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Colombia targets rebels, ends talks after kidnapping

BOGOTA, Colombia (CNN) -- Three years of a stumbling search for peace vanished Thursday after President Andres Pastrana scuttled peace talks with the country's largest guerrilla group and ordered Colombia's military to retake a rebel-held zone that had been set aside as a neutral ground for negotiations in 1998.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard called the collapse of the Colombian peace process "a disastrous development" with "enormous consequences for the people of Colombia."

Military sources said army and air force units had begun striking rebel-built airstrips and suspected guerrilla bases in the zone, and ground troops were poised to enter the 16,000-square-mile area. Most of the guerrillas, however, were believed to have already slipped away into the jungles and savannahs.

"I've decided not to continue the peace process with the FARC. I've decided to close the zone and I have ordered our troops to return there from midnight," Pastrana said in a nationally televised address Wednesday night.

"We cannot sign agreements with a group that is putting a rifle to the head of innocent people. Colombia says, 'No more.' We're tired of guerrilla hypocrisy."

CNN's Karl Penhaul crossed into the region and noted that the civilian population in the region "seems normal."

"There is no evidence of an exodus from the region," he said.

Penhaul ran across a small FARC foot patrol alongside the road, and noted they were "very calm, relaxed and lounging in the grass on the roadside."

"The army has said they want to take back the zone," the patrol's commander said. "Well, we're still here and they'll just have to come and get it."

Pastrana set aside the land as a venue for peace talks aimed at ending Colombia's four-sided civil war, which erupted in its current incarnation four decades ago but has at its roots the conservative-liberal split that came about at Colombia's inception in the 19th century.

The Colombian government is beleaguered by two Marxist guerrilla groups, FARC and the ELN (National Liberation Army); and the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia (AUC), a coalition of right-wing paramilitary groups that formed in the 1980s to defend villagers -- and in some cases drug traffickers -- from attacks by the leftist groups. Recently, ties between the AUC and the Colombian military have been brought to light.

A limited number of U.S. personnel -- military, civilian and State Department -- have been deployed in Colombia to assist in the "war on drugs," but none are expected to be involved in Colombia's current strife.

Pastrana's government and FARC returned to the negotiating table only last month with some hopes of meeting an April 7 target date for a cease-fire.

But Wednesday's hijacking and kidnapping of Senate Peace Commission chairman Jorge Eduardo Gechen appeared to have obliterated what slender strings remained of those hopes.

The hijackers boarded the twin-engine turboprop plane in the central city of Neiva early Thursday and hijacked it, forcing it to land on a rural highway about 20 miles away. They fled toward the rebel zone with Gechen.

Gechen's son, Jorge Andres Gechen, called on the government and FARC to end the civil war at once.

"What is the government waiting for?" said Jorge Andres Gechen. "How is it possible that the 'guerrillas' of the FARC do this? If they are looking for peace, let the kidnapped free."

Gechen's kidnapping is not the first time guerrillas have targeted Colombian lawmakers, especially high-ranking members of congressional peace commissions. Last September, House peace commission chairman Rep. Jairo Rojas was shot and killed by unknown gunmen. Rojas had taken the place of Diego Turbay, shot and killed by FARC guerrillas in December 2000.

Turbay was a member of the Liberal Party, Rojas a member of Pastrana's Conservative party.

Also in September, FARC rebels stormed the apartment of Sen. Jaime Lozada, taking his wife and two sons captive.



 
 
 
 






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