Quotes of the Day

Staring at the charred skeleton that was once Bogotá's posh El Nogal social club, Eliodoro Londoño straightened his power suit and tried to hide his feelings of powerlessness. Londoño, 47, a telecom executive and El Nogal member, lost friends and colleagues on the night of Feb. 7, when a 200-kg car bomb planted by Colombia's leftist FARC guerrillas ripped through the club's 11 stories, killing 35 people — including six children at a piñata party — and injuring 173.

The El Nogal blast was the most devastating attack of the rebels' new urban terror campaign and the first to hit the capital's élite. Londoño and Colombian authorities hope the attack will prompt the world to change tactics too, and regard Colombia's guerrillas as terrorists. Reason: police say the guerrillas are aided by terror groups like the I.R.A. and Spain's Basque separatists, ETA, who could turn Colombia into a South American Afghanistan. "At least now other countries will know this for what it is, not guerrilla warfare but international terrorism," Londoño said as recovery workers retrieved the last two corpses from the ruins.

That's the warning that President Alvaro Uribe is frantically trumpeting. "Democratic nations shouldn't ask Colombia to tolerate terrorism while the U.N. is deciding the matter of Iraq," he insisted last week. His ministers, meanwhile, barnstormed Washington for more aid, including help in freezing foreign bank accounts connected to the guerrillas. Their efforts got considerably more attention late last week when a U.S. government reconnaissance plane carrying four Americans contracted by the military and a Colombian soldier crash-landed in the southern province of Caquetá, in a zone controlled by the FARC. U.S. officials say the guerrillas executed the Colombian and one American, then presumably kidnapped the other three. (None of the Americans was identified.) The murdered American was the first working for the U.S. government to be killed in Colombia's civil war.

The four-decade-long conflict has already claimed 150,000 lives. The group behind the El Nogal bombing and the Caquetá killings — the Marxist, 18,000-member Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), the country's largest guerrilla army — has been branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department (as has the A.U.C., an umbrella group of vicious right-wing paramilitary armies, and a smaller leftist group known as the E.L.N.). Last week, Uribe convinced the U.N. Security Council to label them as such; and the usually timid Organization of American States pledged to help weaken the FARC, whose land-reform ideology has been poisoned by criminal enterprise. FARC rakes in an estimated $1 billion a year, largely by protecting cocaine traffic.

Uribe gained an important victory when the E.U. promised to take "more decisive steps" to combat Colombia's "plague." His government is currently trying Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan, suspected I.R.A. bombmaking experts arrested in 2001 for allegedly training FARC militants. All three insist they were there to observe peace talks, which have since collapsed. But senior Colombian police tell Time the FARC paid the trio $2 million for explosives and mortar instruction. Last spring, FARC mortars killed 119 peasants, accused by the guerrillas of aiding the A.U.C., as they huddled in a church. The I.R.A., say officials, also got the run of the vast jungle controlled by the FARC to test new weapons. Says one police commander, "We fear Colombia is being viewed by international terrorist groups as another Afghanistan, a place they can turn into a global training ground." That's why, say officials, ETA is also abetting the FARC, a charge the Basque group has not denied.

The Afghanistan comparison seems extreme. Still, U.S., British and Colombian investigators say the El Nogal bombing has the markings of I.R.A. and ETA tutelage. They point in particular to the sophisticated remote-control detonation of the car bomb.

Colombia suffered a horrific rash of urban bombings just over a decade ago, when the drug lord Pablo Escobar lashed out at government efforts to rein in his cocaine cartel. The FARC is similarly piqued by Uribe's counterinsurgency efforts and recent U.S. aid increases for Colombia's weak but improving military. Last Friday, at least 16 people were killed in an explosion during a police raid in the southern city of Neiva that authorities attributed to the guerrillas. Uribe and Washington "are only making things worse for themselves," a FARC commander told TIME last year. Most Colombians can't imagine how things could get worse than they already are.

• TIM PADGETT/Bogota
• Are the I.R.A. and ETA using Colombia as a base for weapons testing and training?