COLOMBIA: 'The People's Army' in Colombia is planning to change its tactics, reports Hugh O'Shaughnessy from La Dorada in southern Colombia.
The FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - the People's Army, aims to take its guerrilla war against capitalism in general, and Conservative President Alvaro Uribe, in particular, out of the countryside and into the towns in the next few months.
That is the word from messengers who met FARC members in the jungles of the Putumayo, on Colombia's border with Ecuador, a fortnight ago.
If true, as recent bomb blasts and an attempt on President Uribe's life suggest it will be, this country, which has been at war with itself since 1948 and sees 72 of its citizens dying violently every day, will soon see more bloodshed than in more than half a century.
This is the oldest and most tenacious of Latin America's guerrilla groups with perhaps 15,000 fighters. It is starting a difficult transformation at a time when it is being squeezed mercilessly by President Uribe, who this month celebrates his first anniversary in office. He is content that the public opinion polls - for what they are worth in a country with few telephones and many illiterates - show approval for his hard, US-backed anti-guerrilla line and his preoccupation with security.
Bogota, the capital, is certainly a fraction more relaxed than it was two years ago. In 2001 few of those with a car sallied out on the surrounding highways for pleasure.
Today the Bogotanos think it rather chic to join the caravanas which are escorted by army trucks and helicopters to nearby cities, shielding them from FARC's attempts at kidnapping and ransom.
The profits the guerrillas once got from pesca magica or magic fishing - the seizing of a vehicle and the shaking down of the occupants for what they had in their pockets - is not what it was.
But here where a century ago Roger Casement investigated the conditions of slavery imposed on the rubber tappers, there is no relaxation. It is tense. La Dorada has been taken over from the FARC by the "paracos" or paramilitary death squads which operate in close collaboration with the army. They, not the FARC, now control the income from the hills covered with delicate lime-green coca bushes, whose leaves are the raw material for cocaine.
Father Nixon Herrera, the young and athletic parish priest, remembers the battle two years ago. Then his church was pressed into service as a casualty station and a morgue as the battle raged. As the paracos seemed to weaken, he recalls, the army helicopters roared overhead to ensure that their allies finally won the day against the guerrillas. Along the road great black burn marks show where the guerrillas blew up the oil pipeline.
The electricity pylons have become alternative FARC targets.
The FARC has been expelled from here and from the extensive territory around San Vicente de Caguan, north of where President Uribe's predecessor allowed them to congregate unmolested.
The force came together in 1953 as a peasant group of no more than 27 fighters committed to seizing and defending land for those who tilled it.
Now, as the rural population shrinks and the cities swell, FARC is having to transform itself if it wants to maintain the dream of taking power nationally.
Pedro Antonio Marmn, alias Manuel Marulanda, alias Tirofijo or Sureshot, is the commander today as he was then.
His guerrilleros - and these days also his guerrilleras - maintain they are practising grass-root revolutionaries fighting in concert with, but never subject to, the Marxist principles of the Colombian Communist Party.
Apart from the autonomous groups of six in a UTC or a tactical combat unit, the lowest formation is the 12-person squad; the guerrilla is a group of two squads; the company is two guerrillas; the 110-person column is two or more companies while a Frente or front, of which there are five, is two or more columns.
In addition there are two "joint commands" in areas of less activity.
The organisation is commanded by a 25-member central general staff with its secretariat. The guerrilla recruit, who is unlikely to have finished primary education, ordinarily joins up for life. There are no pensions.
The FARC is more sophisticated than in 1953: it is also much richer. It can afford good medical care for its fighters. Comandante Fernando Caicedo tells of a young fighter who was missing many teeth when he joined up. He chose the dangerous option of deserting as soon as he obtained the dental plate he coveted.
FARC's annual income of many millions of euro is reliably estimated as coming from extortion (40 per cent) and from kidnappings (10 per cent).
But about half comes from levies on the cocaine fields which flourish hereabouts, despite US efforts to destroy them by aerial spraying of fierce toxins.
The guerrillas are widely criticised for recruiting fighters under 15.
Although they admit this, arguing that many of these children are orphans, the continuing practice is damaging to them, especially at a time when many sense that guerrillas have lost their political drive and theirs has become just another job.
Country women in the ranks, and almost half the FARC's strength is female, claim the guerrilla life is preferable to that of being a farmer's wife in the wilderness.
"We are provided with everything from food and uniforms to sanitary towels," says a 19-year- old who used to work harvesting coca leaves.
On the other hand there are complaints of lingering machismo: the men are allowed to find partners outside the FARC, women are not.
The extension of the campaign into the cities is surely Marulanda's greatest challenge. Will the country cousins from the forests ever come to terms with cities and townees and vice versa? The message from the FARC is that there is no alternative. And anyway, it claims, it will continue to be able to draw freely on the urban experience of allies in the Basque Country and Ireland.