Some months ago an old friend called from Bogota. He wanted to know what the "Colombian situation" looked like from an outside perspective. We talked in circles for a while, as people do when their longing to be optimistic is blocked on all sides by reality. Then he said: "You know, for the first time in my life, I feel frightened in Bogota. When I wake up in the morning I feel fear. You watch everything disintegrating around you and feel paralysed. It's impossible to imagine how this will all end. And you have the dreadful feeling that everybody else is paralysed too."
My friend belongs to the community of grassroots activists in Colombia which has spent the better part of two decades struggling, with phenomenal courage, to build a centre; a tolerant place, where Colombia's fragile institutions could be strengthened so that the urgent task of constructing a nation from this war-ravaged, anarchic society might finally begin. Now he is saying that the country is spinning out of control. "The bus is careering towards the edge of the cliff," he said, "and there seems to be no - one able to put their foot on the brake." Is his pessimism justified?
The peace process is certainly mired in difficulty, despite growing popular support. Less than a year ago, the Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, went to the jungle headquarters of the FARC guerrillas to meet the legendary 64-year-old leader, "Tiro Fijo", and kick-start peace talks. Like previous attempts to resolve half a century of political violence, Pastrana's initiative provoked the violent opposition of Colombia's powerful far-right. Their determination to sabotage any negotiations that explicitly recognised the political logic of the insurgency had been inevitable; but the rebel leadership's failure to respond in kind to Pastrana's overtures was not, and their subsequent intransigence had almost fatally undermined his presidency and brought the peace process to its knees.
A few weeks after our conversation, stories about Colombians leaving the country in droves hit the news. The wealthy were long gone to their houses and apartments in Miami, Houston, Paris, London and New York, taking their money with them. But now the hard-working middle-class was also seeking to escape. Young married couples who could no longer stand the fear that consumed them every time their children left the house were selling everything they owned and heading for Ecuador, Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, even Peru - any place where they had contacts or friends and where the kids could go to school without bodyguards. People were lining up outside the US Embassy applying for visas.
In an effort to halt the panic, the government commissioned a banner that appeared one morning across the most traffic-congested central street of Bogota. The message read: "Do not leave. This will get better". ("No se Vaya. Esto Se Mejore.") But "This" did not get better. It got worse. Last month, when millions of Colombians took to the streets in some 700 cities and towns across the country to demand an end to kidnapping and violence, a return by the guerrillas to the negotiation table, and an immediate ceasefire, time was running out for hopes that the peace process could be salvaged.
For the first time since the 1930s, the economy was on the floor; with unemployment rising to 20 per cent, whatever social cohesion had survived the year-long peace negotiations was now in tatters, the divisions between peace-makers and warriors - between those who wanted the guerrillas to quit stalling and get on with the negotiations, and those who wanted the government to unleash the army and go for the extermination of the guerrillas with US military help - were intensifying.
The only statistics on the rise were of violence and death. At least 20 civilians were being slaughtered daily in paramilitary massacres in the villages while the army stood aside and looked the other way; at 200 seizures a month, guerrilla kidnappings, carried out at random roadblocks, were up 20 per cent since 1998; each month, 25,000 peasants were abandoning their homes and their crops to join the population of 1.5 million displaced persons (seven times greater than the numbers driven out of East Timor, almost twice the refugee population of Kosovo) thus intensifying the worst humanitarian crisis in South America this century. Most fled the paramilitary terror, but a new exodus had also recently developed from guerrilla-held territory of peasant families avoiding guerrilla recruitment of their children or getting out before the arrival of the "paras".
There were troubles, too, on Colombia's borders, where refugees were starting to spill across the frontiers with Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Panama, evoking the ugly spectre of future internationalisation of a conflict that was also being fuelled by the failed US "war on drugs". Washington's disastrous policy of fumigating Colombian drug crops in the southern jungle territories controlled by the guerrillas had done nothing to limit drugs. To the contrary, the coca crop has increased by 50 per cent in the past 12 months. The spraying has devastated the fragile ecology of the rainforest and brought a war of pesticides and helicopter gunships to the coca farmers. By destroying the farmers' ability to feed their families and forcing the government to make war on its own people, the US effort has served to boost guerrilla recruitment.
Meanwhile, the organisers of the chilling, selective, high profile assassinations of prominent Colombian intellectuals and human rights defenders were on a roll. Within the past year, three university professors have been murdered in their offices; 30 human rights defenders have been killed or forced to leave the country. Several key investigations of paramilitary leaders which were expected to uncover links between individual army officers and paramilitary atrocities have been paralysed, because a dozen government investigators and prosecutors working on these cases have been killed or driven into exile.
It is clear that a government which cannot keep its own most valiant investigators and prosecutors alive cannot hope to crack the impunity rate for political crime and mass murder.
The killing in Colombia has been going on for a very long time. It used to be possible to sustain the myth that the identity of those behind the murder of Colombia's best and bravest was unfathomable. They were "Colombia's dark forces", faceless, nameless, unknowable. Now the numbers and notoriety of the serial killings has demolished that myth. Today, everyone has some idea about who they are and how they operate. But it has not helped. The government remains helpless to protect its citizens, its friends, even itself.
When Colombians review the history that has brought them to this perilous moment, they may differ about the significance of particular events, but there are benchmarks that flag the progressive unravelling of its social fabric.
It was an earlier peace process in 1982, led by the maverick, populist Conservative, Belisario Betancur, that unleashed the contradictions that have been ripping Colombia apart ever since. When Betancur became president, much like Andres Pastrana, he launched a peace process that fired the imagination and enthusiasm of 80 per cent of the population. In the spring of 1984, his government signed the first ceasefire agreement with the then 20-year-old insurgency of the FARC. It included a commitment from the insurgents to halt the kidnapping, and contained their core demands for political, economic and agrarian reforms. Later that summer, the government signed a second truce which included an amnesty with the smaller M-19 Revolutionary Movement.
That summer, when the M-19 guerrillas put down their guns and came out to the public squares to initiate a national dialogue on their programme for political and economic reforms, it was fiesta time in rural Colombia. But when the television cameras recorded the speeches and the dancing and brought them into the sittingrooms and offices of the establishment, upper class Colombia watched the scenes of public euphoria in horror. For they understood immediately that they were seeing a new country coming to life in front of their eyes.
For the first time they saw the other Colombia - a country they had neglected and abandoned to its own devices, without services or infrastructure, lacking roads, markets, schools, teachers, clinics, doctors or clean water. Lacking a future. They had mocked when Jaime Bateman, founder of the M-19, had told them years before that the revolution was a fiesta. Now they suddenly understood what he meant. They saw that in this other country, with its energy and its human warmth, the guerrilla was king. And intuitively they grasped the essentials: here was a world where the old system of controls was at risk of becoming irrelevant. This was guerrilla country. They watched and they were frightened. And a groundswell of unease started to build around the peace process. And Betancur began to pull back.
Then the killing began. One by one and two by two, on the streets of their home towns, at the corner bus stop, or in the neighbourhood cafes they frequented, amnestied M-19 guerrillas were cut down by "anonymous gunmen". It took time to understand what was happening. The truth finally emerged about the alliance brokered between the Medellin drugs cartel and Colombian army officers to create a crack paramilitary force - and this is the sorry framework which has supported para-state terrorism ever since.
In 1982, unwilling to confront the opposition of the generals to his peace policies, Betancur chose to negotiate with the guerrilla leaders behind the generals' backs. While the president and his negotiators were meeting secretly with the M-19 leaders in Madrid to talk of peace, the army was planning its strategy for continuing the war. It was a straightforward plan: drugs money would pay for weapons and salaries, the army would provide training and intelligence, and the partners to the scheme would benefit jointly from the skills of the graduates. In short order, death squad training schools, run by crack mercenary trainers hired under army auspices in Israel and England were up and running in the central Magdalena Medio valley. Soon Colombia had a new generation of modern, professional death squads. The destabilisation campaign was in place.
With the exception of the recession, which has accelerated the current crisis, nothing about today's dark and frightening scenario is new. The forces driving the breakdown of the Colombian state pre-date both the 35-year-old rural insurgency and the rise of the Colombian mafia. Drugs, traffickers and guerrillas are the symptoms of the Colombian sickness. The causes are more deeply rooted in the particular characteristics of Colombia's sham democracy. Designed to exclude political participation to any group outside the traditional parties - Conservatives and Liberals - the biparty system has closed all avenues to the development of a modern, pluralistic democracy.
From 1958 to 1974, the exclusion of their opponents was legalised by the terms of a unique power-sharing agreement that permitted the two elite parties to alternate power every four years. But the exclusion of the legal opposition did not end when this pact ran its course. It continued at the end of a gun. Between 1985 and the early 1990s, three presidential candidates and the entire activist membership of the political party that resulted from the FARC's '94 accords with Betancur - the Union Patriotica, (UP) were systematically murdered.
Since the 1960s, in order to keep their antiquated system functioning, every government has relied on "states of siege" to cut back the democratic process. Predictably, the army has been corrupted and the civilians in government rendered largely irrelevant.
There is nothing new about para-state terror in Colombia. The first shots in the campaign to eliminate prominent Colombians by the use of "anonymous gunmen" struck minister for justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, as he sat in the back of his official Mercedes in May 1984. Since then, the ubiquitous motor-cycle killers who snake through the traffic to strike their victims in broad daylight, and who somehow always manage to disappear again into the underworld, have left a trail of victims: judges, journalists, attorney generals, political leaders, presidential candidates, a minister of justice, priests, human rights lawyers, labour leaders, police chiefs, senators, congressmen, and, just a couple of months ago, the most beloved political satirist and television comic in the country.
The purpose of the killings is always the same: to sabotage peace efforts and keep the war going by any means necessary. For only a continuation of the war can guarantee that nothing will change politically. So for the supporters of the corrupt status quo, peace is the ultimate enemy. This is why peace in Colombia has always had such dangerous and unscrupulous enemies. The killings are messages, addressed to any government that seeks to establish its independence or that appears to be preparing to challenge the status quo. Because Pastrana is driven by a messianic determination to end the war and start building a better country with social, economic and political justice, it has become imperative that the peace process he launched with such naive enthusiasm a year ago should fail. The message of the killings says: We are stronger than you. We surround you. We have infiltrated your institutions. We can strike where and when we choose. If you refuse to listen, if you insist on resisting our logic, we can destroy you.
In line with this bleak history, the Colombian peace process ought to have given up the ghost by now. Certainly President Pastrana has received scant support thus far, domestically or internationally, for risks taken and efforts invested. Yet there are a couple of things about this peace process that are different from previous attempts to solve the Colombian war. Pastrana himself is one. The role of the growing popular movement in the process is another.
Pastrana's consistency and commitment - often in the face of brutal rejection, from the FARC leaders, from his own party, from Washington - is the one constant of the peace process and the main reason why it is still showing signs of life. All other Colombian leaders have been quick to abandon their efforts when confronted with the stubbornness of Tiro Fijo and his closest lieutenants. Pastrana, it seems clear, is not a quitter. This alone puts him ahead of the game as it has been played in Colombia so far.
In October, 1997, 10 million people responded to the call to register a vote for peace and the national peace movement was off and running. It was the peace vote that won Pastrana the 1998 election. In recent weeks there have been some interesting developments. Just when an imminent return to war appeared most inevitable, 10 million people marched on October 24th to demand that the violence stop and the guerrillas return to the negotiations. It was the culmination of several months during which every weekend there were marches in one city or other. As the momentum built, the conviction spread that this could become a revolutionary form of participation on the part of ordinary people throughout Colombia.
This time - and this is very new - a cross section of society wants a role in these negotiations and the process is being structured to make that possible. No one segment of Colombian society, not even the FARC's historic constituents among the campesinos, wants to abdicate their opportunity to affect the outcome of these talks.
Too early to be hopeful? Probably. Yet in the past few weeks the level of violence is down; now Washington appears to be having second thoughts about throwing almost $2 billion at the Colombian army.
A former peace activist, a wonderful man who recently fell victim to the "dark forces", used to tell his friends: "If you work for peace in Colombia, you have to be an optimist." In his memory, if for no better reason, Colombian peacemakers will surely keep their optimism alive as the process lurches into a new, and yes, a more hopeful phase.
Anna Carrigan is the author of The Palace of justice: A Colombian Tragedy. She is writing a sourcebook about the peace process as well as a book of Colombian memoirs.