Colombia's Hell : Fear grips a nation.

Scientific socialism may be dead, but scientific extortion is very much alive. In Colombia, information technology has transformed kidnapping from an art into a science.

When the guerrillas there hold up a car or a bus, they tap the names of the passengers into the laptop computers that are now as essential to their operations as their automatic weapons. A database, using information taken from bank records or from tax returns in the Ministry of Finance, informs the kidnappers who is worth what. Let the ransom fit the assets! Ranging from $60 to $1 million, the revolutionary tax, as the guerrillas call it, is steeply progressive: so steeply, in fact, that the guerrillas derive as much from it as from the cocaine trade. They are the richest guerrillas in the world.

The revolutionary tax is also known as la pesca milagrosa, the miraculous catch. The guerrillas believe that the road to heaven is paved with intimidation. And since the end justifies the means, all the pious sentiment in the world-such as that expressed recently when millions of Colombians took to the streets to march in favor of peace-will not deter the guerrillas in the slightest.

I was told that foreigners in Colombia are eminently secuestrable- kidnappable. As the dirty war in Argentina introduced the world to the concept of passive suicide (for example, "X was suicided last night at police headquarters"), so the conflict in Colombia has enriched the world by the notion of kidnappability. Blue eyes alone, I was told, were sufficient to render their possessors vulnerable-for one was thereby recognized as being either a member of the Colombian elite or a rich foreigner. Who says now that biology is not destiny?

The use of kidnapping is criminal, of course, but it does not follow that those who perpetrate it are mere criminals. They are more important and dangerous than that: They are political utopians who use (as all such utopians eventually must) the methods of bandits. And these methods are proving very effective indeed, for they are fast reducing the status of the constitutional president of Colombia to that of mayor of Bogota. His writ runs only in the cities of his country, and even in the rural areas nominally under his control the influence of the guerrillas is strong and growing.

So insecure has Colombia become that it is now unsafe for anyone with tangible assets to leave any city by land. None of the major cities is securely accessible from any other by road. All but one route out of Bogota have been attacked, trapping the middle classes in the city and inducing a state of paranoid claustrophobia among them. If they want to go anywhere, they have to fly-but not long ago, an Avianca flight from Bucaramanga to Bogota was hijacked, and some of the hostages have not yet been released. The entire congregation of a church has also been kidnapped-the whereabouts of 150 people are still unknown-and likewise a pleasure launch on the Pacific coast. No one knows where the kidnappers will strike next-and there are so many government soldiers in the political heart of Bogota that it has the atmosphere of a city awaiting a final assault by a besieging army. Outside the railings of the presidential palace, soldiers with semi-automatics stand guard at intervals of three feet.

If the cities of Colombia are under siege, their citizens are doubly so: Common crime, responsible for 80 percent of the murders in the country, flourishes in the shadow of political insecurity. The visitor to Colombia is soon reduced to a state of incipient psychosis by the advice he receives from well-meaning Colombians. For example, do not, on any account, show your identity papers to a policeman who asks to see them. He might not be a policeman; but even if he is, he might very well fail to return them in an attempt to extort money.

To hail a taxi in Bogota is no longer a simple matter. On no account should you hail one in the street: It might be a false taxi, whose driver is in league with criminal gangs, on the lookout for victims. And even if it is a real taxi, the driver might succumb to the temptation to make extra money by delivering you not to your destination, but to criminal acquaintances of his.

No: You must telephone a trustworthy company. Because criminal gangs intercept the radio messages of taxi companies, however, and send false taxis around to waylay unsuspecting customers, you must note the registration number of the taxi that is being sent to you and refuse absolutely to get into any other. And the taxi driver will also ask you for the last two digits of the telephone number from which you called, to ensure that he is picking up the right passenger and not someone who will take the opportunity to rob him.

The Colonial Art Museum in Bogota is the only art gallery I know where the custodians carry guns. Throughout the city, uniformed security guards proliferate like private armies, soldiers stand guard outside fashionable apartment blocks where prominent secuestrables live, and there are many training schools for security staff. In the old part of Bogota known as La Candelaria, I was told, robbers frequently dress smartly to deceive their victims. Distrust in Colombia is now mutual and multidirectional. The general rule is, Suspect everyone of everything, do not assume that anyone is who he appears or claims to be, impart the minimum amount of information to as few people as possible, and maintain your vigilance at all times. This advice is all the more striking because everyone you actually meet is helpful and agreeable. On the brink of disaster, manners are maintained.

But the savagery of the crimes reported daily in the newspapers is enough to make the steadiest hand tremble. In Colombia, mutilations of murdered victims have their own names: for example, the corte de corbata, the tie- cut, which consists of the removal of the victim's tongue and its placement below the fatal gash in his neck; or the corte de florero, the florist's cut, which consists of the replacement of the decapitated head of the victim by his hands and feet, like a bouquet of flowers.

In the past, the Colombian economy has always grown despite the successive waves of violence that have engulfed the country; but this latest wave has been accompanied by an economic recession, in part brought about by the new-found financial rectitude of the banks, which until recently accepted deposits without asking questions as to their provenance. In an attempt to clean up the country's image, all that has now changed, with the result that internal investment has dried up: Colombian depositors now go elsewhere. Every other house in the colonial heart of the city of Cartagena is for sale, and Colombians who can are leaving the country in unprecedented numbers.

But it is the guerrilla war that is causing Colombia's rapid decomposition. There are two main rebel groups, the ELN and the FARC, which field perhaps 5,000 and 15,000 men respectively (in 1990, the FARC had only 1,000 men under arms). If current rates of growth are maintained, they will double in a few years. The FARC, to whom the Colombian government has conceded exclusive control of an area three times the size of El Salvador, runs training camps for recruits, many of them still children, and some of them lured from Ecuador (undergoing its own economic crisis) with the promise of a "job." The FARC also produces armored vehicles from converted road-building equipment, looted from areas outside its control. The nature of the war is thus changing, from irregular skirmishes to full-scale battles-in which the Colombian army, bureaucratically led and manned largely by conscripts from the lower classes, has not excelled. Few Colombians want the guerrillas to win, but fewer still are willing to die to preserve the state.

How have two Marxist guerrilla movements managed not only to survive in Colombia, but to prosper to such an extent that there now is a real possibility that they will eventually overthrow the constituted government? Have they not heard of the end of the Cold War? Do they not know that the tide of history is against them? A few years ago, Colombia was regarded as one of the least likely of Latin American countries to fall into the hands of a revolutionary movement. Now the position has been reversed, and it is the only one likely to do so.

The defeat of Communism elsewhere has actually helped the Colombian guerrillas. They now depend on no external funding, but have found very large economic resources within Colombia itself. The expansion of the guerrilla movements is the consequence not of poverty but of wealth-and it is no coincidence that the political violence in Colombia is worst not in the poorest but in the richest parts of the country. The guerrillas have muscled in on the economic bonanzas that have fueled the Colombian economy in the last decade and a half. The ELN specializes in extortion from the oil companies that pay it large sums not to blow up the oil pipelines (though sometimes they still do so, pour decourager les autres, as in the village of Machuca, where 74 villagers were burned to death). The FARC, by contrast, specializes in controlling the cocaine trade, levying a tax on growers and processors. And of course, where there is money there are sequestrables.

The end of the Cold War has not only made the purchase of arms on the international black market much easier for the ELN and the FARC-who are liberated from the need to find sponsors and patrons-but has made the United States less anxious about the prospect of a guerrilla takeover. At the height of the Cold War, concerns about Colombia's human-rights record might have been considered something of a luxury, obstructing the primary goal of preventing another country from falling into pro-Soviet hands; but now such concerns have moved center stage in the elaboration of policy. And it is the activities of the extremely ruthless paramilitary organizations, for whose existence and conduct the Colombian government is blamed, that exercise the human-rights lobby.

The fact is that the guerrillas in Colombia are opposed not so much by the army as by paramilitary groups organized and funded by landowners. Many of these are narcotraficantes, who bought their land from ranchers intimidated by the guerrillas into selling their property, and who are no strangers to the organization of violence. The paramilitaries operate on the principle that the only effective response to revolutionary terror is even greater counter-revolutionary terror, and the army looks on their activities with benevolent neutrality. The lesson of the Guatemalan insurgency has been learned: that if counter-revolutionary terror is sufficiently brutal, the guerrillas lose sympathy and support, for their claim to represent and protect the interests of the peasantry is exposed as a sham.

The paramilitaries are most numerous and active where the guerrillas are most numerous and active. The army does not oppose them because they are doing its work for it, and in any case it is in no shape to fight on two fronts at once. But the covert or implicit use of brutal paramilitary organizations has its costs. The image of the Colombian government, both within and outside the country, is severely tarnished. Thanks to residual guerrillophilia among the Western intelligentsia, who believe that rebellion in distant countries is its own justification, human-rights groups are inclined to blame governments more than the insurgents whose activities predictably bring about the catastrophic situation.

What do the guerrillas want? One of the FARC's comandantes told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the FARC wants to rule Colombia, a statement that was greeted almost with shock in the country, as if it were a sudden revelation. But the leader of the FARC, Mario Marulanda Velez, known as Tirofijo, has been a guerrilla for 50 years-and no one lives such a life to earn the opportunity to lose next year's elections. Far from being the freedom fighters of the romantic imagination, the guerrillas are inveterate enemies of freedom.

If they won, thus establishing the first government founded on kidnap, the rest of the world would no doubt come to an accommodation with them. But their victory could herald the start of yet another disastrous wave of revolutionary violence in Latin America, just as the tide seemed to have turned against it forever.

Mr. Daniels, author of Utopias Elsewhere, is a doctor who lives in England.