Citizens: Leaders are ineffective

 BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

 BOGOTA, Colombia -- Four months ago, presidential hopeful Alvaro Uribe's calls
 for a crackdown on Colombian guerrillas, kidnappers and drug lords were earning
 him a mere 5 percent showing in the polls. Today, he has a 17 percent approval
 rate.

 One year ago, most Colombians scorned right-wing paramilitary gunmen as thugs
 who massacre civilians suspected of helping rebels. Today, a growing number
 support the paramilitaries as effective if brutal fighters.

 Increasingly desperate over the violence lashing their nation and frustrated by the
 stalled peace talks with rebels, more Colombians are demanding that their
 government adopt a mano dura -- a tough hand.

 They are calling for tougher stances at the peace table, a declaration of
 something akin to a state of emergency, creating civilian militias and harsher jail
 terms, including the death sentence, for kidnappers.

 ``Every day there is more pessimism, lower support for the [President Andrés]
 Pastrana government . . . and more support for a military solution to the conflict,''
 said Hernán de la Cuesta, head of the Invemer polling firm.

 The shift has also generated occasional calls for U.S. involvement in Colombia
 beyond the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package for a campaign against the narcotics
 industry and the leftist and rightist rebels who often protect it.

 "We must kill all the hooligans,'' said Bogotá supermarket clerk Rafael Hurtado,
 26.

 "And if that means Americans coming to wipe out everyone keeping us in a state
 of disaster, even better,'' Hurtado said.

 Colombia's insurgency has left 35,000 dead since 1990 and the country accounts
 for two-thirds of the world's kidnappings -- 3,000 a year -- as well as 90 percent of
 the cocaine and 65 percent of the heroin sold on U.S. streets.

 About 1.8 million people have been forced from their homes by the violence, the
 economy is barely recovering from a 4.5 percent plunge last year and common
 crime has long stood at near-epidemic levels.

 "There is a groundswell of frustration and desperation worse than anything I've
 ever seen there,'' Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami expert on Colombia, said
 after a recent two-week visit.

 Pastrana has stubbornly pursued a 2-year-old peace process with the
 20,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the
 smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN, even though the talks have yielded no
 results.

 Even after the FARC ``froze'' the talks last month, Pastrana extended until Jan. 31
 the life of the 16,500-square-mile ``demilitarized zone'' that he ceded the FARC in
 southern Colombia as a haven for the talks.

 Yet all around him military officers, politicians from his Conservative Party and the
 opposition Liberal Party, private sector leaders and plain citizens have been
 clamoring for a crackdown.

 Polls show that about 80 percent of Colombians oppose a continuation of the
 demilitarized zone, saying the FARC has turned it into a haven for recruiting and
 training new fighters, holding kidnap victims and planting coca fields.

 "The peace process is exhausted because of the lack of results,'' acknowledged
 Congressman Antonio Navarro Wolf, a supporter of the negotiations and former
 leader of the disbanded M-19 leftist guerrilla movement.

 Armed Forces Chief Gen. Fernando Tapias urged Pastrana to impose a ``state of
 internal commotion,'' akin to the five states of emergency declared since 1978 to
 lift some constitutional guarantees for the insurgency war.

 And cattleman's association chief Jorge Visbal drew thunderous applause at a
 convention two weeks ago when he demanded that the government create civilian
 militias to augment the 146,000-member armed forces, far too small for a country
 seven times the size of Florida.

 Pastrana tried to answer the growing demands to get tough by proposing to
 lengthen prison terms, including life sentences for massacres and 40-year terms
 for kidnappers.

 Congressional critics replied that the problem was not short sentences but a
 weak government that fails to enforce the law.

 Pastrana's proposal, said Sen. Amilcar Acosta, ``is like searching upriver for
 drowning victims.''

 "What we do need is a public force capable of averting kidnappings,
 disappearances and massacres,'' said Uribe, a tough-talking conservative seeking
 the Liberal Party's nomination for the presidential elections in 2002.

 While almost every poll shows Pastrana's approval rates at record lows, about 22
 to 25 percent, quarterly polls taken by Gallup Colombia show Uribe's popularity
 jumped from 5 percent in August to 17 percent this month. The Gallup polls have
 a 3 percent margin of error.

 Bagley said Uribe's rise reflected the ``astounding support'' for the right-wing
 paramilitaries, also known as Self-Defense Forces of Colombia or AUC, that he
 found in recent meetings with dozens of business persons here.

 "To a man and woman they considered the AUC tactics for annihilating the FARC
 as a model, [justified] the human rights violations and were all willing to say that
 they pay protection money to the AUC,'' Bagley said.

 Michael Gold-Biss, a Colombian-born political scientist at St. Cloud State
 University in Minnesota, said he was equally discouraged after a one-week visit to
 Bogotá this month.

 "We're still a ways from an Augusto Pinochet,'' he said of the former Chilean
 dictator.

 "But people are justifying the existence of the paramilitaries because the
 government is ineffective.

 "I have never felt this discouraged.''