As the controversial case of the Colombia Three comes to a head, Deaglán de Bréadún captures the mood in Bogota.
The great Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, describes his country's capital as a "city where a sleepless rain had been falling since the early 16th century". The Nobel prizewinner was writing about Bogota as he experienced it in the early 1940s but the "sleepless rain" was still falling relentlessly on its streets this week.
A desk clerk in my hotel explained: "We don't have stations in this country". By "stations" he actually meant seasons, but the point he was making came across. Bogota and other high-altitude areas of Colombia live in an eternal early spring.
It's perfect weather for growing the coca leaf, raw material for cocaine, illegally supplied in vast quantities from Colombia to the rest of the world. People in the richer lands of North America and Europe snort the white powder greedily, uncaring or oblivious to the fact that, as Colombia's vice-president Francisco Santos recently told me: "Every time they inhale a gram of cocaine they are inhaling blood, Colombian blood." The world is also largely oblivious to the dirty little war taking place here, in America's back yard, between the Colombian government and one of the world's largest guerrilla armies, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC for short.
Any place with an unresolved land distribution issue is likely to be in trouble - just look at Zimbabwe. Colombia is said to be owned by 30 or 40 families and there isn't much of a middle layer between them and the poor peasants who make up the FARC's support base.
The previous president, Andres Pastrana, sought to make peace with the FARC and end a conflict which has raged since the 1960s and cost many thousands of lives. He established a peace process and ceded control over a sizeable portion of the country - equivalent to the land mass of Switzerland - to the FARC guerrillas.
This "peace zone" or "demilitarised zone", call it what you will, attracted many foreign visitors who came to dispense good will and study the latest effort in conflict resolution. They reportedly included well-known people such as the former Northern Ireland secretary, Mo Mowlam, and Jordan's Queen Noor. There also were less well-known visitors to the region in August 2001, among them James Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Connolly.
Except they weren't travelling under those names. Monaghan was Edward Joseph Campbell, McCauley was John Joseph Kelly and Connolly went under David Bracken, curiously enough the name of the main character in Frederick Forsyth's thriller, The Day of the Jackal.
This should have given them a further layer of obscurity, but somebody was watching and they managed to attract exactly the kind of attention they were trying to avoid. We may never know who tipped off the Colombian army to arrest the three Irishmen arriving on a flight to El Dorado airport in Bogota from the FARC zone but there are no prizes going for anyone who guesses it was British or US intelligence, or both operating together.
The excuse given subsequently for using false identities was that Monaghan and McCauley had what observers of the republican scene call "form" or, in non-racing parlance, previous convictions for their activities. Connolly was "clean" in this context but he had a connection of his own with the republican movement, since he was the Sinn Féin representative in Cuba, although the party tried vainly to deny this at first.
There must have been a discreet bottle or two of champagne consumed in parts of what is known as "the intelligence community". Three big Irish republican fish had been landed, putting the Sinn Féin leadership firmly on the back foot as it sought to explain and rationalise its way out of the situation.
There was further pain for the republican movement when Sinn Féin's offices at Stormont were raided - on the same day the trial of the "Colombia Three" began in Bogota. Meanwhile, a virtual avalanche of stories began to appear in the news media about the alleged activities of the three Irish visitors to the FARC zone.
Summarising a whole variety of reports, most of them widely circulated, the trio were involved in testing a napalm-type bomb "with the power of a small nuclear device" for use in British cities; they were tracked by a special SAS squad using CIA satellites; they were filmed in the Colombian jungle giving bomb-making classes for which they "may have been paid in cocaine"; they were part of a much larger group of IRA members who visited Colombia over a period of years; their activities were connected with the Florida gun-running case, and Fidel Castro is in league with the IRA for the purpose of fomenting revolution throughout Latin America.
Most of these stories relied on anonymous sources with little in the way of verifiable evidence. The account given by Monaghan, McCauley and Connolly themselves was very different: they said they were simply studying the peace process and having a good holiday. In the event, little or nothing from the more colourful media accounts of the Colombian adventure was put forward in the trial of the three men in Bogota. This turned out to be a rather more mundane affair by comparison, with various individuals claiming to be FARC deserters and alleging that they saw the three giving bomb-training classes at particular times in the demilitarised zone.
This was hotly disputed by the defence, which called a series of witnesses ranging from an Irish diplomat, Síle Maguire, to a psychiatrist from Co Kildare, Dr Seán Ó Domhnaill, to give testimony that, when the prosecution claimed the three men were in FARC-land, they were actually in Ireland or, in Connolly's case, enjoying a good dinner with Irish parliamentarians in Havana.
The trial ended on August 1st, 2003, but since then the months have drifted by and still there is no verdict. I asked a man in Bogota if this was normal practice. Speaking in measured tones and with quiet fatalism, he said: "It is very normal in Colombia, my friend."
The judge, Dr Jairo Acosta, specialises in cases involving alleged terrorist offences. Whatever his verdict, his utterances in court indicate that he is likely to go into considerable detail about the reasons for his judgment. He has told the news media at different times that he had a backlog of other cases which had to be dealt with in order and that, essentially, the Irishmen would have to wait their turn.
This week it appeared their turn might be coming at last. It began to look as if a verdict had finally been reached and it was now just a question of how to present it. Although the judgment was originally meant to be delivered to the men in writing at La Modelo prison outside Bogota, it is now expected to be handed down in public.
The Palace of Justice, an imposing building in Bogota's Plaza Bolivar, is expected to be the location and the verdict is now thought likely to be delivered by a more senior judge than Dr Acosta, although the latter heard the case on his own. This is a long way from the earlier approach, more reminiscent of a traffic offence. The Colombians know they are under international scrutiny, both from those who seek to uphold what they see as the highest standards of justice and from others whose chief concern is the fight against what they regard as terrorism. The Palace of Justice has seen drama before: the now-defunct M-19 guerrillas seized the place in 1985, leading to a bloody shoot-out in which more than 100 people, including 11 members of the Supreme Court, died.
Speculation about the verdict was growing this week, and inevitably there were guessing-games over the significance of the Colombians' apparent intention to turn the announcement into a media event.
A guilty verdict would probably lead to an appeal to one or other international human rights forums, with much attention being focused on the occasionally farcical moments in the trial. A verdict of innocence on the bomb-training charge would inevitably provoke outraged reaction from, say, Republican Party sources in Washington and Northern Ireland unionists, among others. Virtually everyone expects the men to be convicted of travelling on false documents, although the time they have already spent in jail could be deemed sufficient punishment for that offence.
All sides are hoping that, whatever the verdict, the long wait will be over. Meanwhile, the ordinary people in Bogota were more interested in the latest health report on soccer star Diego Maradona. For their part, the three prisoners were reported to be calm and ready for all eventualities: "Que sera sera".
Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times