A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLOMBIA
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This set the stage for the 1998 election, which was won by Andres Pastrana, the
son of a former Conservative president. During the campaign, millions of
Colombians marched for peace, exhausted by the ongoing war with the
guerrillas and the massacres perpetrated by the paras. Pastrana promised to
open talks with the FARC; a member of his campaign was photographed visiting
Tirofijo before election day.
After the Colombian army ceded territory the size of Switzerland to the FARC in
the llanos, the peace talks began in January 1999. Public discussions on a variety
of social themes were televised, with international visitors observing and
participating. Despite the dialogue, armed conflict actually intensified: the army
was again in no mood to negotiate, while the FARC leadership seemed to be
using peace talks as a way to strengthen themselves militarily — the FARC had
just lost Urabá to the paras. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration in the U.S., in
consultation with the Pastrana government, designed "Plan Colombia," a
comprehensive program to fight the drug war. Although crop substitution
schemes and judicial reform are part of the Plan, by far the largest amount of
funding goes to the police and military — for instance, more than half of the
billion dollars appropriated by the U.S. Congress for Plan Colombia in 2000 paid
for helicopters. President Pastrana saw the Plan as a way of strengthening his
hand at the bargaining table with the FARC.
Outside of a few minor agreements on the ground rules of the ongoing conflict,
little came of the three years of negotiations. Talks ended in February 2002
during another presidential campaign. A few days after, former senator, anti-
corruption crusader, and French citizen Ingrid Betancourt, who was running for
president, was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas when she tried to enter the
recently-ended demilitarized zone. She was one of many politicians taken by the
FARC at the time, kept in captivity alongside captured soldiers and, in February
2003, three U.S. contractors whose drug reconnaissance plane had been shot
down by the guerrillas.