By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday; Page A01

TAME, Colombia -- After years as a distant rumor, war has reached this lonely city on Colombia's eastern plains. Left-wing guerrillas have taken to assassinating
strangers in the streets. Roadblocks have gone up on the edge of town where right-wing militiamen inspect cars and take names. Police have sand-bagged their
headquarters.

The two guerrilla armies that have enjoyed uncontested control of this region for years have weathered a two-month campaign by the military. Now paramilitary
forces that work hand in hand with the army have moved in, bringing what Tame's residents fear are the tactics of a dirty war that is spreading across once-stable
areas of Colombia.

"The people want to be left in peace," said Tame's mayor, Jorge Antonio Bernal, who no longer keeps his office in town because of guerrilla death threats. "But that
is not going to happen anytime soon."

By almost any measure, more people are fighting more frequently in more parts of Colombia than at any point in the four-decade conflict. Once confined to a cluster
of central provinces sliced by guerrilla transportation routes, intense fighting now touches remote southwestern and eastern provinces and has become a permanent
feature of the southern jungles where army and paramilitary forces are contesting rebel control for the first time.

The forecast from army generals and guerrilla commanders is for more fighting in the months ahead. The escalation is taking place despite President Andres
Pastrana's controversial peace negotiations with the rebels, including a vast demilitarized zone in the south, and a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package designed to combat
the flourishing drug trade that helps finance leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary fighters alike.

"We are going to have a period of two or three years in which the situation is going to become more acute before we find a way to peace," said Gen. Fernando
Tapias, head of the Colombian armed forces. "The state and society must be prepared for this."

In Colombia's four-sided war, the main actors are two Marxist-oriented rebel armies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National
Liberation Army (ELN), pitted against the army and a pro-government paramilitary force, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Their clashes
traditionally have occurred sporadically, often under cover of darkness, through quick strikes against civilians, sabotage and bombings or in accidental meetings in
jungle settings.

But a number of factors are conspiring to change that. They include the enhanced capability of the Colombian armed forces, due in part to U.S. training and military
aid that is by far the largest component of the $1.3 billion drug-fighting package. Added to that, a fading economy has contributed recruits to the growing guerrilla
and paramilitary armies. And the U.S.-backed anti-drug effort has produced a balloon effect, in which squeezing the war in one part of Colombia has sent it bulging
into other parts.

To the north of Tame (TAH-mee), for example, sit fresh coca fields controlled by the FARC, the country's largest left-wing guerrilla force. Coca cultivation has
doubled here in the past year as the rebels find new places to plant cocaine's key ingredient, far from a U.S.-backed aerial spraying campaign in the south of the
country.

The Bush administration has undertaken a review of the U.S. policy here that it inherited from the Clinton administration. A high-ranking delegation of U.S.
diplomatic and military officials came to Colombia last week for talks to guide the reassessment. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is scheduled to visit Sept. 11-12.

The U.S. aid, mostly devoted to military transport helicopters and training, was designed to help Pastrana's peace efforts by depriving the rebel army of its slice of
Colombia's $6 billion-a-year drug industry. The peace talks have been fruitless so far, however, creating public disenchantment with the process. But Marc
Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs who led the U.S. delegation, restated support for Pastrana on Friday, adding that Plan Colombia, the
president's program of negotiations combined with military pressure and social development, "remains the only way to peace."

The training and new equipment have turned the Colombian military into a more mobile and capable offensive force, encouraging predictions that fighting will intensify
before it can diminish. The improvement was particularly visible last month in southern Colombia, where a rapid deployment unit killed 50 guerrillas in a sustained air
and ground attack lasting two weeks.

But the FARC guerrillas and the rival AUC paramilitary forces are also improving, and they are reaching into new parts of the country. So far, the overtaxed military
has shown an inability to stop the spread. A senior U.S. official said the Colombian military can do "set pieces," regional military operations like those in the south,
but is not yet ready to take on the armed groups nationwide.

"It is a fact that the Colombian military and the Colombian police are not strong enough to provide security throughout the country," the U.S. official said.

An acute downturn in Colombia's economy, which had been remarkably resilient, has also contributed to intensifying violence. As unemployment hovers near 20
percent and the economy fails to produce enough new jobs to keep pace with population growth, the rebel and paramilitary organizations have provided job
opportunities for hundreds of young men and women.

Recently, members of the paramilitary army's governing body said the force had grown by 5,000 members over the past year, a figure that if true would mean the
AUC now numbers 13,000 armed troops. The 18,000-member FARC, a mostly rural insurgency that has fought the government since 1964, is also expanding at a
rate its leaders say is outpacing their ability to finance it.

"The reason is the crisis that this country is in -- the shortage of schools, of spaces in universities, of employment," said Raul Reyes, a leading FARC commander.
"Everyone is asking to join us: journalists, economists, politicians. One of the problems is that we are short of money to buy arms, so we have told people they have
to wait. If not for this, we would be much bigger."

This town of 40,000 people, sitting on a treeless plain that runs north to the Venezuelan border, is on the leading edge of the war's expansion. Until recently, violence
had rarely reached this place, 200 miles northeast of Bogota, the capital, and town residents had learned to accommodate passing guerrilla armies.

But last spring the main paramilitary leader, Carlos Castano, announced that his troops would control Arauca province, where Tame is located, by the end of the
year. Since then, killings in the province have doubled.

The murders have included about 25 itinerant salesmen shot in Arauca city, the provincial capital, 80 miles to the northeast; police officials suspect they constituted
an advance guard of paramilitary organizers and were killed by guerrillas. Last month in the town of Saravena, a door-to-door salesman, previously wounded, was
pulled from a hospital bed by members of the FARC and shot 15 times.

"This town's opinions are very divided," said Bernal, Tame's mayor. "Some are afraid of the arrogance and death these paramilitary groups bring, but others are
sympathetic because of the destruction and unemployment caused by the guerrillas."

The history of the guerrilla presence in Arauca is as complicated as in any other part of Colombia. The first guerrilla group to arrive was the ELN, Colombia's
second-largest Marxist insurgency, which now numbers about 5,000 members. The ELN was drawn by the financial possibilities presented by a cross-country oil
pipeline that began operating in 1986.

The guerrillas made money from the Cano Limon pipeline in two ways: They were paid not to blow it up, and they controlled companies hired for repair work after
they did attack it. A portion of roughly $4 billion in oil royalties, paid by Occidental Petroleum and the state-run Ecopetrol to the provincial government, flowed into
unions, government agencies and civic associations controlled by the ELN.

But military officials said the FARC, which has roughly 1,500 troops operating in Arauca and two neighboring provinces, began asking the ELN for a share about
two years ago as part of a national search for funds. When the ELN refused, the FARC began blowing up the pipeline, something it has done more than 120 times
this year alone. The pipeline has been inoperative for all but a month this year.

While competing for money, the FARC and ELN have formed military alliances here and in other strategic areas across the country to confront the army and
paramilitary forces. In recent weeks, the guerrillas joined to bomb the heavily guarded 18th Brigade headquarters in Arauca city.

The military has been growing in Arauca and now tops 5,000 soldiers. But on any given day, according to Gen. Pedro Lemus Pedraza, who runs the 18th Brigade,
80 percent of his resources are devoted to protecting the flow of oil.

As the army has guarded the pipeline, vast new tracts of coca crops have emerged. The FARC has started ordering local farmers to grow a maximum of six acres of
coca, according to government officials and sources close to the FARC. Coca is also appearing in other parts of the country for the first time -- in the Uraba region
in the north and Narino province to the southwest, among others -- bringing with it an increased guerrilla presence, matched by paramilitary forces who arrive in
reaction.

Most of the fields here have emerged between Tame and Saravena, another guerrilla stronghold. In the past year, officials say, the land under cultivation has risen
from 10,000 acres to more than 25,000 acres.

Reyes, the FARC commander, said the guerrilla group charges drug traffickers a fee only to transport the coca base from guerrilla-controlled areas, although the
Colombian government says the group is more deeply involved. But even if the FARC took only one cut from the coca proceeds, the crop in Arauca alone could
bring the guerrilla group $50 million a year.

"The army says that all of this coca is essentially moving up from the south because of Plan Colombia," said a government ombudsman who asked to remain
anonymous for safety reasons. "The spraying in [the southern province of] Putumayo is not killing the coca, just shifting it. So now we are a coca zone."

Despite the drug violence, Tame residents are most alarmed by indications of an impending paramilitary offensive similar to those that have recently swept through
nearby guerrilla strongholds. Since the middle of August, paramilitary forces from neighboring Casanare province have been operating on the outskirts. They have
established regular roadblocks, untouched by army forces stationed less than 30 minutes away, and assembled lists of the truckers, taxi drivers and others who pass
to and from Puerto Rondon, about 50 miles southeast of Tame. Those stopped are asked to bare their shoulders so the paramilitary troops can check for the telltale
sign of guerrilla membership: marks left by rifle straps.

The roadblocks appeared soon after the army's rapid deployment force withdrew from Tame after a two-month offensive against joint ELN and FARC forces.

"Why does the army always head out and find guerrillas, but never paramilitaries?" asked Juan Carlos Pacavita, a local musician who lives in a tin-shack village of
displaced families on the outskirts of town. "I really want to know this. These groups are 15 minutes away and heading into our town."

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