According to the latest Colombian opinion polls, eight out of 10 people have lost faith in the current peace talks between the government of President Andres Pastrana and the powerful peasant-based guerrillas of the FARC.
There are many reasons for this lack of support for a peace process that began with such high hopes 18 months ago.
But the chief factor is the condition, imposed by the FARC and accepted by the government that peace talks would proceed without a ceasefire and without any agreement by the combatants to respect human rights and humanitarian law in the continuing conflict.
This is an ever more degraded and vicious fratricidal war in which over 80 per cent of the victims are civilians. Last week, a new atrocity sent waves of revulsion and terror throughout this war-corrupted land. It also raised these issues with a starkness never experienced before and almost closed down the peace negotiations. The crime was the gruesome killing of a middle-aged country woman. In the pre-dawn hours last Monday, armed men invaded the modest farm house of Elvia Pachon Cortez in the central state of Boyaca and attached a so-called "necklace-bomb" around her neck.
The 55-year-old woman was decapitated some nine hours later when the collar detonated while police and soldiers struggled to defuse the device. A young police bomb disposal expert was also killed in the blast and three soldiers were injured.
That evening, army and police chiefs provided police pictures and video of Mrs Cortez's long agony to the television stations in time for the evening news and announced that they had proof of the identity of those responsible. The culprits, they said, were "known members" of a local front of the FARC who were attempting to extort $7,500 from the victim's family.
The media, the government and the US State Department all accepted the military's version without checking with the Colombian attorney general whose investigators were already pursuing a number of other hypotheses. President Pastrana angrily denounced the FARC and suspended the next round of peace talks pending an agreement by FARC leaders to immediately discuss a ceasefire and "a definitive end to kidnapping and extortion".
He also cancelled a joint government-FARC invitation to the international community to attend a conference in FARC territory on drug crop substitution scheduled for May 29th-30th.
In Washington too, within hours of the President's outburst, the State Department praised Mr Pastrana's "courage" and called on the FARC to desist from its "barbaric activities".
For their part, the FARC, who had instantly repudiated and condemned the killing, categorically denied any involvement. Since the guerrillas regularly use threats, violence and kidnapping to extort money few were prepared to believe them.
But their denial now appears consistent with information from the chief investigator for the attorney general's office that the device used to detonate the bomb was so sophisticated it could only have been constructed by someone with access to international terrorist expertise.
On past form this is more likely to implicate the right-wing paramilitaries than the FARC.
Also members of the Cortez family who witnessed the dawn attack told reporters on condition of anonymity that they did not believe that the men were guerrillas.
Meanwhile, following a bad meeting with the new Colombian High Commissioner for Peace, Mr Camilo Gomez, the FARC harshly attacked the President for surrendering to the combined pressures of President Clinton and the Colombian military, and warned that rupture in the talks could only be averted if the drug crop substitution conference went ahead at the end of this month. As Colombians pondered this dangerous sequence of events a consensus emerged among thoughtful analysts in support of the only proposal offering a way back from the brink of all out civil war.
Under the heading "The UN throws a life-jacket to the peace process" the El Espectador newspaper on Thursday ran an interview with Mr Anders Kompass, head of the Colombian office of Mrs Mary Robinson's United Nations Human Rights Commission. In today's agitated Colombia, Mr Kompass, a calm, quiet-spoken Swede, has emerged as the only voice who consistently addresses the fundamental issues that have corrupted Mr Pastrana's beleaguered efforts to keep his promise to the Colombian people to end the violence.
Last week Mr Kompass again urged the guerrillas and the government to give priority to an agreement to respect international human rights and international humanitarian law as an essential first step towards preserving the talks.
Then he went to see the FARC leaders and gained their support to establish a special mechanism of arbitration, to be responsible solely to the peace table, that would investigate any violent acts that might impact on the talks and report back to the negotiators with their findings.
As the week wore on, and more details surrounding the murder of Mrs Cortez emerged, it became crystal clear how crucial is Colombia's need for a mechanism such as Mr Kompass has suggested.
For it now appears that the crime that the Colombian army and police generals had presented as a bungled FARC extortion attempt, may have been something even more sinister. What was done to Mrs Cortes, whatever the motive, was something beyond humanity. It seems Colombia's "dark forces" are back in business.
By Saturday the President had let it be known that he was "no longer inclined to believe that the FARC was responsible", so defusing the immediate crisis, although the talks remain frozen over the issue of reinstating the international conference on drug crop substitution.
Last Friday, at the end of a roller coaster week, the headline in El Espectador read "Peace in the intensive care unit" and the paper's editorial warned readers that if people were unhappy with the peace process they would soon find out that life without it would be far worse.
The end of the peace process, the editorial said, will imply a military escalation of the conflict on a scale never experienced in this country to date.
Colombia's peace commissioner, Mr Camilo Gomez, said last night after meeting FARC leaders that it was "increasingly clear" rebels were not responsible for the killing.