Colombia President, Top Rebel Meet in Effort to Rescue Peace Process

President Andres Pastrana ventured into the heart of rebel territory Thursday for a high-stakes meeting with Colombia’s most powerful guerrilla leader in an attempt to salvage the country’s battered peace process.

The talks ended inconclusively, with plans by Pastrana and the rebels’ taciturn veteran commander, Manuel Marulanda, to meet again this morning.

“It was a very productive meeting,” Pastrana told a throng of reporters as he emerged from the seven-hour encounter. “We’re going to continue working, and we’ve decided to meet and continue our conversation tomorrow.”

The rendezvous, which finally came off after weeks of nail-biting standoffs and public ultimatums, had been billed as a last-ditch effort to rescue Colombia’s two-year peace process from near collapse.

The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, walked away from the negotiating table in November to protest massacres by right-wing paramilitary death squads.

The president traveled with 60 guards to the ramshackle airport in San Vicente del Caguan, the de facto capital of a Switzerland-size enclave that Pastrana ceded to FARC control in 1998 as a goodwill gesture. The guerrilla haven’s demilitarized status is due to expire today.

Pastrana then took the short helicopter ride to Los Pozos, where he was greeted in a muddy field by Marulanda. With the president’s contingent of guards left behind in San Vicente, 1,500 guerrillas provided security in this jungle town.

For his part, Marulanda has said the meeting must focus on stopping paramilitary massacres and on foreign military aid to Colombia. The military component of the United States’ massive anti-drug initiative, dubbed “Plan Colombia,” has angered the FARC, which says the package is a thinly disguised anti-insurgency initiative.

“Plan Colombia: The Americans supply the arms. Colombia supplies the bodies,” read a placard in San Vicente’s sun-dried central square.

The meeting generated measured optimism that the FARC will rejoin negotiations. Even so, it remains to be seen if the face-to-face encounter will provide a much-needed impetus for dialogue or if Colombia’s slow-moving peace process will continue along the same meandering path.

Pastrana and Marulanda launched the negotiations amid salsa concerts and painted banners, but their negotiators have yet to discuss the substance of a 12-point agenda.

Meanwhile, Colombians’ patience is wearing thin. Graffiti scrawled near the bullring in the capital, Bogota, describe the process as a “dialogue of the deaf,” while a recent editorial in the daily El Tiempo referred to the talks as “a tedious film, in slow motion.”

“I see this process as a cheat,” presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez said. Speaking by phone before Thursday’s meeting, Uribe said that nothing short of a FARC promise to end all hostilities would justify maintaining the demilitarized zone.

Referring to continued guerrilla attacks on remote hamlets, he added, “This has been a process of words but a reality of war.”

Pastrana has staked his presidency on negotiating an end to Colombia’s long civil conflict, a point he underscored over the weekend with an unscripted visit to the FARC’s haven.

The president even took the wheel as he entered San Vicente on that trip. A day later, Pastrana’s advisors learned that a rebel had recorded his arrival from a nearby checkpoint. “Nothing new,” the rebel reported after lowering a chain to let the entourage pass. “But the peace commissioner has a new driver.”

Even as Pastrana sought to ease tension in the demilitarized zone, his advisors are working to establish a second zone, and a second peace process, in the north’s Bolivar province. The new enclave would be much smaller, a sliver of land amid cattle pastures and mineral deposits, and would be handed over to the Colombia’s second rebel group, the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, or ELN.

The government has yet to set a date for a troop withdrawal from that second zone, but analysts say an eventual peace process with the ELN may well succeed where the FARC talks have failed. The 5,000-strong ELN has lost ground to paramilitary groups in the rebels’ traditional strongholds and seems ready to make concessions. Already, ELN commanders have said they will consider a regional cease-fire.

Such an agreement would amount to a long-overdue publicity coup for Pastrana. But without concessions from the more prominent FARC, Colombia’s conflict will drag on.

“With the FARC fighting in the whole country,” FARC commander Andres Paris said, “an eventual peace process with the ELN would be like a champagne cork floating in a whirlpool.”