Sureshot's war predates the Cuban revolution, and his relationship with Fidel is notoriously frosty. Trinidad also seems to disregard the hemisphere's leading socialist utopia. The Cuban guerrillas were victorious after only two years in the field, he explains, while the more patient FARC has had decades of war to solidify its revolutionary character before coming to power.

He has a loaded Galil lying on the table, so I don't challenge his defeat-is-victory logic. Instead I ask him where FARC gets its rifles.

"From all parts," he says, laughing and tapping the stock of the Galil. "From the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Russia. All parts. Arms dealing is the best business in the world, after drugs. States do it, mafias do it."

It has been alleged that FARC earns $500 million a year, mostly from "war taxes" on the drug trade, but also from the practice known here as miraculous fishing, after a popular children's game in which prizes are pulled at random from a barrel: the guerrillas grab random groups of people at roadblocks or church services, perform credit checks via radio, and keep anyone with a healthy bank account. Kidnapping, I remind him, is the number-one complaint against the guerrillas.

"Somebody has to finance this war," Trinidad replies, "and the rich are going to pay." The guerrillas are not involved in drugs, he insists; they simply protect peasant coca farmers, because they are peasant farmers, and then tax large businesses, regardless of what they sell. "It is a financial strategy," the banker-guerrilla explains. "A tax. We are financing the war. Where do the arms come from? The food? We have to pay for the medicine, clothes, medical bills, the lawyers for our imprisoned guerrillas, their education."

The guerrillas are "by principle Communists" but also "patriots" and "nationalists" who "want peace" and a "new economic model." He talks about a "new economy" and a "new political regime that opens space for others" and a "new state" and a "new structure for the armed forces" and a "new system of justice" and a "new model of social society." Colombia also needs a new road and communications infrastructure, a new crop-substitution program, a new anti-corruption culture, and a new distribution of land, water, mineral, and other rights, not just in some places but in every part of the country.

This speech is finally interrupted by the guerrilla spokesmodel in her white T-shirt. She comes in holding a note Simon Trinidad has written; she can't understand it. He looks at the note.

"Trinidadtres a `otmail dot com," he says.

"otmail?"

"Hotmail," he says, pronouncing it properly in English, with the breathy "H." "Hotmail dot com." She stares at him. "Hotmail dot com!" he says again. Finally he has to go outside for a minute and explain the email address to someone himself; then he comes back in and apologizes. Good help is hard to find.

I ask him what impact U.S. military and financial aid will have on Colombia's 40 million people. "If your neighbor's house is on fire," he replies at once, "you shouldn't throw gasoline on it. This will increase the horror of the war. A modern war--like in Yugoslavia, with helicopters and airplanes--can destroy bridges and buildings, factories and so on, but not us guerrillas. We will spread out to all parts of the country. We will fight the war of mobile guerrillas, as Che Guevara taught. Today, here; tomorrow, there. It will generalize the war. You are going to bring the war to all Colombia. However, misery will continue."

He watches me for a while and then says, "Write that down. The struggle will continue. Hunger and misery will continue."

I'm still having trouble catching up with the list of all the new things Colombia needs, and he watches my notebook like a hawk.

"Write that down!" he says again.

"Misery continues! Write that down!"

While I am interviewing Simon Trinidad, a peace delegation of Pentecostal Christians is in another room, slinging scripture at the glad-handing guerrilla spokesman Raul Reyes. (Reyes is notorious for declaring, between stints as the FARC man in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Sweden, that he was tired of living "in the mountains.") The Pentecostals finish before I do and swipe my cabdriver. I sprint after the taxi--the only one for twenty miles--but it flees over a ridge, sagging with Bibles, and I am left to walk. I stroll into the hamlet of The Wells, with its twenty-three tin-roofed shacks. There are a pair of fly-infested cantinas along the main street. Shortly after a man tells me it never rains during the day, it begins to pour. I spend two hours sitting in one of the cantinas, drinking coffee, watching the rain, and waiting for any kind of transport. There are no taxis; one bus comes by, so packed that men are literally hanging from the sides, and the driver refuses to take me. Once in a while a pickup truck comes through, never headed the right way. The rain stops, mostly.

A five-year-old boy from the village watches me sit there. He's patient and charming. "I have paint on my shirt," he finally offers. Yup--bright orange paint. I notice a bit more in his hair. I look around. The whole village is bright. All twenty-three shacks are bright orange. The cantina is bright orange. The entire street is painted in hydraulic reds and oranges. I push a fingernail into a yellow fence post. The paint is soft. Only the fronts of the twenty-three shacks have been painted. It is a Potemkin village.

"When did they paint everything?" I ask the boy.

"Yesterday!" he shouts. "Yay!"

I don't know why I am surprised when a couple of guerrillas walk in for lunch and within seconds spot themselves on the restaurant's television set. They are watching a long news report about FARC, broadcast from the capital but filmed just up the hill at the peace shed and beamed from those convenient dishes. "There you are again," one guerrilla says to the other, grinning. Then the same report shows a long interview with Comandante Simon Trinidad, talking about the need for new things. On camera, the mustache works.

Eventually I talk my way onto a cattle truck heading toward the big town with the airport. There are already a driver and three assistants in the cab, all older men with filthy, ripped clothes and hands like slabs of burned beef. I sit amid a tangle of legs as we haul nine gray oxen through guerrilla country at ten miles an hour. After ninety minutes we pass a large house with twenty or thirty guerrillas lolling around. Some are sitting on the porch, others are standing on the wet grass, others are sleeping in the backs of three big, covered trucks.

"Look at those drunkards," the driver says. "They are sleeping it off."

"Look at those trucks," the man on my right says. He whistles under his breath: "They have everything."

FARC has scared some order into the region, but the local schools still have no desks, and people in the towns bitch about the guerrillas openly. Posters criticizing FARC are up in some homes I saw. And more people wear the green ribbon that symbolizes Colombia's burgeoning peace movement, known by its simple, nondenominational slogan: NO MAS.

The guerrillas return the favor. Flush with money, FARC doesn't depend on the peasants and doesn't need the towns. It isn't really a guerrilla army, and it isn't building models of anything in FARClandia, nor is it disarming in the Zone of Disarmament. The rebels just rest and train here, and then move off in their nice trucks to fight somewhere else.

Twenty minutes along, the cattle truck makes a sudden turn left. They have to drop off the oxen not in town, as I had assumed, but far outside. It will mean a delay of an hour or two. Impatiently, I decide to walk the last two miles and jump down. The men wish me luck, and the truck rumbles off.

I'm a hundred yards down the dirt road when I notice something on a barbed-wire fence: a standard-issue FARC uniform. It's wet. I stop to look at it and then hear laughter. Over the course of a minute, I notice, scattered in the distant trees, the following things in the following order: a camouflage pup tent; a rifle; a path; a FARC guerrilla smoking a cigarette; another camouflage tent, set on a sleeping platform with mosquito netting; another guerrilla; another tent; another rifle; another path; a curl of smoke from a cooking fire hidden deeper in the jungle.

It's a FARC forward camp: a blocking force laid across the main road between the town, with its airport, and the FARC leadership near The Wells. I walk slowly down the exact middle of the road, hoping to seem either innocent or invisible, but it descends toward a creek, and when I get to the bottom I have to cross a bridge. I can see a checkpoint a hundred yards on the other side of the bridge. There are three sentries standing there, facing away. Out in the middle of the bridge I can hear the laughter, clearly, and I look upstream. Thirty or so FARC guerrillas are bathing in the creek. Their rifles are leaning on trees, and guerrillas are plunging in and out of the water. There are at least six women soldiers among them. Like the men, they have stripped down to their underwear and are soaping up in the creek amid gales of laughter, splashing, and flirting.

I stand in the middle of the bridge for a long time, watching the strong men and handsome women. These are the Monkey's troops, the same ones I saw in the mist this morning. Lurking in the zone of denial, well-equipped with music videos and mosquito netting, they resemble the hard-working staff of an IPO primed for the big pop. They have 17,000 soldiers and are growing. FARC talks about a long-range plan, about needing twice as many fighters with air power before the final assault on Bogota. Even if the peace shed produces a treaty, some people won't accept that. The Monkey and his brother won't disarm. They will take their own troops, and the hard-liners, and the hungry peasant kids like Sebastian, and they will regroup and keep fighting. They know what happens to guerrillas who run for office in Colombia: after FARC formed the Patriotic Union Party in the 1980s more than 3,500 of their candidates and campaign workers were assassinated. For the hard-liners, peace looks more dangerous than war.