BY LETTA TAYLER
                      Newsday

                      BOGOTA, Colombia - Each time Patricia Perdomo learns that another bomb has pounded a guerrilla position in
                      the jungles of Colombia, she's terrified it may have struck her mother, a congresswoman whom the leftist rebels
                      have held hostage for the past five months.

                      ''I pray and I hope, but nothing stops the agony of not knowing if she'll come out alive,'' Perdomo said of her
                      mother, Consuelo González de Perdomo.

                      González is among at least 300 hostages -- including five members of Congress, a presidential candidate and 47
                      soldiers and police officers -- being held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

                      Hostages, some held for as long as five years, have become an increasingly potent weapon in the nearly four
                      decades of civil war.

                      Since President Andrés Pastrana ended three years of peace talks with FARC recently and ordered air raids on the
                      rebels' bases, ''There is a greater risk that the hostages will die,'' said Olga Lucia Gomez, co-director of the Free
                      Country Foundation, a support group for hostages' relatives.

                      Families have become increasingly fearful that their loved ones might be executed by the guerrillas, killed amid
                      combat, or might die from duress as their captors move them deeper into the jungle.

                      Pastrana halted talks with FARC after the group kidnapped prominent Sen. Jorge Gechen Turbay by forcing down
                      the airplane in which he was traveling.

                      On Saturday, FARC snatched Ingrid Betancourt, an environmental candidate in the presidential election scheduled
                      for May.

                      CONDEMNATIONS

                      U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the U.S. State Department and the European Union last week condemned the
                      kidnappings.

                      FARC said in a statement Monday it would free its captives only in exchange for FARC members held by
                      authorities -- an offer the government rejected.

                      That position angers many relatives of FARC's hostages. ''FARC works hard to get its members back. It even raids
                      prisons to set them free,'' said Lucrecia Torres, whose son, soldier Wagner Harvey Tapias Torres, 28, has been in
                      FARC's hands for five years. ``But the government is doing nothing to release people like my son, who risked his
                      life for his country.''

                      Last summer, the government swapped 13 FARC members for about 350 of the guerrillas' hostages. FARC had
                      sought the release of 14 members.

                      ''If the government had just given up one more FARC prisoner, our relatives might be free today,'' Perdomo said.

                      The military has rescued hundreds of kidnap victims over the years and says it knows where many are hidden.
                      The Bush administration's recent decision to share more intelligence information with Colombia also may help
                      locate captives.

                      But Free Country fears that the rebels are pushing captives into more remote locations within the
                      Switzerland-sized enclave that the government ceded to FARC in 1998 and now is trying to recapture by military
                      action.

                      Colombia had 3,041 people abducted last year, more than any other country, according to Free Country, and a
                      third of them by FARC.

                      Hostages have included schoolchildren, priests, politicians, business executives and journalists.

                      HOSTAGE DEATHS

                      Nearly 100 hostages died last year, including folk music promoter and former Culture Minister Araujo Noguera. In
                      the past four years, 38 U.S. citizens have been seized, three of whom were killed.

                      Most hostages are released for ransoms that help fund the guerrillas' drug-trafficking and military operations, the
                      National Police says. Those released included Alfonso Manrique, a Bogota oil executive who was marched through
                      more than 1,000 miles of rugged terrain from one camp to another during 18 months of FARC captivity in the
                      mid-1990s.

                      Authorities fear FARC will try to seize more politicians, increasing the tensions surrounding elections for Congress
                      next month and for president.

                      The government on Monday urged candidates to keep travel to a minimum. Still, Pastrana conceded that
                      Colombia is paying a price for such caution, saying that FARC ``is kidnapping democracy.''