Bogotá residents, left, enjoy a quiet life, while rural areas are plagued by combat deaths, including these FARC rebels.

By SIMON ROMERO

BOGOTA, Colombia - A much-heralded renaissance is under way in Colombia’s largest cities, and few places capture it better than the Parque de la 93, a verdant, tranquil island of sidewalk cafes where Bogotanos listen to jazz, sample microbrewed beer or dine on Cantabrian prawns. So you can imagine the surprise a few weeks ago when 300 people displaced by fighting in the countryside tried to occupy the park, demanding greater benefits.
The protesting refugees, who included about 30 children, served as a reminder that if Colombia’s capital city is looking to a bright future, much of the countryside surrounding it is not. There, in the hamlets and jungles, Colombia remains at war, as it has been for generations.
And so, the placid ambience here underscores not so much a bright future for Colombia, but the disconnect between the nation’s ascendant cities - Bogota and Medellin in particular - and its rural areas, mired in horrors.
Perhaps only in a country like this, where rural guerrilla warfare and brutal counterinsurgencies have ground on for decades, can such extreme dysfunction seem ordinary. With war so endemic, some rebel leaders fight their entire lives, even managing to die of old age.
Just a few years ago, the nation’s largest cities were also violent theaters of conflict; there were periodic bombings in the capital and a horrific murder rate in Medellin as cocaine barons battled the police.
In this decade, across Colombia, there has been a decline in the level of extreme violence - not enough to end the rural displacement and conflict, but enough for imaginative mayors to restore a sense of safety to the two largest cities.
A result has been cities that now have thriving, livable cores. But the cities seem in a different country from the rural areas that are the domain of a dizzying array of private armies, including leftist guerrillas like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC) and resurgent rightwing paramilitary groups with names like New Generation and Black Eagles.
On the left was Manuel Marulanda, who led the FARC for more than four decades until his death from natural causes in March; he got his first taste of rural guerrilla warfare during the late 1940s and 1950s, a period so bloody that it became known simply as La Violencia after 200,000 people were killed.
Today, his group still holds some 700 hostages, even after the government’s dramatic rescue in July of 15 high-profile captives, including the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt.
Immortalized by the painter Fernando Botero as a rotund, rifle-clasping killer standing in a forest clearing, Mr. Marulanda haunted urban Colombia with his thirst for war and his peasant habits. The cities meant nothing to him.
“Marulanda had no notion of urban life, no concept of conducting affairs from a palace if the FARC were to realize their dream of seizing power,” said Alfredo Molano, a columnist for the newspaper El Espectador.
In July, Ms. Betancourt’s deliverance allowed Colombians to dream for a moment that the endgame to their long war might be approaching; Colombia’s newly confident army has been penetrating jungle holdouts of the FARC far more effectively than in past years.
But coca cultivation still surges. Rebels still plant land mines. Bombs still explode. The conflict keeps shifting to ever more remote areas, and reminders of the grim world outside the cities intrude here.
A mother cries for a son still held captive God knows where. A refugee child outside the sidewalk cafes pleads for housing. And when that happens, it can seem that the war’s horrors have finally been woven into the fabric of the city itself.