"That's the Monkey," the cabdriver says, and finally makes up his mind to accelerate. I look back and catch a glimpse of a portly officer, facing the troops, gesturing with his right hand as he addresses them. The Monkey (alias "El Mono Jojoy," born Jorge Briceno) is FARC's top military strategist, notorious for his dislike of foreigners. Last year he conspired with his brother, a dim-witted field commander, in the execution of three Americans who were caught wandering in a FARC zone. ("Three gringos die," he complained later, "and it turns into a major brouhaha.")

We bounce deeper into the fog.

There is no peace table. There is only a huge, open-sided shed that is empty. This peace shed is well and freshly built, with lights, a cement floor, rooms off the back filled with chairs, and an air-conditioned communications center. Also three satellite dishes. And bags of ice-cold water. But no table. The shed is quiet when I wander up from The Wells at breakfast. A few guerrillas walk out of the surrounding trees, ignoring me. A guerrilla with a clipboard finally adds my name to some list, but I am condemned to wait all morning for an interview. I kill time by strolling up and down the only road, watching the occasional cowboy with a machete canter past. The guerrilla guarding the front gate of the peace shed watches me go up and down for a full hour.

"Can you speak?" he says at last. Si, I tell him. I go to the fence, and he leans on one post while I lean on another. It is cloudy, humid, and still. He looks at my notebook. "You can read?" he asks. I nod yes. "Did you go to a school?" Si. "Did you pay hundreds of pesos to learn Spanish?" Two hundred pesos would be about ten cents. Yes, I nod.

He entertains both of us with stories about jaguar hunting, and then he "does" the accents of the different Colombian provinces. "In Santander they say --," he informs me, "and the paisa say --, and in Putumayo, whoo, they talk funny, they say --. "I can't even hear the differences, but I laugh because he is enjoying it so much. He's just a kid. His name is Sebastian. He is illiterate, was raised right here in Caqueta province, and has never traveled anywhere except on patrol. He has been a fighter for "a few years."

Like the American drug czar, the Bogota government claims that the guerrillas are succeeding because they are rich and that the average guerrilla is motivated by a generous paycheck. Our helicopters are supposed to help separate the guerrillas from the source of that money, the drugs. Then both guerrillas and drugs will atrophy. I ask Sebastian how much he is paid.

"Nothing," he says, gently. "We are here en conciencia. Otherwise the government would say we are burguesa. Here we receive all the necessities: food, clothes, everything. We study. We get the analysis. We learn about the classes and so on, the oligarchy and so on." His tries to talk about politics and "the analysis" but gets lost in the abstract language. Finally he retreats to a concrete idea. "There are little old ladies who don't have anything at all," he says, "and so we want to end that. I'm going to speak slowly now, so that you can understand. We act out of conscience. We want the petroleum, the minerals, and the land to be for everyone."

I look at Sebastian's feet. He's wearing a pair of new rubber farm boots. They aren't even scuffed yet. For many peasant recruits, their first pair of shoes is the pair FARC hands them. The government soldiers they shoot at are the only government employees they've ever seen. "Food, clothes, everything," covers a lot of ground in Colombia, where the revolution is fueled by a per capita GDP of just $6,200 and farmland is concentrated in fewer hands every year. A chance to help old ladies. Land for everyone. Why not?

Eventually Sebastian speaks again: "What do you think of this land?" he says. "Is it more beautiful in your country? Are there mountains, like here?" And again: "Is everything the same? Are the trees just like this? Is everything green like this?""Do people wear the same clothes?" he says. "Is everything just the same?"

At last, I am called to my interview. Comandante Simon Trinidad is, within the formal hierarchy of FARC, only the No. 2 commander of the Caribbean Block, which in turn governs the combat actions of various smaller guerrilla "fronts" along the distant coast. But the real power structure of FARC has emerged during the two-year-long prenegotiation with the government over possible future peace negotiations. Trinidad is one of the seven guerrilla negotiators known as "the Thematics": they negotiate which "themes" can be negotiated at later negotiations. The Thematics are the public faces of FARC, younger and more presentable than the tottering Sureshot, who grumbles about making journalists "pay" for their "lies" about FARC. Indeed, in 1999 FARC commandos kidnapped one TV commentator who criticized them, and five Colombian journalists were assassinated in the last six months, mostly by right-wing elements who shared Sureshot's distaste for criticism. Trinidad is dressed in worn camouflage from his ankles to his floppy hat, and he lays a loaded Galil on the table, next to a vase of flowers. He has a stereotypically big salt-and-pepper mustache and is, like me, sweating bullets in the stuffy concrete room.

We start with his resume, which is in no way typical of FARC, except in the ways that matter. Born to an upper-class family on the coast, Trinidad attended prestigious prep schools, graduated from university, and was a navy officer, a landowner, and a professor of economics. He also spent ten years as manager at Colombia's Banco Comercial, which is, he assures me with quiet dignity, "affiliated with Chase Manhattan." Trinidad's own transition from banker to guerrilla began when he protested the way land on the coast was concentrated in the hands of a few powerful landowners, men from his own class.

"I said publicly, to friends and at the university, that we needed land reform. This turned me into an enemy of the powerful people on the coast, and they attempted to assassinate me. They did assassinate my friends: lawyers, doctors, health workers. This is when I dedicated myself to fighting. I could have gone into exile, but I didn't want to do that. I'm forty-nine years old. I have sixteen years as a guerrilla."