Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces

The heavily armed rebels usually show up in groups of 20 or more, dressed in green fatigues and seeking food. "Of course you have to give it to them," said one resident of this isolated village 35 miles west of the Colombian border. "People don't like that they're here, but with few police and many informants around, they keep quiet." Then just as suddenly, the rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, melt back into the jungle.

Members of Colombia's largest rebel group live openly on or near several Indian reservations in western Venezuela with at least the tacit approval of President Hugo Chavez, indigenous leaders here charge.

In a bizarre turn in a case that has kept this nation in thrall, preliminary blood tests indicate that a child who has been a government ward for more than two years is the son of Clara Rojas, a presidential campaign manager held by leftist rebels who kidnapped her nearly six years ago.

It might sound like mere semantics. But when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez proposed this month that Colombia's largest rebel group be recognized as "belligerents," not terrorists, the reverberations reached to Washington and Europe, and relations between the two Latin American nations plunged to what one observer called perhaps the lowest point in their history.

The phone rings and Jo Rosano jumps to answer, thinking of the sound of her son's voice: Hi, Mom, it's me, Marc. But it isn't him. Rosano hangs up to resume scouring the Internet for news, brewing espresso, pacing, praying, crying and waiting -- as she has for the last five years. "Day and night," she says, "this is my life." Colombian rebels have held Marc Gonsalves and two other Americans hostage since February 2003, when their plane crashed during a drug surveillance mission for a U.S.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across Colombia and around the world Monday to protest continued abductions carried out by leftist guerrillas in the South American nation. But the massive outpourings in Colombian cities and the scattered gatherings in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Madrid and elsewhere were shunned by relatives of some captives. Opposition politicians in Colombia who said President Alvaro Uribe had overly politicized the day reluctantly took part.

Father Acacio Belandria says openly what others in this run-down town in southwestern Venezuela are afraid to: Colombian rebels are all over the place. The 78-year-old Jesuit priest says his parishioners are increasingly complaining of extortion, kidnapping threats and killings by the leftist guerrillas, and that Venezuelan armed forces and President Hugo Chavez are either unable or unwilling to stop them.

After six years of captivity at the hands of leftist rebels, four Colombian hostages gained their freedom in a jungle clearing Wednesday after captors turned them over to representatives of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

President Alvaro Uribe appears to have taken a calculated risk in ordering his armed forces to invade Ecuador to kill a top rebel leader, deciding to risk the ire of his southern neighbor to inflict a major loss in a decades-long war. Tensions continued to mount Monday after the clandestine operation in which Colombian soldiers and aircraft entered Ecuador to kill Raul Reyes, the nom de guerre of the No. 2 commander in Colombia's largest rebel group, known by its Spanish initials, FARC.

An increasingly isolated Colombia came under heavy criticism from its neighbors at an emergency Organization of American States session Tuesday for killing a top Colombian rebel leader in Ecuador last weekend. A sense of crisis has enveloped the region as diplomats worked to avoid an armed conflict that could be devastating to a continent that has successfully transitioned into a mostly democratic region after the military juntas and "dirty wars" of the 1970s and 1980s.