July 6, 1999. Copyright 1999. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

COLOMBIA BACK TO THE BRINK

LONDON, July 6, Graphic News: COLOMBIAÕS LARGEST Marxist rebel force is to meet the government of President Andres Pastrana for the latest round of peace talks amid warnings from the United States that Washington is ready to help fight the guerrillas to stop them trafficking drugs.
A recent U.S. report conceded Washington was losing the drug war against cocaine and heroin production in rebel-held territories.
ColombiaÕs 20,000 rebels are earning $600 million a year to fund their long-running conflict which has claimed 35,000 lives in the last 10 years alone.
Colombian police crime figures for 1998 show rebels carried out 1,726 ÒterroristÓ strikes, including bombings and assaults on military facilities last year Ð up 12 percent on 1997.
Between 1991 and 1998 the two main leftist guerrilla groups raised more than $5.3 billion from the drug trade, abductions and extortion.
In some of the worst outrages, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), South AmericaÕs oldest and largest rebel group Ð set up in 1966 as a pro-Soviet, Marxist military wing of the Colombian Communist Party Ð packed corpses, donkeys and even tortoises with explosives.
Last year, the guerrillas were blamed for six percent, or 1,385, of a total 23,096 murders across the country and for more than half of ColombiaÕs 2,609 reported cases of kidnapping, police said.
No crime figures have been given for the mostly state-tolerated ultra-right wing paramilitary death squads acting for big landowners and drug cartels. AUC justify massacres of villagers and human rights workers, claiming they support guerrilla activity. 
The majority of the 1998 attacks were carried out by FARC followed by the smaller, Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN).
The report said the two groups had earned $2.3 billion from narco-trafficking in the last eight years, $1.2 billion from kidnapping and $1.8 billion from extorting businessmen and from robberies.
FARC and ELN deny direct links with the drug trade but admit to ÒtaxingÓ traffickers and the 100,000 ÒcocalerosÓ who cultivate 80,000 hectares of coca in the southeast and 6,500 of poppies in the hills.
Washington insists its aid packages are devoted to a war against drugs. But that war is increasingly taking on overtones of a counter-insurgency effort. 
In the aftermath of the kidnap and murders of three Americans by FARC rebels in March, Republicans on Capitol Hill have pressured the administration to increase aid to the Colombian police and military.
Augusto Ramirez of ColombiaÕs church-backed National Peace Commission said the murders were Òextremely bad for the peace process.Ó
The U.S. Congress has appropriated a record $240 million aid package for 1999, including weapons and aircraft, while the U.S. military  is helping to set up an elite 1,000-strong army anti-narcotics unit near rebel strongholds in the south.
The internal conflict has been bleeding Colombia for nearly four decades and President Andres Pastrana, who took office in August, has made a negotiated settlement his top priority. But FARC broke off talks just days after they got under way in January and the ELN has also ended exploratory talks with the government. Neither group accepts any role for the AUC.
Following the January breakdown Peru and Ecuador bolstered border patrols with Colombia, Peru dispatched two battalions Ð about 1,200 men Ð to its northern frontier and Ecuador deployed a special forces brigade. Venezuela has some 12,000 soldiers in outposts along its border with Colombia.
Throughout the region, U.S. special forces teams continue to give military training to local armies ostensibly to fight the war against cocaine and heroin, but as both U.S. and Colombian officials call the rebels Ònarco-guerrillas,Ó the line between counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency is becoming increasingly blurred.
/ENDS
Sources: U.S. State Department Patterns of Global Terrorism, Reuters, International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Economist