Back in February, I wrote about an ominous new development in Colombia's long-simmering civil war: a new poll that, at the very moment the U.S. Congress received a Bush Administration request for expanded military aid, a far right, minor-party extremist named Alvaro Uribe Velez had taken a surprising and firm lead in polling for that troubled country's presidential elections. Uribe had displaced the ruling party's candidate, Horacio Serpa, by promising a sweeping and brutal crackdown on rebels, and by promising that such a campaign would be backed to the hilt by the Pentagon. Given that voter turnout is highest among urban and wealthier Colombians weary of the decades of war, Uribe's tough talk played well.

In subsequent weeks, the Pentagon did, in fact, begin to escalate its involvement in Colombia's war, with the sort of post-9-11 bipartisan rubber stamp that has marked most of Congress's responses to America's ever-widening military commitments. Bush Administration figures also began to label FARC and other Colombian rebel groups as "terrorists," even making the ludicrous claim that they posed a terrorist threat on U.S. soil. And, in an effort to save his party's grip on power, current president Pastrana dropped his three-year-old effort to negotiate a cease-fire and instead unleashed a sweeping offensive against guerrillas, including saturation bombing of what had until that point been designated as a "safe" territory for the rebels. In response, FARC and other rebel groups began bringing the largely rural, low-intensity war to Colombia's cities: bombing infrastructure, kidnapping politicians, and otherwise retaliating for Pastrana's betrayal.

And two weeks ago, Uribe won anyway -- with 51% of votes counted, a slim majority that means he will not even need to face a runoff in the crowded field.

As I noted in February -- but it's worth repeating -- the last time Colombia elected an extremist like Uribe, in 1950, the resulting dictatorship killed 150,000 people in three years before a coup deposed it. On the prior occasion, in 1898, the result was the "Thousand Days' War," and another 100,000 massacred. The talk in Bogota these days is of a 50-year cycle of tragedy, and how the United States is not only walking right into it, but encouraging it.

Uribe's decisive victory, and his predictably bellicose post-election statements, leave no room for doubt. A dramatic escalation in Colombia's war is upon us, and in both Bogota and Washington, the expectation is that the United States will be a full partner. That could mean anything from acceleration of weapons sales and gifts (already happening), military advisers on the ground (already happening), covert activity though DynCorp and other CIA fronts (already happening), and deployment of U.S.-backed and trained mercenary forces (already happening), to active use of U.S. air power and even ground troops against military targets.

While Washington's long-standing preference remains to fight its battles with proxy forces if possible, it has already been involved militarily, directly and indirectly, for a number of years in the Amazon Basin. Primarily, this has involved support for local militaries prosecuting the War on Drugs in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, but in each of these countries, the portion of the drug trade associated with anti-government forces has tended to be prioritized, and that associated with pro-government forces -- or the government or military itself -- ignored. Particularly in the post-September 11 climate, where U.S. troops are now deployed in ground patrols in at least a half-dozen different countries, active U.S. military involvement in Colombia's war is much more likely than it could have been a year ago. Now, moreover, Bogota has in power a government that feels none of the usual constraints to keep reliance upon U.S. power circumspect.

That's not the only constraint Uribe is likely to ignore. Colombia already has the hemisphere's worst human rights record -- a euphemism that translates to jailings, torture, assassinations, and other types of repression that would be grounds for an all-out U.S. invasion were they practiced in neighboring Venezuela. In Colombia, much of the damage is carried out by paramilitary groups -- a favorite calling card being chainsaw dismemberments -- whose terrorism is supported at least by weapons and training from the Colombian military and police forces. Reports keep cropping up that some of the same people are also involved -- and that U.S. personnel are at least at times involved, too. And now, Colombia has elected as its president a man who first came to national prominence a decade ago, encouraging the growth of "self-defense groups" -- paramilitary vigilantes of the sort associated with 80% of Colombia's human rights abuses.

In the end, distinctions as to where American assistance stops and local firepower takes over hardly matter. In a continent that has seen three major, spontaneous, successful mass uprisings in the last year and a half -- the focus of each of which (Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia) was refusing to allow local governments to be controlled by international, especially American, institutions and companies -- the United States has now clearly cast its lot with the continent's most violent regime in a war it cannot win. Moreover, virtually nobody in the United States seems to have noticed, or cared.

For years, observers have been warning that Colombia could explode, with the United States caught in the explosion. By all accounts, that crisis is finally here.