Protesters Lift Colombia Roadblocks

another possible headline

Monday February 19 8:17 PM ET

Protesters Lift Colombia Roadblocks

By Ibon Villelabeitia

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - After a tense stand-off with the army, thousands of protesters on Monday dismantled crippling roadblocks set up four days ago to oppose government plans to cede an enclave to leftist rebels for peace talks.

Protest leaders warned they are willing to retake roads if President Andres Pastrana ignores pleas to meet them and proceeds with a land-for-peace deal to temporarily grant an area in northern Colombia to the country's second-largest rebel force.

``We are removing the roadblocks and letting traffic go through but we want the president to meet with us,'' Rafael Reyes, who identified himself as a protest leader, told Caracol TV station.

Pastrana, struggling to end a four-decade-old war pitting rebels against the army and outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups, hopes the enclave will lure the National Liberation Army (ELN) into peace talks.

A similar land-for-peace deal struck two years ago launched dialogues in a vast jungle area in southern Colombia with a different group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the hemisphere's largest and most powerful guerrilla army.

But plans to cede control of the 1,560-square-mile (4,000-square-km) zone in Bolivar district to the Cuban-inspired ELN has run into angry opposition from locals, plunging Pastrana's peace campaign into a fresh crisis.

Fueled by the booming drug trade, the South American nation's war kills an average of 3,500 civilians every year.

Area Mayors In Talks With Peace Commissioner

The mayors of San Pablo and Cantagallo, the two rural villages within the proposed ELN area, traveled on Monday to Bogota to hold talks with the government's peace commissioner.

Some local residents fear leaving the ELN to range freely in the area will bring a repetition of alleged abuses by the FARC in their enclave, including kidnappings and recruitment.

Pastrana, who has made peace his priority, has insisted that tighter rules will guarantee the law is obeyed.

Television images on Monday showed trucks and other vehicles driving slowly along newly cleared roads that link the capital Bogota with the Atlantic coast.

Protesters, apparently deterred by heavily armed troops and riot police dispatched to the area, began to gather their belongings and go home.

``Traffic has been restored and there was no need to use force,'' police inspector Gen. Alfonso Leon Arellano told reporters in La Lizama, the center of the protest.

The government has accused the protesters, who have choked off the delivery of goods to some key cities, of being coca growers opposing drug-eradication programs and supporters of right-wing death squads in the region.

Rights monitors say the 8,000-strong paramilitaries, responsible for the deaths of scores of peasants, have links to the army. Leftist rebels have pressed Pastrana to crack down on paramilitaries as a condition for peace talks.

For two weeks, the government has been fumigating in the region some of the thousands of acres (hectares) of coca fields -- the raw material for cocaine -- which is the armed groups' war chest.

Colombia produces two-thirds of the world's cocaine, earning the country's increasingly powerful and well-armed warring factions hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Last year, Pastrana won $1 billion in mostly military aid from Washington for his ``Plan Colombia,'' a carrot-and-stick plan to destroy drug plantations and to fund development programs to woo poor peasants away from the drug trade.