DICK SPRING wrote to the vice president of Colombia recently in unmistakably pithy terms.

The Department of Foreign Affairs had received a delegation of country people from Colombia who had come to Dublin and were seeking the aid of Ireland, at the time occupying the presidency of the EU, to rein in the death squads in their country.

On December 11th last, the Tanaiste addressed Dr Carlos Lemos Simmonds, who combines being Colombian vice president with the job of ambassador to London:

"Representatives of the Peasant Farmers held detailed discussions with my department in Dublin on December 9th, 1996. I was horrified to learn on the following day of the murder in Colombia of one of the peasant leaders, Adinael Toscano, and two of his family.

"I should be grateful if you would be good enough to let me know the results of your government's investigation into this and other acts of violence in the area."

The Irish protest was the right and honourable thing to do, but anybody who spends more than a few days in this tortured country cannot but end up blase about the constant loss of human life in the most wretched of Latin American republics.

There is near death to be seen every day in the Septima, the main street of Bogota, the capital. The church of San Francisco is a few yards from the spot where a popular political leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, was killed in 1948, an event which gave rise to the sacking of Bogota by the infuriated mob and the start of a decade during which more than 250 000 were shot or hacked to death throughout the country.

Around the corner in the city's main square they are rebuilding the Palace of Justice, seized by guerrillas in 1985 and stormed by the army, resulting in the deaths of at least 70 people, including the president and 11 members of the Supreme Court.

On the pavement outside the church there is a tragic collection of, beggars - men and women with twisted limbs or no limbs at all, amputees, the congenitally misshapen or thalidomide sufferers.

AS well as slow death on the streets of Bogota there is murder in Laolombia. The national average is 77 per 100,000 inhabitants or about fifteen times the westem European average. I went to a town of 15,000 inhabitants not far from Bogota where about 90 murders had been registered in 1996.

The easy - and inaccurate - explanation for the violence is that Colombia is the world's main producer and distributor of cocaine and a promising source of heroin. Fierce turf battles, it is said, are fought by left wing guerrillas who wax rich on the money to be made from narcotics.

Such versions overlook the realities of Colombian life. To start with, the real violence started in the country in the mid1940s. Then the clever men on the north coast, who later started growing marijuana and thereafter graduated into hard drugs, had not even thought of the various crops in their good soil which were to make billionaires of many of them.

The violence started and has continued mainly because of hard politics. Gaitan was murdered in 1948 because he represented a threat to the country's rich elite. There was a violent reaction to his murder, and in recent years guerrilla violence has more than compensated for atrocities committed by the army and the police.

SOME drug money is almost certainly skimmed off by the guerrillas who are estimated to number about 20,000 and who are responsible for terror and violence. One authoritative study of Remolinos de Caguan, a settlement of 10,000 people in the deep south of Colombia, suggests that the guerrillas, by levying about £250 per hectare on coca bushes planted by the local peasants, raise about £1.5 million a year.

But, in a newspaper interview last month the US ambassador, Myles Frechette, went back on previous US claims that the guerrillas were the main force behind the growing of narcotics.

This force is, of course, the narcos - the big drugs traders - and they have a relatively happy relationship with the establishment, the armed forces and the soldiers' allies in the paramilitary death squads.

Even President Ernesto Samper has been accused of taking $6 million in contributions from the narcos. He was cleared by the Colombian congress last year. In public opinion polls here, however, most Colombians believe he did take the money.

None of his rivals for the presidency is looked on in a more favourable light and most politicians are no better than he is. A healthy majority of the upper and lower houses of congress are commonly regarded as venal, as are many judges and public prosecutors.

Death certainly lurks in the barrels of the guns of the guerrillas who have very often proved to be unreliable, treacherous and willing to change their political colours in exchange for spot cash.

As the local and foreign voluntary organisations have bravely raised the banner of human rights; President Samper has thought it useful to join the crusade.

As a consequence, the army monotonously accused by such as Amnesty International of chronic indiscipline and of responsibility for atrocities, has sought to reduce its profile. More and more it is farming out its dirty work to the paramilitaries.

Many of the paramilitary gangs are made up of narcos who have bought land and cattle with their plentiful spare cash and who are now keen to preserve property rights threatened by the forces of the violent left.

In November, Human Rights Watch, a US based organisation, brought out a report Colombia's Killer Networks: The Military Paramilitary Partnership and the United States, which revealed how the army and the paramilitaries collaborate.

It commented: "We believe that the military high command continues to organise, encourage, and deploy paramilitaries to fight a covert war against those it suspects of support for guerrillas." It added details of how this partnership is knowingly reinforced by the US government.

In such a maelstrom of violence it is no wonder the government pay for television advertisements every evening urging Colombian viewers not to be ashamed of their country.

For millions of Colombians the publicity is not working. They are sick of their society, but have no idea of how to change it.