COLOMBIA: The conditions for insurrection are growing daily and civilians face terror from all sides, writes Ana Carrigan
In Bogota, Colombians are calling for renewed peace negotiations. In Washington, the Bush administration is increasing America's involvement in their war. When Colombia's new leader, Mr Alvaro Uribe Velez, takes office on Wednesday, he confronts a choice: he can follow Washington's lead to a wider war; or, with the mediation of the United Nations, and the support of Europe and his Latin neighbours, seek a lasting, negotiated peace.
Last May, when Mr Uribe won the Colombian presidential race in a landslide, his victory was interpreted as a mandate to escalate the war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Mr Uribe campaigned on a pledge to re-establish the government's authority throughout Colombia. His proposals include plans to increase defence spending, double the number of professional soldiers and police, give the army new powers to carry out preventive detentions and searches and create a million-man civilian intelligence militia.
Mr Uribe's victory cleared the way for the Bush administration to pursue its twin obsessions - drugs and terrorists - in Colombia. Last month, Congress passed legislation lifting all restrictions on Colombian military aid and providing an additional $500 million which includes funding for a Colombian brigade to protect Occidental Oil's pipeline from guerrilla attacks. In Bogota, the American embassy announced the resumption of America's drug crop fumigation program - a major catalyst for rural poverty, revolt and ecological devastation.
Yet in Bogota, since May, a different interpretation of Mr Uribe's electoral mandate has developed.
On election night, nothing in his victory speech resonated so powerfully among Colombians as his surprise vow to seek UN mediation to reopen peace negotiations. In June, a poll found 65 per cent wanted him to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict; 77 per cent supported his decision to request UN mediation. Only 14 per cent wanted international military aid, while 26 per cent thought the best way the international community could advance a future peace process was by providing help to promote human rights.
The majority of Uribe's vote came from ordinary citizens, desperate for capable new leadership. They hope he will fulfil his promises to return security to their streets and their farms, fight corruption and patronage, woo back investment and jobs and increase spending to tackle the poverty that is at the root of the growth of the guerrilla and paramilitary armies.
Nothing on this wish list is compatible with a wider war. Last week thousands of rural women boarded buses and marched through Bogota to demand the war's end; 700 mayors held a day-long conference to develop concrete peace proposals for presentation to the government and the guerrillas; the governors of six southern states demanded an immediate bilateral ceasefire and their participation in negotiations; establishment figures are campaigning for the release of FARC's high-profile political hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.
Yet Mr Uribe owes a debt to the Colombian far right. Their agenda is radically different. They want the defeat of the guerrillas, judicial reform to tame the constitutional court and a constitutional amendment to permit a state of emergency and give army commanders a free hand to run the war.
They also want Mr Uribe to root out members of a Colombian "fifth column" - intellectuals, labour leaders, priests, judges, human rights defenders and ecologists - all members of a "new international communist conspiracy".
Since President Pastrana broke off peace talks with the FARC leaders last February, the guerrillas have shifted the balance of power in their favour. In June, borrowing a strategy used to devastating effect by the Vietcong, they launched a campaign of intimidation to drive mayors and municipal officials from their posts. In quick order they erased all traces of government authority from 35 municipalities in 24 of the nation's 32 states.
The outgoing government has been unable to counter this threat, and the FARC is planning the next stage of its strategy to impose an "alternative government," through "revolutionary civilian councils." Directed by "community leaders", these councils would be forced to carry out FARC "laws" at gunpoint.
This is not the only crisis. For the first time since the 1940s, the conditions for a violent social insurrection are brewing. Soaring public debt menaces an Argentina-style collapse. Sixty-four percent of Colombians - 27 million people - live below the poverty line; 9.6 million are destitute; one in five children in rural Colombia is undernourished; 2 million people have been displaced.
If Uribe chooses, or is pushed, to widen the war, the next phase in the fighting will not only destroy what is left of Colombia's democracy, it will eliminate rural community life and culture. The FARC's "revolutionary civilian councils" are the mirror image of Mr Uribe's proposal for a million-man civilian intelligence militia. For the first time in the 40-year saga of the war, these two terrible projects will force civilians to directly participate in a war they reject.
It won't be long either, before the contagion of rebellion, already smouldering in Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela, flares up and sets the entire region aflame.
The Ecuadorean foreign minister recently articulated the fears spreading across the Andes: "If Colombia is going to become another Vietnam," he said, "we don't want Ecuador to be the next Cambodia."