Reuters, 05.24.03, 5:03 PM ET By Missy Ryan

CUSCO, Peru, May 24 (Reuters) - Latin American leaders urged the United Nations on Saturday to do more to stop rebel violence in Colombia, but stopped short of endorsing outside military action in the Andean nation's bloody four-decade war.

"We presidents of the Rio Group have agreed to ask the U.N. Secretary General (Kofi Annan) to call on the (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) FARC to halt violence and ... walk toward peace," Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo told reporters.

But Toledo cautioned that the joint declaration, signed at the end of an annual summit of 19 members in the mountain city of Cusco, did not mean that Latin America had decided it would commit to helping Colombia militarily.

"Peace is our concern. ... We should be facilitators and there was no decision about external forces participating in Colombia. The issue did not even come up," he said.

But that had appeared to be a possibility for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who said a day earlier that if the FARC did not follow the U.N. urging, "we would have to seek another remedy, which should entail all nations helping Colombia defeat terrorism militarily."

Still, it was not entirely clear whether the action the Rio Group wants the United Nations to take would mean a resolution urging a cease-fire and peace talks, or something else.

Thousands of people are killed every year in Colombia as the FARC and other armed groups battle security forces and each other. The Uribe government has promised a hard military line against rebels and the drug trafficking that it says finances rebel arms purchases.

The United Nations already has a small role in Colombia. Shortly after Uribe took office in August, he invited a U.N. special envoy to facilitate peace talks. There has been little progress in the negotiations.

SUPPORT NOT UNANIMOUS

Because of the many U.S. interventions in Latin America over the past 150 years, many Latin American countries bristle at any talk of intervention from the United States or elsewhere.

The United States has a presence in Colombia. It has poured about $2 billion into the anti-drug war in Colombia, the world's top cocaine producer, in the last two years.

One of those opposing a larger U.N. role in Colombia was Venezuela's left-leaning Presidents Hugo Chavez, who warned it could set a perilous precedent.

"What this (declaration) establishes is very dangerous. ... It opens the door to something much more serious than a war: (foreign) intervention," said Chavez, who, nevertheless, signed the declaration "with reservations."

"Never on this continent has this been proposed. For example in Peru, which had a rebel problem, no one proposed that ... a multinational force come in to occupy," he added.

The summit concluded with a resolution focusing on political party reform and new financial mechanisms to secure investment, give more access to credit and fight poverty. Leaders signed the resolution, which will be translated into the Andean language of Quechua, at an Inca fortress as locals bearing golden shields stood guard.

Latin America may be emerging from economic woes that led the regional economy to a 0.6 percent contraction in 2002, but the United Nations says even projected growth of near 2 percent in 2003 will not slash troubling poverty rates.

Toledo said that Rio Group nations would look to Brazil and Mexico -- the region's biggest economies -- to speak for Latin America at a June Group of Eight nations meeting.

"The industrialized world needs to know we believe in democracy and governance ... and that globalization means we all play by the same rules," Toledo said.

Posted on Fri, May. 23, 2003 EDUARDO GALLARDO Associated Press

CUZCO, Peru - Latin American leaders on Friday considered a plan for stepped up U.N. efforts to end to Colombia's four-decade guerrilla rebellion.

Presidents and government officials from 19 nations gathering in this historic city in the high Andes - the former center of Inca culture - focused on a peace proposal for Colombia that also included greater cooperation among Latin nations.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the plan asks that the United Nations arrange a cease-fire between the government the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, then bring the rebels into "serious peace talks."

"If the guerrillas do not accept (the plan), then let the entire world help us end this conflict. All countries could help Colombia to defeat militarily terrorism," Uribe said.

Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, opening the Group of Rio summit, announced the plan as part of an all-out war against terrorism and drug trafficking, which he said seriously threatens democracy in Latin America.

The countries were represented by 11 presidents and eight vice presidents and foreign ministers.

Uribe warned that guerrilla violence was already spilling across the borders of Colombia's neighboring countries, especially Ecuador and Venezuela.

Toledo said his government supports the plan.

"You are not alone, my friend... Here you have sister nations that are prepared to help in whatever manner needed," Toledo said.

The audience of applauded his remarks.

22 May 2003 22:55:01 GMT BOGOTA, Colombia, May 22 (Reuters) - Colombian troops killed at least 29 Marxist rebels as they pushed into drug- and arms-smuggling areas in the country's eastern jungles on Thursday, the army said.

One soldier was killed in the battle in Vichada province, near Venezuela, in one of the heaviest blows landed by the U.S.-backed armed forces against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for months, military spokesmen told Reuters.

The victory comes after a terrible month for the army, which began with a botched hostage rescue attempt and continued this week with news that 140 soldiers had divided up millions of dollars found in a secret rebel cache and run away.

The rebel army known by the Spanish initials FARC is fighting a four-decade-old war. Thousands of people are killed every year.

The FARC says it wants socialist revolution and funds itself by kidnapping and "taxing" the cocaine trade.

The government says the jungles of Vichada are a major route for smuggling drugs and arms.

21 May 2003 16:53:30 GMT BRASILIA, Brazil, May 21 (Reuters) - Brazil strongly suspects that Marxist guerrillas from Colombia are crossing its jungle border and forcing young Indian villagers to join their ranks, a police investigator said on Wednesday.

"We have accounts of Indians being recruited," federal police agent Geraldo de Castro Neto told Reuters. "The guerrillas paint a picture of a better life. There is also the possibility of forced work, but we still have nothing concrete."

Brazilian security has long suspected the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or cocaine smugglers of using local Indians to carry drugs through the jungles to Brazil.

But since Brazil opened a police outpost in April deep in the northwest Amazon near the border, authorities have been alarmed to find entire Indian communities populated by only young children and adults, with no adolescents.

Investigators fear the young people were taken away by the rebel group known by the Spanish initials FARC, which "taxes" the cocaine trade to fund its four-decade-old war in Colombia.

"There is nothing stopping the Indians being used in the drug trade as well," Castro Neto said by telephone. "Everything is under investigation."

The remote Amazon area known in Brazil as the "dog's head," straddling thick jungle between Colombia and Venezuela, is notorious for drug smuggling.

FARC recruiting of Brazilian Indians would be more evidence that Colombia's war is spilling over into its giant neighbor, which is already a major market for Colombian cocaine.

Castro Neto said the FARC started forced recruitment of Brazilian Indians two or three years ago.

Colombia's armed forces have long warned that the FARC has crossed into the country's neighbors, including Brazil, and the Bogota government regularly accuses the rebels of forced recruitment of Colombians.

By Reuters, 5/20/2003

BOGOTA -- An emergency war zone declared in eastern Colombia to crack down on Marxist rebels has failed to restore order or to stop political killings, the nation's human rights and legal officials said yesterday.

Selective assassinations continue, and violence has flared in towns adjacent to the Arauca region where military reinforcements were sent in by President Alvaro Uribe last year, Colombia's ombudsman, Eduardo Cifuentes, and its inspector general, Edgardo Maya, said at a news conference.

The presence of military reinforcements has reduced the death rate in the area, they said, but municipal officials fear for their lives and death threats have forced journalists to flee the oil-rich area on the border with Venezuela.

''Today the civilian population lives in fear, and the authorities themselves have no security,'' said Cifuentes, Colombia's top human rights official.

Shortly after he took office in August, Uribe decreed the ''rehabilitation zone'' in an area long under seige by Marxist rebels, and sent extra troops and police armed with broad emergency powers to detain suspects.

Until the reinforcements arrived, police in the Arauca town of Saravena had lived as virtual prisoners in their sandbagged barracks, under constant threat of bomb or mortar attack.

Colombia's constitutional court has recently declared most of the emergency powers illegal, although the rehabilitation zone in Arauca, and another created in the Bolivar and Sucre provinces, were due to expire anyway.

The continued presence of the military and police reinforcements has become the highest-profile test of Uribe's promises to crack down on illegal armed groups fighting in a four-decade-old war.

Cifuentes and Maya said Arauca needed more public investment as well as troops and better protection for officials working to build institutions in the province.

US special forces are stationed near Arauca, training Colombian troops to protect the Cano Limon oil pipeline from rebel bombing.

The Colombian Army, meanwhile, said it had arrested 70 suspected Marxist rebels in an urban sweep of the country's south yesterday, and the military said it confiscated explosives, guns, and 77 pounds of unprocessed cocaine.

The army's ''Operation Tempest'' took place in Caqueta Province and targeted urban guerrilla fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's largest guerrilla army, known by its Spanish initials, FARC.

One alleged FARC rebel who engaged soldiers in gunfire was shot dead in the provincial capital of Florencia, the army said.

Suspected rebels were also captured in the smaller city of Puerto Rico.

The military operation was among the biggest urban round-ups in recent months in Colombia. ''Tempest'' followed the capture of 14 rebel suspects over the weekend in the western provinces of Antioquia and Risaralda.

The Andean nation's conflict claims thousands of lives a year and has been made more complicated by the rapid growth of far-right paramilitary militias waging a dirty war to stamp out Colombia's more than 20,000 suspected rebel fighters.

The army said five of its soldiers were killed in combat with paramilitary forces yesterday, about 185 miles southeast of Bogota in the jungles of Meta Province.

Three paramilitary gunmen were killed in the same fighting, in a strategic, central drug-trafficking zone.

Colombia is the world's largest cocaine producer and one of the top suppliers of heroin to the US market.

This story ran on page A9 of the Boston Globe on 5/20/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.