Emptied Camps Show Rebels Prepped for War

Just beyond the fronded huts where negotiators used to talk peace, leftist rebels had a camp ready for war.

There were wooden bunks for troops scattered among the trees and a classroom where rebel instructors gave lessons on radio communications. There was even a makeshift Jiffy Lube, a wooden rack designed to raise the rebels’ many stolen four-wheel-drives for oil changes.

The camp was abandoned about a week ago, when President Andres Pastrana abruptly ordered the military to retake a former demilitarized zone ceded for negotiations to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC.

The rebels apparently were able to carry off most of what they had in the camp, located just behind the site of the fruitless negotiations. They left behind only scraps of paper, a bit of food and a chilling message, scrawled across a blackboard:

“The people ask, ‘How are we going to take out the gringos if they get involved?’ The FARC answers them: ‘With a war that is a guerrilla war and an organized people.’ ”

Plastered on the blackboard was a newspaper article from August, only six weeks before a “breakthrough” in the process.

A daylong tour of the increasingly unstable former peace zone revealed the extent to which the FARC pays attention to the United States, both as a supporter of the Colombian military and as a direct enemy.

It also showed that while the Colombian military and police brought plastic flags, a marching band and a burst of macho adrenaline when they reentered the zone last week, they did not bring its inhabitants more security, or peace.

The military and police have at best tenuous control of the former peace zone’s five towns, which remain filled with rebel infiltrators. But they seemed to have almost no hold on the more than 260 villages that make up the mostly rural former zone, which is about twice the size of New Jersey.

“We are here and we will be here waiting for the army,” said Comandante Pija, a rebel commander manning a roadblock about 19 miles west of this tiny town, once the headquarters for the peace talks. As he and his men stopped vehicles and inspected cargo, he said he had seen no troops nor experienced combat.

“We are not hidden,” he said with a laugh, when asked whether the FARC had fled into the jungle.

Colombia’s nearly 40-year-old internal conflict is complicated, a multilateral battle among the government, right-wing paramilitary groups, the FARC and a smaller rebel army.

The U.S. has become increasingly involved as it seeks to cut down Colombia’s drug industry, which helps finance both guerrilla groups as well as the paramilitary groups that commit most of the massacres in the country.

That involvement grew even deeper last week, as Washington decided to begin sharing military intelligence with the Colombians to fight guerrillas and speed up delivery of spare parts for U.S. equipment used by Colombian forces. The highest U.S. military official in the country accompanied a Colombian government delegation on a visit to the zone last week.

Printout of a U.S. Report on Terrorism

In one camp belonging to a guerrilla leader was a printout of a recent U.S. Embassy report on terrorism. The FARC has been included on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups; that page was missing from the lengthy document.

In several camps were press summaries, some written in hand, others downloaded from the Internet, that included articles from U.S. news agencies and a U.S. newspaper about various developments in the peace process.

The guerrillas at the roadblock made it clear that they consider themselves at war with the U.S. They blamed U.S. support for the first government attack against the guerrillas 38 years ago and said that Plan Colombia, the U.S.-backed program to halve the country’s drug production, was only the latest reincarnation of that aggression.

U.S. aid to Colombia in the form of helicopters and troop training is supposed to be limited to counternarcotics efforts.

“It was directed at us. Plan Colombia was an excuse. All the helicopters were used to fight against the guerrillas,” Pija said. “They want to exploit Colombia and its riches--our oil, our minerals, our coal.”

Both sides continued to fight during the negotiations, which never produced a cease-fire or much else.

One of the primary reasons behind mounting frustration with the talks was accusations that the guerrillas used the peace zone to prepare for war. That seemed obvious from the clues that remained in the camps.

Two of the camps were in dense jungle, with huts, kitchens, classrooms and supply depots squeezed among towering trees that provide thick cover. All the camps seemed to have electricity. Some had gas stations.

In a camp belonging to Joaquin Gomez, head of the local FARC command bloc, was a wooden gun carved to resemble an automatic rifle. A handful of bullets lay scattered on the ground. There was also what appeared to be an extensive system of trenches, 5 feet deep and curving through dense jungle.

There was an intricate obstacle course on about an acre of land that included barbells, parallel bars, even a wooden structure built like the facade of a home, good for practicing storming.

Alarming News in Training Notes

One notebook lying in the camp had a chart with carefully scrawled figures: “Table on how to shoot down planes and helicopters,” read the title. The table contained data on how fast helicopters, bombers and fighters move and how to best aim to shoot them down.

The last seems especially bad news for U.S. pilots at work in Colombia. The State Department hired a private U.S. company, Virginia-based DynCorp, to fumigate Colombia’s coca crops, sending in spray planes low over fields in rebel areas.

The rebels also seemed obsessed with the media. There were several abandoned notebooks containing grammatically atrocious radio news show transcripts. Copies of recent Colombian newsmagazines and newspapers could be found in the open-air beds in the camps.

Rebels at the roadblock said three years of peace talks had given them ample time to prepare to defend the zone in future battles. They confirmed that guerrillas within Colombia’s major cities had plans for attack, and threatened further violence against U.S. contractors.

They also implied that they had used the zone to train commanders and to expand their presence throughout the nation.

“The demilitarized zone was useful for us. We prepared ourselves politically and militarily,” Pija said. “Before, we weren’t familiar with some parts of the country. Now we’re sending troops there.

“We benefited a lot,” he said.

The camps and interviews also revealed much about the guerrillas’ daily life and gave a hint of the grim and conflicted future facing the estimated 100,000 people living in the former peace zone.

The largest city in the region, San Vicente del Caguan, is now without power, running water or phone service, the victim of rebel attacks. Televisions do not work because rebels have blown up transmission towers.

The 70-mile stretch between San Vicente and Florencia--both cities equipped with large military brigades--remains a hazardous no man’s land with rebel roadblocks and booby traps. A minor presidential candidate was kidnapped over the weekend, and some taxicab drivers refuse to make the passage.

The government said last week that it wants to reestablish a presence in the zone to show residents that they are no longer in the hands of the domineering and capricious FARC.

But it said it would proceed slowly through a region that has been under control of the rebels for 38 years and that has lacked any military presence for the last three.

“We have to be careful about this,” one military source said.

As a result, instead of a demonstration of state power, the opposite has occurred. “The guerrillas say to us: If the army is here to guarantee your safety, where are they?” said one taxicab driver who refused to drive to Florencia on Monday.

Personal Side of Rebel Life

What the guerrillas left behind was not all about war, of course. There were also clues to the rebels’ quotidian, if strange, existence in the jungle, the daily bread and butter of life in the middle of an irregular war.

Artists and intellectuals had sent copies of their work to the guerrillas, signed with enthusiastic notes. One rebel had pasted bra ads from a local magazine all across his wooden bunk.

Then there was this notebook, found on the ground. Toward the end was a series of mash notes, apparently scrawled back and forth between two rebels. An estimated third of the FARC’s force are women.

“I love you,” read the first set of handwriting. “I like you,” read the second. Then, the final note: “Hay lovio.”

Pronounced phonetically in Spanish, the phrase approximates the sound of the English “I love you.”