Rebels Push Colombia Toward Anarchy

News of his impending execution came to Mayor Nestor Leon Ramirez on a white sheet of paper.

A guerrilla commander handed the note to a farmer, who delivered it to Ramirez. It read: “For the good of your health, you must leave the city. If you do not, you will become a military target.”

But Ramirez, leader of this bustling town, decided to ignore the message, which arrived this month.

Now, death shadows him like a dark halo. He sits at his desk and wonders: When will they come? And how?

“Today, I am able to work,” Ramirez said. “I can’t say what will happen tomorrow.”

Since the collapse of peace talks in February, democracy itself has become the primary target in Colombia’s 38-year-old guerrilla war. Attacks on the symbols of state are part of a new guerrilla strategy designed to plunge vast swaths of the country into anarchy.

Every mayor in the country--more than 1,000--has been ordered to resign by the rebels or face death. Scores have quit. Some have fled to govern from fortified army bases. One of Ramirez’s colleagues was killed in a nearby town this month.

The guerrillas have also destroyed roads and bridges, crippling public transport. They have attacked power, telephone and television towers, halting media and communication transmissions.

The rebel attacks have served to showcase one of the most fundamental problems in this nation’s increasingly barbaric war. More than 180 years after Colombia’s founding, the government has yet to impose control over its sprawling territory.

It is Colombia’s lawlessness that has allowed the guerrilla war to fester for four decades. It also fostered the explosion of the drug crops here that now provide most of the cocaine and much of the heroin available on U.S. streets.

Before the collapse of peace talks, the rebels had maintained an uneasy coexistence with local officials in areas they dominated. Now, they have decided to wage a campaign to prove the state’s impotence, embarrassing the government in a bid to force a return to negotiations.

Colombia’s guerrilla war pits the army and growing right-wing paramilitary forces against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and a second, smaller rebel army.

“We’re in the beginning of a new phase,” FARC organizer Juan Pablo said as he relaxed at a restaurant in a riverside town a few miles from San Vicente del Caguan, in the heart of the former rebel zone. “We’re going to demonstrate that we’re in the position to control certain areas and that we can push that control to an extreme.”

The problem is especially serious in Colombia’s southern plains, where the guerrillas have long held sway. A weeklong tour found a region abandoned and chaotic. City councils have resigned en masse. Dozens of towns now lack judges, prosecutors or local police officials. Commerce has been strangled.

National government officials resist the idea that the guerrillas are successfully ridding the area of civilian control. But interviews throughout the region--which never had a strong government presence--indicated that it has descended into chaos.

What little order exists is imposed by the heavy military and police presences in urban centers. Beyond is a no man’s land where leftist rebels run tollbooths, patrol destroyed roads and impose their own brand of law.

The problem has become so serious that U.S. aid officials are considering suspending development programs in the region designed to wean locals from drug crop profits by building new infrastructure like roads, wells and dams.

Such a suspension, in turn, would imperil U.S. efforts to halve the amount of cocaine produced here by 2005--one of the chief goals of the $1.3-billion Plan Colombia, launched two years ago.

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The cinder-block Town Hall in Puerto Rico is mostly empty these days.

The mayor is gone. He quit this month, reading his resignation aloud in the town square after receiving a death threat. The City Council fled too. There are no judges or prosecutors.

The bridges around town have been blown up. The power substation lies in rubble. The phone exchange is damaged. The roads are under the control of guerrillas. There has been no electricity, water or phone service for months. There isn’t even a town ambulance.

In short, there is little to indicate that this woeful town in the heart of southern Colombia has any connection to the rest of the country.

“We are completely alone,” said the police inspector, one of the few town officials left.

Towns such as Puerto Rico in these sparsely populated plains have long been under the influence of the FARC, a guerrilla army of 17,000 mostly poor rural peasants who are nominally Marxist.

The guerrillas’ de facto domination of the region was recognized in 1998 when the Colombian government ceded a big chunk of the country to the rebels for peace talks. The demilitarized zone was to be the catalyst for a new and brighter future.

All that changed when the talks collapsed and President Andres Pastrana ordered the army to retake the zone, about four times the size of Los Angeles County. The guerrillas went on a rampage of destruction.

The suffering grew worse after elections in May, when Colombians selected Alvaro Uribe as their next president. Uribe, who is scheduled to take office in August, won largely as a result of promises to get tough with the guerrillas.

To the guerrillas’ chagrin, most of the towns in the region voted for Uribe--a very public reminder of their lack of popular support. Polls have shown that only 1% to 2% of Colombians back the rebels.

The guerrillas responded by demanding the removal of mayors in three departments in Colombia’s south--Caqueta, Putumayo and Huila. The demands later spread to Arauca, Norte de Santander and Santander in the nation’s northeast, as well as elsewhere.

The common thread: The departments are located in areas rich in the coca and poppy crops that produce cocaine and heroin, respectively. Roughly half the FARC’s $300-million to $500-million annual income is believed to come from drug profits.

These are also areas where the FARC has a strategic advantage. Sparsely populated southern Colombia is militarily costly to control and has little legitimate economic value to the nation. The opposite is true for the rebels, who can exercise their power with scattered attacks and benefit from the illicit resources.

The guerrillas’ devotion to clearing the region by violence was underscored by one rebel squad leader. Standing alongside a barbed-wire fence on a road leading out of San Vicente, he patted the black-metal barrel of his AK-47.

“Everything we have,” he said, “we got through this.”

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The result of the stepped-up attacks has been misery for hundreds of thousands of Colombians.

In most towns, electricity comes only from portable generators droning outside stores and restaurants. Phone service is nonexistent. In San Vicente del Caguan, tens of thousands of residents try to make calls through 27 existing satellite phone connections.

Repeater towers needed to broadcast television and radio signals also have been destroyed. The only sources of media are local radio stations and places lucky enough to have satellite television service.

More serious problems involve attacks against health and public transport. The rebels have seized two ambulances from local communities in the last few months. In the case of Puerto Rico, a prematurely born baby died after his mother was forced to get out of the ambulance and hitch a ride to the nearest hospital.

“They are trying to destroy the institutions of the country and widen their zone of control,” said Omar Varon, mayor of Doncello, a community near San Vicente. “It’s an attack against the state ... [and] civil society is paying for it.”

Guerrillas dismissed the claim. Juan Pablo, who organizes clandestine guerrilla fronts that operate in cities, called the misery “suffering light.” He noted that the rebels could easily cut food and fuel supplies but have not, instead only making such deliveries more difficult.

“The idea is to break the normal rhythm of the economy,” Juan Pablo said.

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The guerrillas have become increasingly brutal during military confrontations. Last month, nine soldiers on leave were stopped at a rebel roadblock outside San Vicente del Caguan. Their mutilated bodies were found days later.

Army Col. Cesar Delacruz said some of the men’s genitals were cut off. Others among those killed were found without fingernails. The account could not be independently confirmed.

“They have lost all respect for life,” said Delacruz, commander of the local battalion in San Vicente del Caguan, where the men were stationed.Military officials have responded to the rebel offensive by successfully taking control of most local cities and towns.

Streets and cafes throughout the former rebel zone are now filled with soldiers and police. A gunfight outside a hotel one recent night was quickly quelled by a squad of soldiers firing their rifles.

Outside the urban centers, however, control is nearly nonexistent. A squad of guerrillas eating lunch under a tree near the town of La Sombra smiled when asked about recent battles with the army.

“How can we fight anyone when the army doesn’t ever come by?” the squad leader asked.

Colombian army officials acknowledged that small squads of guerrillas still roam the zone. But they portrayed the rebels as the last remnants of a mostly vanquished force.

There are skirmishes on an almost daily basis, the officials said. U.S. trained counter-narcotic brigades have played a significant role, because many of the guerrilla fronts in southern Colombia are linked to the drug trade.

In addition, the U.S. has given “technical intelligence” support to the effort to retake the zone, Delacruz said. He did not explain further, but after peace talks collapsed, the U.S. lifted restrictions that limited intelligence sharing to narcotics operations. It began providing rebel target coordinates to the Colombian military.

There are signs that the army’s offensive has had an effect: The guerrillas seem hard up for cash. They held an auction last month to sell off stolen cars. And they have begun rustling cattle, according to a local rancher.

Also, the army has managed to block any large-scale invasion by right-wing paramilitary forces. Many had predicted that the zone would become a bloody battleground between rebels and paramilitary groups after three years of guerrilla domination.

The national government has responded to the threats against civilian authority by refusing to recognize the mayors’ resignations. Instead, Interior Minister Armando Estrada Villa offered to step up protection, with bodyguards and bulletproof cars.

That has done little to appease local officials, however. In Doncello, one City Council member rejected the government offers and said he had already prepared his resignation slip.

On Tuesday, one of the councilman’s colleagues was killed.

“This life,” he said, “is a living death.”