WAITING FOR WAR.(strained political and social conditions in Colombia )

The power failure that knocked out the lights in the greater part of Colombia in March was not, it turned out, the result of a bomb. As officials explained to a skittish public two days later, it was the result of a hundred and seventy bombs, which had taken out as many power pylons since the beginning of the year, weakening the energy network enough so that the slightest dysfunction during peak hours would bring the entire system down. In a less hardy nation, one might have expected a panic, but this is Colombia. Little more was heard about unpredictable blackouts, and the same people who hours before had called friends and relatives to make sure they were all right (in the restaurant in Bogota, the capital, where I was having dinner, the worry was palpable) were soon boasting that they had gone to bed early and slept deeply, or cracked jokes while they waited for the movie to start up again, or gone on dancing. The bravado was understandable. After all, it had been only a blackout, which meant that the war everyone is waiting for hadn't started.

Lying just across the Caribbean from Florida, Colombia has been troubled by political violence and civil wars for much of its two centuries of independence. In the last twenty years, that violence has been fuelled by exorbitant profits from the drug trade. Bombs, hijackings, and power outages have become a way of life, and if the next stage is to be a full-fledged war, the United States, which already counts Colombia as its third-largest recipient of foreign aid, will be instrumental in financing it. The war may be inevitable, even if Alvaro Uribe Velez, the hard-line Presidential candidate, who is running far ahead of his rivals, fails to win the elections later this month, even if the United States Congress fails to approve new disbursements of military aid, even if the guerrillas, who have survived for forty years, quickly disintegrate, Taliban-like, under the impact of a first air strike. There is much anxious debate about whether an outright war against the guerrillas is a good idea--whether, among other things, it represents any kind of solution to the country's long-term problems--but at this stage the question may be moot. The warriors--so many of them!--are already armed and waiting at the door. In addition to the Colombian government, with its sometimes less than efficient Army, and the government in Washington, which allotted $1.3 billion two years ago to fight the drug trade, and is about to vote on thirty-five million dollars more to combat Colombian terrorism, there are warring outlaw groups on the right and the left that in recent years have grown huge on drug-trade profits: the two largest are the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known as the A.U.C.), which calls itself patriotic and is paramilitary; and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which calls itself socialist and has been waging a guerrilla campaign along the outer edges of Colombia's tumultuous geography.

The FARC was once an orthodox guerrilla organization, but that was years ago. Its roots were in the nineteen-fifties, in a peasant movement that failed to get satisfaction from the government following the long years of bloodshed known as La Violencia. It was not a war or an uprising but a seemingly endless series of massacres perpetrated by land-starved campesinos from the Conservative Party against land-starved campesinos from the Liberal Party, and vice versa. While the peasants killed each other, the party bosses negotiated, in 1956, a power-sharing agreement that failed to make any provision for greater democracy or social justice. In a remarkable speech two years ago, the guerrillas' aging leader, Manuel Marulanda (a pseudonym for Pedro Antonio Marin), recalled this era bitterly. He talked about the cows, pigs, and chickens he lost forty years ago when government troops invaded the land that he and a few other demobilized Liberal campesinos had precariously settled. (In Bogota, the speech became a source of mirth among the rich.) After that long-ago government raid, Marulanda and a small band of followers took up arms again and, under the influence of a Communist Party organizer named Jacobo Arenas, they soon identified themselves as a revolutionary movement and became known as the FARC. Arenas, who died in 1990, was the chatty ideologue; the parsimonious, slow-moving Marulanda was the fighter. By staging kidnappings and sabotage operations, their group survived in hiding for more than twenty years, growing slowly, until Colombia was swept into the vortex created by United States consumers' ravenous demand for illegal drugs.

I met Arenas and Marulanda in 1986, after trekking for five strenuous days across a frozen Andean paramo and then down from that height--some three thousand metres--into a highland jungle where the FARC had set up its central headquarters, in a camp camouflaged among giant tree ferns and stands of yarumo. The journey seemed like an expedition to another continent, but that wrinkled mountain territory was actually just a hundred miles or so from Bogota.

Farther south, the highland jungle flattens out and turns into the Amazonian river basin that Colombia shares with Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela--a sea of jungle, as it were, and largely uncharted. It was here that desperate campesinos, chased away by La Violencia, or ruined by agribusiness, were gradually making their way. ...