again.

“Every day in our country, the phenomenon of violence is getting more uncontrollable, generalized, indiscriminate and cruel,” Supreme Court President Pablo J. Caceres wrote to Gaviria in December.

Talks begun last June with holdout guerrilla leaders who command 7,000 fighters have broken down several times. Bent on disarming the rebels first, the government has overlooked the paramilitary gangs that still work for drug traffickers or prey on guerrilla veterans returning to civilian life.

As Escobar’s rivals scramble for his drug business, the breakup of his private army has swollen a wave of kidnaping and armed robbery in Bogota, Medellin and other cities, giving sudden rise to neighborhood militias that summarily execute criminals.

Worried by these setbacks, the government asked six leading violentologists for advice. In a 224-page report last month, they called for separate peace conferences and crash public investment in each of Colombia’s seven bloodiest regions, bringing all armed entities into each set of negotiations.

“Instead of putting a priority on disarming the guerrillas across Colombia, the government should try to disarm entire regions,” said Eduardo Pizarro, a member of the advisory panel.

Walter Jaraba and Jenny Martinez, disarmed guerrilla veterans, settled on a farm last year in uneasy coexistence with Jose Petro, a neighbor active in the local paramilitary squad. Then someone poisoned nine of Petro’s chickens. Petro blamed Martinez, brushing off her denials. “This will not stand!” he fumed. At 9 p.m. on Dec. 5, seven paramilitaries kicked open the couple’s door and started shooting, killing Martinez, Jaraba’s mother and his grandmother.

Paramilitary death squads, made up of ranchers and military officers, stalk many of Colombia’s disarmed guerrillas. Officials of Hope, Peace and Liberty, a political party formed last March by the largest demobilized rebel army, say that 60 of its 2,149 members have since been killed.

The Department of Cordoba, once an intense battleground, is the closest thing in Colombia to a model of reconciliation. A wealthy rancher there, Fidel Castano, disarmed 200 paramilitaries last year and gave away 2,400 acres to former rebels and rebel supporters.

Yet, even in Cordoba, the peace is fragile. Jenny Martinez was the ninth ex-guerrilla killed there last year, and others are being sought.

Four Cordoba companies that were organized to employ 350 disarmed rebels still lack bureaucratic approval and start-up credits. Most of the former rebels waiting are illiterate teen-agers or men in their early 20s. Idled and threatened, some have turned to crime. Thirty have resumed the armed struggle.

“There is still a dirty war against us,” says former guerrilla commander Rafael Kerguelen.

Government strategists have long argued that once all guerrillas disarm, the paramilitary forces set up to fight them will dissolve. But the panel of violentologists warned that paramilitary groups, now numbering more than 100, are out of the army’s control.

In the Middle Magdalena Valley, for example, Colombia’s largest paramilitary group ran the guerrillas out years ago. But the promised disarming of its 700 men was carried out halfway and then halted in January after unknown gunmen assassinated the leader, Luis Meneses, amid internal feuding.

“Few of the original paramilitary armies are left, the ones with a clear counterinsurgency mission,” said Jorge Antonio Melo, Gaviria’s counselor on human rights. “What you have now are small squads waging local vendettas.”

On June 20, the day after drug lord Pablo Escobar went to jail, Marxist guerrillas ambushed a police patrol and a navy riverboat, killing 15 government agents. They also kidnaped Rafael Serrano, a congressman who was to travel that day to Caracas, Venezuela, for peace talks between guerrilla leaders and the Colombian government.

If anyone believed that Escobar’s surrender or the talks in Caracas would bring instant peace to Colombia, the rebels wanted to prove them wrong. By November, when the negotiations last broke off, 1991 had become the bloodiest year in three decades of guerrilla war, with more than 1,700 dead.

The cease-fire taking hold in El Salvador this month leaves Colombia’s army battling the last major Cuban-inspired insurgency in the West. But since the fall of communism in the East and the decline of Fidel Castro’s capacity to export revolution, the fire of Marxist idealism has gone out of the fight.

What keeps the guerrillas going, instead, is a combination of profit and fear of the future. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army have been led for decades by aging Castro contemporaries with little yearning for civilian life.

As their outside support dries up, the 7,000 rural-based guerrillas fill war chests with revenues from kidnaping and occasional alliances with drug traffickers. Pointing to the slayings of recently demobilized comrades, they insist in peace talks that all paramilitary squads be disbanded first.

The two rebel groups bickered with each other last spring over the number of constitutional assembly seats they should demand as a reward for disarming, and the chance for peace was lost when the assembly finished its work.

The rebels’ subsequent offensives were inspired, in part, by the Salvadoran guerrillas’ success in negotiating a sharp reduction of the Salvadoran army by fighting it to a 12-year stalemate. Gaviria responded to the attacks with a war tax to add 6,500 troops to Colombia’s 120,000-member army.

“Both sides have reached the conclusion that armed conflict no longer makes sense,” said violentologist Mauricio Garcia Duran. “But both continue using war as an instrument to achieve peace.”

To mark the first anniversary of her husband’s murder, Fabiola Borrero attended Sunday Mass last Sept. 22 at Santa Filomena Church in Cali. Her husband, a lawyer, had tangled with drug traffickers in a land dispute, and now Borrero, a Superior Court magistrate, had just taken a drug case of her own. As she turned from the communion rail, a sicario firing from close range shot the 43-year-old widow in the face. Stunned, helpless church-goers watched the gunman run outside and escape aboard a motorcycle driven by an accomplice. The judge died three days later.

Anyone who thought Escobar’s surrender would stop the drug violence was wrong, too. Truck bombs no longer demolish entire city blocks, but the peril is unceasing for judges, peasants on Mafia-coveted land and anyone else standing in the way of drug traffic.

The judge’s murder in Cali followed a Supreme Court order reopening a case against three alleged bosses of that city’s loosely knit cocaine cartel.

Cali’s low-key bosses, long reliant on bribery and other painless persuasion, quietly overtook Escobar’s busted Medellin cartel as the kings of cocaine. But lately a branch of younger, more reckless Cali traffickers operating in the Cauca Valley has entered a more lucrative illicit trade--heroin.

Since September, the police have found and destroyed three heroin labs and 4,000 acres of poppies growing as raw material for the drug. The flowers have left a trail of victims--such as the 20 tribespeople killed at El Nilo, or the 66 bodies pulled from a single bend in the Cauca River in eight months.

Police also seized 154,280 pounds of cocaine in 1991, four times more than in any previous year, and claimed to be driving the trade out of Colombia.

Rodrigo Losada, a senior violentologist, disputes that claim. He argues that drug mafias have been a factor in about 40% of all homicides in each of the past 15 years. If trafficking is really down, he asks, why isn’t the murder rate?

“The murder rate has more to do with the constant level of armaments in the country,” answers Melo, the presidential adviser. For example, he estimates that Escobar’s surrender left 1,500 sicarios unemployed by the drug trade but still armed, accustomed to easy riches and trained for a life of free-lance crime.

Last Nov. 24, Joaquin Rueda answered a knock at his farmhouse. Two gunmen barged in with their hostage, the abducted wife of a Medellin TV executive. Seeking a hide-out, the men took Rueda, his wife and four children captive in their own home. Four days later, two accomplices joined the kidnapers, but police were on their trail. After a thunderous shoot-out, the executive’s wife, the four kidnapers, the Rueda couple and their two teen-age sons lay dead.

As jobless former guerrillas and Mafia hit men joined the crime wave, Colombia chalked up yet another annual record in the first 10 months of last year: 1,541 kidnapings. Police said 129 of the victims were killed, 701 ransomed, 158 rescued and the others still captive as of Halloween night.

Kidnapers are now Public Enemy No. 1. The police have formed 12 special rescue squads and put up highway billboards instructing motorists how to avoid abduction.

Colombia’s two largest cities are the hardest hit. Masked men with submachine guns raid Bogota restaurants, robbing patrons of cash and jewelry. Thieves in Medellin are stealing 15 cars per day, more than the number rolling off the city’s assembly lines and more than half the nationwide total.

Eighty-two taxi drivers were murdered in Bogota last year. Medellin’s homicide rate was five times higher than Washington’s. “The surrender of Pablo Escobar atomized the criminal power structure and unleashed tremendous anarchy in Medellin,” said Emma Maria Mejia, the president’s special counselor there. “The cartel’s second, third and fourth tiers are killing each other and innocent citizens.”

The government’s anti-crime effort centers on draft legislation to toughen gun control. Officials estimate that 4 million Colombians own legal and illegal firearms, which account for more than 80% of all homicides.

Officials are also spending $100 million to root out the kill-and-get-rich ethic Escobar bequeathed to Medellin’s poor, explosive northern comunas --slums where the distrusted police rarely venture. So far, Mejia reports, 500 new teachers have been hired, putting 30,000 idled kids back in school, and 36 new mini-factories are employing 252 youths.

But the effort is being challenged by a new kind of crime fighter:

At 3 a.m. last Sept. 14, two dozen black-clad men, hooded and armed with automatic weapons, made the steep climb up Sugarloaf Hill to the Medellin comuna of Villa Turbay. They knocked on doors and called names from a list, summoning 10 known drug pushers and addicts into the cold fog. Nine were led to a vacant lot, tied up and shot. Eight died. The 10th, a 38-year-old man, was left home with the warning: “Be careful with bad company.”

The manner of execution was hauntingly familiar, but the killers were not right-wing paramilitaries or Mafia hit men. They belong to the Popular Militias, the new kids on the block in Medellin’s mean streets.

The militias are a vigilante network claiming 5,000 members. Some are armed by and linked to the rural-based guerrilla groups. In recent months they have seized control of Medellin’s comunas from criminal gangs spawned by the drug trade.

“We’re a kind of government here. . . . We’re the law,” boasted Jacobo, a 25-year-old chemist who speaks for the militias but won’t give his last name. “We warn people, ‘Don’t do drugs on the streets, in front of the children.’ Offenders get a second chance. If they don’t correct themselves . . . (he snaps his fingers) . . . death!”

Jacobo said the militias have killed more than 200 “criminals” in the past year.

The street where he spoke, in the comuna Villa Socorro, was bustling after dark with shoppers, pedestrians and bus commuters--a scene of normality unimaginable a year ago.

“The militias are doing the work of the police,” Jaime Suazo, the corner bartender, declared to a barroom now crowded with patrons, who nodded with approval. “We’re a community again.”

Militias are also welcomed because they raise money for local improvements and enforce consumer boycotts by running off electric-bill collectors at gunpoint. Their critics say they are extorting money from neighborhood businesses and subverting legal authority.

“They perform a community service, but I’m afraid their remedy is worse than the disease,” Manuel Restrepo, a violentologist at Medellin’s University of Antioquia said as he doodled daggers on a note pad. “They are reinforcing the idea of private justice and vengeance. This is a fascist position.”

Special correspondent Stan Yarbro contributed to this article from Bogota.