When negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas went on hold yet again last week, just 24 hours before negotiations were scheduled to begin, few Colombians believed either the official explanations for delay or the new date, set for next Tuesday.
Even before this latest postponement of the talks, the credibility of the FARC and confidence in the government's handling of the peace process, had both hit a low point. In nationwide polling, 75 per cent of Colombians said they did not believe the rebels intended either to end their 40-year insurgency or to abandon their plans to topple the government and install a socialist regime by force.
Two-thirds said they had no faith the peace talks would end the war, and 54 per cent said they were planning to leave the country. (Sixty-five thousand middle and upper class professionals have already done so in the last four months and 300,000 are expected to go by year's end.)
President Andres Pastrana came to power with an overwhelming mandate to negotiate a political solution to the war, but his best and boldest initiatives have foundered on the rock of FARC intransigence. Now, for the first time, Colombians long accustomed to living precariously, are afraid their country may finally be sliding over the edge.
Only one year ago, just before he took office, when Mr Pastrana went alone to the FARC's clandestine jungle headquarters to meet the legendary 68-year-old FARC leader, Tiro Fijo, (Sure Shot), to find out what it would take to get peace talks started, such scepticism would have been unthinkable.
In those days, Colombians were marching and voting and lobbying for peace, and grassroots peace assemblies sprouted in every village and town across the land. It seemed then that a watershed moment in Colombia's endless political violence had been reached.
But last year's peace movement has evaporated like a mirage, leaving no trace of its brief passage across the political landscape. In the last six months, as the FARC has come down from the mountains and onto the nation's television screens, much of its behaviour has frightened and alienated Colombians.
This has been particularly the case within the demilitarised zone, where - at the FARC's request - Mr Pastrana evacuated the army and police in order to provide a secure environment for the talks. The DMZ is the size of Switzerland. It contains five small towns and 200,000 inhabitants.
The expectation was that this so-called "Peace Laboratory" would offer the FARC a showcase for its ideas about local government, allow it an opportunity to present its alternative vision of the new Colombia it wanted to build out of the negotiations, and give the commandants experience in integrating with the municipal authorities and building mutual trust. Things did not work out that way.
Before long, the guerrillas started rustling cattle, forcibly conscripting schoolchildren and imposing their own form of revolutionary discipline and justice. More than anything, more even than the guerrillas' connection to drugs, this behaviour has de-legitimised the FARC and the peace process in Colombian eyes.
The war has been going on for so long that much in Colombian society has changed radically since it began in the l950s. Industrialisation and drugs have each created social revolutions, so it seems almost impossible that the basic causes which drove the insurgency all those years ago should still exist.
Yet they do, and they have survived the passage of time lamentably unchanged: the conditions of extreme poverty and landlessless; elite attitudes towards poor people; the violent persecution of all who ever tried to organise politically around the needs of poor people - there has been no change there.
Holding these factors in place, the larger element which perpetuates these brutal and brutalising aspects of Colombian life - a political system constructed around the refusal to permit the expression of any legal opposition to itself.
Mr Pastrana is the first Colombian president for 50 years who has shown that he understands the historical and the cultural causes of this apparently endless war. The negotiating agenda which he signed with the FARC is a radical document implying profound reforms of Colombia's politics and economy and its social and judicial institutions, including army and police.
Mr Pastrana has been busy mobilising international support, from the White House to Cuba, to Japan and the EU, to get Colombia's social and economic transformation started. Two weeks ago he even persuaded Mr Richard Grasso, president of the New York Stock Exchange, to meet the FARC leaders and give them a "tutorial" on the benefits of modern capitalism.
This peace strategy centres on a simultaneous attempt to eliminate drug cultivation and political violence by enlisting the collaboration of the guerrillas to eradicate drug crops in their territories manually, in return for mammoth investment in infrastructure and alternative crops and an end to Washington's environmentally damaging and militarised aerial fumigation programme.
It is far from certain Mr Pastrana can deliver, but those who know the FARC leaders believe the main reason Tiro Fijo wants to end the war is indeed to sever the FARC's financial dependence on drugs and regain control over a generation of field commanders in his 15,000 strong peasant army who have been contaminated by easy drug money.
Yet in spite of its agreement to negotiate, the FARC, its guerrilla rivals in the ELN, and its bitter enemies, the right-wing paramilitaries, have all increased their involvement with drugs. The FARC has also reportedly added a further 2,000 fighters to its ranks in the last six months, while rejecting all calls for a ceasefire and a moratorium on kidnapping.
Colombians are now giving up hope. The economy is in a tailspin; the peso is falling; unemployment tops 20 per cent and people are increasingly desperate from hunger; the war has generated a humanitarian crisis similar in scale to Kosovo, with close to a million and a half internally displaced people; in recent weeks, refugees fleeing across the Venezuelan border and FARC incursions in Panama warn of the inevitable internationalisation of the conflict.
Colombians yearn for a reprieve from the weekly "massacres foretold" by paramilitaries and guerrillas in undefended villages; the selective assassinations by rightwing death squads of their intellectuals and human rights defenders; the repetitive slaughter of their young soldiers, thrown into battle by incompetent commanders to be cut to pieces by the most powerful guerrilla army seen in Latin America since the heyday of the Salvadoran FMLN.
Since the most recent spectacular kidnappings by the ELN, something seems to have snapped. Colombia is already very close to being a failed state, a country without effective laws, where the government cannot get its orders obeyed by its own generals and is in consequence helpless to protect its citizens from murderous paramilitaries who continually act in varying degrees of complicity with the army.
The vacuum, where official power should be, is rapidly being filled by warlords of the right and the left. Barring some miraculous change of heart by the FARC, the long dark night of total civil war which waits in the wings is inevitable - and all because Mr Pastrana has come on the scene a decade too late. In the last week, a new FARC offensive, mounted from the DMZ, has come within 15 miles of Bogota and now rages throughout 10 south-eastern provinces - one-third of the national territory.
For those who have questioned the FARC's commitment to a political solution, the answer now seems clear. A majority of Colombians no longer doubt that the FARC is using the peace process to milk the government's commitment for its own purposes. It is another tragedy foretold.
The Colombian military yesterday proclaimed victory over the FARC offensive, saying more than 200 rebel insurgents had died in four days of fighting.
Ana Carrigan is the author of The Palace of Justice, a study of democracy in Colombia.