SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia (AP) -- In the main square of
                  this ranching town ceded by the government to Colombia's biggest rebel army
                  six months ago, Comandante Jairo convenes townspeople for weekly
                  informational meetings.

                  Before addressing the crowd, the 46-year-old local security chief for the
                  Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, comes to attention,
                  dropping the butt of his assault rifle to the podium.

                  Jairo's aide-de-camp is rigid beside him. So are the teen-age rebels peppered
                  throughout the audience.

                  The FARC's anthem, a distorted tape recording, blares through loudspeakers
                  decreeing: "Socialist the future will be."

                  The green-fatigued guerrillas sing along. The few hundred San Vicente
                  residents do not. They stand silently, expressionless, many with arms crossed.

                  Stoic faces betray neither affinity nor antipathy as Jairo describes the
                  road-paving projects on which guerrillas and residents have worked
                  shoulder-to-shoulder.

                  The rebel officer lectures parents on preventing their children from being
                  seduced into informing for the guerrillas' paramilitary foes. The FARC
                  detained a suspected turncoat in early April and has shown the 18-year-old's
                  videotaped confession twice on the square.

                  There's never any give-and-take in these gatherings.

                  "The people attend because they're afraid," a local rancher says. He and other
                  townspeople say the rebels have threatened to shut down people's businesses
                  if they don't. "They have no compassion," a cafe owner says. Both insist on
                  being quoted anonymously.

                  President Andres Pastrana decided in late April to extend the government's
                  troop pullout that began in November from a Switzerland-sized region that
                  includes San Vicente, and rebel and government negotiators defined a
                  far-reaching agenda Thursday "to construct a new state based on social
                  justice."

                  Pastrana's bold gamble, however, is testing the country's patience.

                  Most Colombians respect the FARC out of fear, but see it largely as a peasant
                  army out of touch with the world on the cusp of the 21st century.

                  Born 35 years ago but deeply rooted in a half-century of peasant discontent,
                  the FARC is a curious phenomenon.

                   The hemisphere's most potent insurgency derives its strength less from the
                   support of Colombia's dirt-poor peasantry than from the anarchy of this drug-
                   producing, corruption-plagued nation where governments have traditionally been
                   weak and political intolerance strong.

                  Its ideology is ostensibly Marxist; its political platform is vague. The FARC's
                  older cadres are mostly disaffected peasants embittered by generations-old
                  grievances. Its recruits are mostly illiterate teen-agers from Colombia's most
                  backward corners.

                  In this verdant southern region, the FARC has alienated much of the very
                  population for whom it says it is fighting.

                  The rebels are taxing commerce, rustling cattle, forcibly recruiting adolescents,
                  obliging adults to undergo military training and conducting midnight searches of
                  homes and hotel rooms, inhabitants and Roman Catholic clergy say.

                  In January, the FARC removed the government-appointed local prosecutor.
                  Now it has turned on openly critical priests.

                  "The people are very frightened. It's very difficult to live here," says the Rev.
                  Rufino Perez, who was transferred out of San Vicente in early May after
                  rebel complaints.

                  To negotiate an end to 35 years of low-intensity conflict, the FARC must find
                  common ground with Colombia's urban, jet-setting elite.

                  But even if that elite -- benefitting from one of Latin America's widest gulfs
                  between rich and poor -- proves willing to embrace the land reform and
                  increased social spending demanded by the FARC, many analysts are
                  skeptical the rebels can capitalize.

                  Cynthia McClintock of George Washington University thinks the rebels'
                  "personal lack of knowledge of the modern world" makes it difficult for them
                  to understand whether their demands are even feasible.

                  Even if the FARC were to give up its arms -- and rebel commanders say they
                  have no such intention even if a peace accord is reached _ many analysts
                  question whether those leaders could make the transition to politicians.

                  "I don't feel that they really have the skills to participate. These middle-level
                  cadres have never been part of Colombian society," McClintock says.

                  In its first two decades, the FARC was closely tied ideologically to other
                  Cuban-inspired Latin American rebel movements.

                  Nearly all those movements are gone, as armed groups. They made peace and
                  took up politics in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Others were
                  defeated.

                  In chaotic Colombia, though, the rebels "developed a kind of armed survival,"
                  says Enrique Santos Calderon, an influential columnist for the newspaper El
                  Tiempo.

                  "And now, being a guerrilla has developed into a way of life for a segment of
                  marginalized peasantry -- and for the marginalized of the cities. For them,
                  joining the rebels has become a form of social and economic advancement."

                  As the FARC lost outside support with the collapse of communism and the
                  Soviet bloc, it was obliged to become self-sufficient.

                  To sustain a fighting force grown to 15,000 men, the FARC compromised its
                  ideals as it came to rely increasingly on ransom kidnappings, extortion and the
                  drug trade, a revenue gold mine in a country that exports more than 80 percent
                  of the world's cocaine.

                  Colombian police say the FARC earns dlrs 500 million a year from taxing drug
                  cultivators and traffickers -- with some commanders of its more than 60
                  "fronts" directly involved in the enterprise.

                  Rebel leaders deny that.

                  "It is not true that the FARC traffics," says Raul Reyes, a member of the
                  rebels' seven-member ruling junta. "The FARC knows perfectly well that drug
                  trafficking is a malady that affects the world's people and particularly its
                  youth."

                  The rebels' leader, 68-year-old Manuel Marulanda, has offered to cooperate in
                  development projects to help wean Colombian peasants off drug crops.

                  But until then, FARC commanders say, his fighters will continue to fire on
                  police aircraft involved in coca crop eradication, just as they still attack police
                  and military posts even while negotiating peace.

                  Marulanda has built up a formidable army that has consistently trounced
                  Colombia's poorly trained, mostly conscript army since the mid-1990s. But he
                  is also a reticent mountain man, a peasant said to have never left Colombia
                  and to have last stepped foot in a city more than 30 years ago.

                  On Jan. 7, the day peace talks were formally inaugurated in San Vicente,
                  Marulanda was a last-minute no-show. He left a chagrined Pastrana sitting
                  alone, empty chair beside him, while a deputy read a speech that was little
                  more than a recounting of past grievances.

                  FARC commanders were perplexed when told they had missed a golden
                  opportunity to show themselves in tune with the times, to make a bold
                  proposal.

                  The FARC also fails to grasp why Washington decided to stop speaking to the
                  group after rebels executed three American Indian rights activists in March.
                  The rebels have apologized for the actions of their "rogue" unit, but refuse to
                  turn over the killers to civilian authorities.

                  "It's a fact, and nothing more can be done about it," Reyes says.

                  Since the peace talks began in January, the rebel's contact with the outside
                  world has grown exponentially.

                  Marulanda and his negotiators have met often since January with Colombian
                  business leaders, politicians and even news directors. All make the pilgrimage
                  from Bogota to these steamy hills where cattle graze and palm trees grow.

                  All are impressed by what a good listener Marulanda is. But many are
                  disconcerted by their reception.

                  In several cases, luminaries of Colombia's "ruling class" say they were met
                  with half-joking greetings from rebel commanders: "We've been looking for
                  you."

                  That's a chilling welcome in a country with the world's highest kidnapping rate,
                  where ransom-seeking guerrillas are responsible for about two-thirds of the
                  abductions.

                  Marulanda met in April with Jorge Visbal, president of Colombia's cattle
                  ranchers association, which says the FARC kidnapped 70 ranchers last year,
                  killing 15.

                  "They have this centuries-old idea of agricultural reform. They have these
                  ideas from another age. They don't live in today's globalized world," says
                  Visbal, who insists there is little wealth to redistribute in the countryside.

                  The FARC's No. 2 leader and field marshal, Jorge Briceno, was brought up a
                  peasant and may understand little of the ways of the global market. But he's
                  racked up an impressive string of victories since late 1995 and holds more than
                  350 captured police officers and soldiers.

                  The FARC may not pose a threat to Colombia's major cities. But it controls
                  huge amounts of the countryside. And Briceno has a clear idea of what gives
                  him his power.

                  "If we don't have guns we aren't respected. Not even you would come here to
                  listen to us," he told reporters near San Vicente in January in a field with
                  hundreds of FARC fighters. "You come because we have guns, right?"

                    Copyright 1999 The Associated Press.