On the road with the FARC.

• Author: Dudley, Steven

On a foggy morning in mid-February, a single-engine Cessna Caravan 208 carrying four U.S. military contractors and one Colombian army pilot was flying over the southern jungles of Colombia. The contractors were on a reconnaissance mission--searching out coca fields and the secret camps of the hemisphere's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC.

As jobs went, this seemingly dangerous mission was fairly routine for these experienced contractors. The pilot would climb through the thick cloud cover, and the contractors would use high-powered aerial cameras to photograph drug-producing areas allegedly under the control of the rebels. The U.S. and Colombian authorities would use this recon to fumigate the guerrillas' lifeline, the coca crops, and perhaps stage some military assault on the group. The United States also uses infrared technology on the airplanes to locate insurgent command posts.

Somewhere in this flight, however, something went terribly wrong, and the Colombian pilot had to crash-land into the side of a mountain. By the time the authorities arrived at the site, they found the plane riddled with rounds from an M-60 machine gun, with all five of the men missing. Two of them, one American and the other Colombian, were later found dead. They'd been shot in the head and the chest. Three others had vanished.

Since that day, the United States has sent in more than 100 Special Forces soldiers, and the total number of U.S. personnel in Colombia has briefly climbed above 400 for the first time since people started keeping tabs. But rescue efforts have faltered. In late March, another U.S. recon plane smashed into the side of a mountain just miles from where the first went down. The second crash killed the three U.S. contractors aboard.

The sudden loss of life has turned a boondoggle into a quagmire. The United States has sent more than $2 billion to Colombia in the last four years, most of it in the form of military hardware, intelligence equipment, and training. But during that time period, they've lost several airplanes and close to thirty helicopters. What's more, the aid has had little real impact on the rebels, the primary target of this military assistance.

The man thought to have captured the three U.S. contractors resembles an elf. He has a little round head, short legs, and a skull-hugging haircut. He likes to wear a camouflage baseball hat, and he gives orders in a rubbery, monotone voice. His soldiers look a lot like he does: sturdy peasant farmers who have filtered into the ranks of the FARC by the thousands, especially in the last few years. The rebel group's membership has climbed to close to 20,000 troops.

When I last saw him, Jose Benito Cabrera, better known as "Fabian Ramirez," walked around his jungle camp with the slow, methodical pace of a general.

He was obviously not in a hurry. Nor was his "movement," the name he and the rest of the guerrillas like to use for the FARC. He was happy, even jovial during those days I spent with him.

It was late February 2002. Fabian had recently been promoted to the Estado Mayor, the twenty-seven-member command structure of the guerrillas. And his troops had just played a major role in breaking up a three-year-long peace process the FARC had been carrying out with the government. A week earlier, a special unit under Fabian's command had hijacked a commercial airplane, forced it to land on a major highway, kidnapped one of the passengers (a prominent senator), then streaked into a 16,000-square-mile area the government had handed over to the guerrillas to hold the peace talks. The audacious act had been carried out with James Bond-like precision: In order for the plane to land safely, guerrillas on the ground had cut some of the trees on the side of the road.

One day later, in a national address to the nation, Colombia's President Andres Pastrana called off the peace process. The president said the FARC was using the 16,000-square-mile area to stockpile weapons, hold kidnap victims, run guns-for-drugs deals, and launch attacks on neighboring villages. And he was right. Following his speech, the president ordered bombing raids and sent thousands of troops to the area amidst great fanfare and press coverage.

But Fabian's soldiers seemed as if they'd been preparing for this for several years. Within hours after the triumphant return of Colombia's military, Fabian's sizable group of urban and rural militias had successfully shut down electricity, water, and transportation in the area. The province was paralyzed for weeks, and the military commander in charge of the region resigned in disgust.

As if to put an exclamation point on his operation, Fabian's troops had kidnapped Ingrid Betancourt as she drove through the war-torn area under Fabian's control. Betancourt was at the time a presidential candidate who'd fought for years for some of the same things that Fabian had declared he would die for when he'd joined the FARC as a teenager. For Fabian, Betancourt's...