The Colombian region where 34 peasants were massacred was long the site of dozens of similar killings, showing the government has a long way to go to control it.

BY FRANCES ROBLES

BOGOTA - La Gabarra has always been a bloody place.

Flanked by jungle and the border with Venezuela, the region in northeastern Colombia has seen hundreds of its people killed in fighting between leftist guerrillas, rightist paramilitaries and, less often, government security forces.

Another 34 workers in a coca plantation were killed in cold blood Tuesday, the worst massacre since hard-line President Alvaro Uribe was elected in 2002. The massacre illustrated how far Colombia has to go before it restores law and order to its far-flung regions.

Authorities branded the slaughter as the work of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, a leftist guerrilla eager to wrest control of the coca-producing region from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, an illegal paramilitary group known as AUC.

A WARNING

But Tuesday's killings were more than a drug turf war. For Colombia, it was a warning that government peace talks with the AUC set to begin July 1 could leave the road open for the FARC to launch offensives and recover territories it had lost to the AUC.

''This massacre means the guerrillas are there, still have the ability to take over territory and will fight tooth and nail,'' military analyst Alfredo Rangel said. 'It shows the government does not have control over those rural areas. Any place the `paras' abandon is subject to be retaken by guerrillas.''

DIFFERENT VIEW

Uribe saw the killings a different way.

''How sad that they slaughtered these peasants,'' he said Wednesday. ``These are the guerrillas that wanted to be considered a political organization? No. That's just vicious terrorism.''

Uribe's Democratic Security project, designed to bring back law and order to Colombia, has deployed security forces to virtually all of the 150 municipalities that lacked any police presence when he took office.

Even La Gabarra, an AUC stronghold since its fighters moved into the area in the late 1990s, killings hundreds of alleged guerrillas and suspected sympathizers, has recently seen lots of military presence.

ENTRENCHED VIOLENCE

But Rangel cautions against excessive optimism, noting that there are places in Colombia where violence was so deeply entrenched that it will take more than new police stations to quell.

According to government human rights prosecutors, the Catatumbo region where La Gabarra is located was the site of 14 massacres with about 130 victims between May 29 and Aug. 21 of 1999 alone. In the state's capital, Cúcuta, the murder rate jumped 87 percent between the first half of 2001 and 2002.

AID TRUCKS BURNED

When the Red Cross tried bringing aid to people fleeing the violence last year, armed groups set the trucks ablaze.

''Since 1999 there have been some 800 selective murders in that area, dozens of massacres and they've expelled 30,000 people from their homes,'' said Gloria Flórez, director of Minga, a human rights group. ``People have lost their belongings, their ranches.

"It's a human rights disaster.''