BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 BOGOTA -- Taking a bold risk for peace, Colombia's government freed two jailed
 guerrilla leaders Friday and put them on a plane to Geneva for negotiations that
 could create a new rebel sanctuary.

 Francisco Galán and Felipe Torres, officials of Colombia's second-largest rebel
 group, the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), have promised to return to
 prison after the two days of talks that start Monday.

 The ELN is seeking control of an 1,841-square-mile area in parts of the northern
 states of Bolivar and Antioquia as an ``encounter zone for more formal peace
 negotiations with President Andrés Pastrana's government.

 Pastrana granted a much larger demilitarized zone to the bigger Revolutionary
 Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in southern Colombia 18 months ago in a
 similar attempt to facilitate peace talks with that group.

 But the area sought by the ELN is strongly contested by right-wing paramilitary
 militias. Just Friday, Colombian radio reported seven ELN rebels were killed in a
 clash with paramilitaries in the southern tip of the region.

 Authorities in Santa Rita de Ituango, 80 miles east of the proposed sanctuary,
 said 21 militia members and two civilians were confirmed killed in a 12-hour
 attack Thursday by 200 FARC guerrillas on a nearby paramilitary camp.

 The Geneva talks come as Pastrana's government prepares to start receiving a
 new $1.3 billion U.S. aid package for its war on narco-traffickers.

 The 17,000-strong FARC and to a lesser extent the 5,000-member ELN and 5,500
 paramilitaries fill their war coffers by imposing ``taxes along the narcotics
 production chain.

 Galán and Torres, captured in 1992 and 1994, were flown by helicopter from the
 Itagüi prison near Medellín to Bogota, where they boarded a commercial plane for
 Switzerland accompanied by several Justice Ministry officials, the government
 said.

 They will join other ELN leaders in meetings with Pastrana's chief peace
 negotiator, and some 90 representatives of the country's political, human rights,
 labor, refugee, farm, religious and other groups.

 The governments of Cuba, Spain, France, Norway and Switzerland have agreed to
 act as friends and facilitators in the negotiations.

 Also expected are relatives of six of the 100 or so men and women kidnapped and
 held for ransom by the ELN -- one of the most appalling aspects of Colombia's 35
 years of drug and guerrilla-related violence.

 Galán and Torres were also allowed out of prison for four days in 1998 to take part
 in an initial peace contact with the government, but those talks were held in the
 mountains of Bolivar state.

 Those initial contacts did not go far, but the ELN forced its way back into the
 negotiations last year with a series of spectacular kidnappings -- 140 from a Cali
 church during a Sunday Mass, 40 from an Avianca airliner hijacked to a jungle
 strip. Most of those hostages have been released.

 Difficulties facing the ELN's request for a sanctuary became starkly evident after
 the rebels charged Thursday that paramilitary units had attacked several of its
 camps in the region in recent days.

 One of the camps raided, the ELN said, was the site of a meeting last week
 between ELN chief Nicolás Rodríguez and government negotiators to discuss the
 Geneva agenda.

 Residents of the region strongly oppose creating the ELN sanctuary, arguing that
 the FARC-ruled demilitarized zone, the size of South Florida, has turned into a
 catastrophe.