BY TIM JOHNSON

 BOGOTA, Colombia -- The appalling story of a rural woman who was blown apart
 by a bomb placed around her neck after she refused to meet the extortion
 demands of Marxist guerrillas triggered a tidal wave of indignation around
 Colombia on Tuesday.

 ``We are horrified. We are indignant, but most of all we're determined to put an
 end to this barbarity,'' President Andres Pastrana said as he suspended a round
 of peace talks with the nation's largest rebel group set for May 29.

 Even in a nation besieged by murders and violence, the terrifying photos of a
 pitiful Elvia Cortes, 55, rigged with a necklace bomb moments before her death on
 Monday provoked a cry of anger from outraged Colombians.

 ``This was a totally savage act,'' said Attorney General Jaime Bernal Cuellar.

 A spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, denied
 the rebel group was behind the bombing. But few Colombians seemed to believe
 the denial, and the bombing may set back peace efforts with the group. It was the
 first time Pastrana had called off talks in the 18 months since negotiations
 started.

 The incident began at 4 a.m. Monday when three uniformed men broke into
 Cortes' rural farm near Chiquinquira, 55 miles north of Bogota, and ordered her to
 pay a 15-million peso ($7,500) extortion they had demanded a week earlier, police
 said. Tired of previous guerrilla shakedowns, she refused.

 The assailants then placed a tube containing explosives around her neck and
 rigged it to a detonator belt around her waist, authorities said. They demanded
 that her family pay the extortion within hours, or they would set off the bomb
 remotely.

 Alerted by neighbors, police and military bomb experts arrived at her home and
 moved her to an open field where they tried frantically to remove the device.

 Tragically, amid the intermittent prayers and sobs of the victim, the bomb
 suddenly exploded around 1 p.m. She was blown to pieces, one police officer was
 killed, and four others wounded.

 Reflecting the national mood of indignation and fury, the Roman Catholic bishop of
 Chiquinquira, Monsignor Hector Gutierrez Pabon, suggested that Pastrana break
 off talks with the FARC, an insurgency that has been fighting since 1964 and
 roams across nearly half the South American nation.

 ``If it is proven that the guerrillas did this, we must leave the negotiating table,''
 Gutierrez said, ``because they are fooling us. They are making the country lose
 credibility.''

 Pastrana's peace efforts are increasingly unpopular among Colombia's 40 million
 citizens, many of whom believe rebels are negotiating in bad faith.

 The FARC, for its part, is increasingly audacious. The group announced in late
 April that it would step up an extortion and kidnapping campaign, warning that
 any Colombian with assets over $1 million must pay ``taxes'' to the group.

 The armed forces commander, Gen. Fernando Tapias, said authorities had
 obtained extortion letters to Cortes from the FARC's 11th Front, proving that the
 guerrillas were behind the bombing.

 ``They will not acknowledge -- now or ever -- that they are behind this,'' Tapias
 said.

 Indeed, FARC spokesman Carlos Alonso Lozada described the necklace
 bombing as ``an outrage'' and said only ``people with a psychopathic mentality''
 could be responsible. He said the culprits seek to sabotage peace talks.

 Pastrana, clearly believing the FARC was behind the death of ``the humble
 woman from Chiquinquira,'' said he would not go ahead with talks on illicit drug
 crops and the environment with the FARC late this month, to which delegates
 from more than 20 countries had been invited.

 ``The peoples of the world would not understand, in light of recent events, that
 they were invited to participate in such a peace process,'' Pastrana said.

 While the Pastrana government has established an agenda on how to end the
 FARC's 36-year-old war, repeated delays have stalled progress.

 Acts of terror increasingly mark Colombia's civil conflict. Right-wing militias
 commonly behead or slaughter peasants they believe support leftist rebels, while
 both the FARC and a secondary leftist insurgency, the National Liberation Army
 (ELN), resort to bombings and avoid military confrontation.

 The ELN is blamed for bombing more than 200 high-tension pylons in the past
 year, threatening the nation's electric grid.

 Last week, members of a FARC squad pulled six people off a bus in central Huila
 state and executed them, later acknowledging a mistake and offering a small
 recompense.

 Pastrana referred to those murders in his talk at a police academy, and said that
 ``an imperative theme'' of future talks with the FARC will be a cease-fire and the
 ``definitive end to kidnapping and extortion.''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald