Pubdate: Fri, 16 Feb 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

COLOMBIA TO ASK BUSH FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDS

BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb. 15 -- President Andres Pastrana said today that he 
planned to seek a fresh infusion of U.S. financial assistance during his 
first meeting with President Bush this month to spur economic development 
in regions where U.S.-trained troops are destroying drug crops.

Pastrana said in an interview that the newly revived peace process with 
Colombia's largest guerrilla group depended on an increase in such economic 
assistance, perhaps as much as $500 million a year from the United States 
alone. He said the money would be used to address high unemployment and 
other economic obstacles that prompt Colombians to join the drug trade or 
illegal armed groups for their livelihood.

Pastrana said his trip to Washington would be a way to introduce himself 
and his country to the new administration at an important moment for his 
anti-drug plan and the peace negotiations. The Bush administration has 
inherited a two-year, $1.6 billion aid package that is designed to reduce 
Colombia's role as the world's largest cocaine producer and deprive a 
decades-old leftist insurgency of its chief revenue source.

Pastrana's words seemed calculated to refocus Washington's attention on 
Colombia as a new administration faces a host of foreign policy questions. 
By stressing non-military elements, Pastrana underlined his hope for a new 
financial commitment to boost a development strategy he has often declared 
key to the drug war's long-term success.

In addition to highlighting successes in the drug war -- much of which has 
been the result of aerial fumigation, which has killed 65,000 acres of coca 
crop in the southern province of Putumayo, the country's principal 
coca-producing region -- Pastrana said he planned to make the case that the 
United States must do more to help ensure that the drug trade did not resurge.

Pastrana said more resources must be committed to social development 
programs that encouraged farmers to uproot lucrative drug crops for legal 
ones. That strategy, along with other civilian programs such as human 
rights and judicial reform, account for only 25 percent of the U.S. aid 
package that forms the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar anti-drug and 
economic development program known as Plan Colombia. He said increasing 
resources for small farmers was a key topic during his meeting with rebel 
leader Manuel Marulanda last week that revived peace talks and for the 
first time paved the way for international participation in the process.

"We are a poor country," Pastrana said in his office at the graceful 
Colonial-era Casa de Narino, the presidential palace. "But we are spending 
$1 billion a year of our money to keep drugs off the streets of Washington 
and New York. We need more help. This is a long-term plan, maybe 15 to 20 
years."

The United States is the largest market for Colombia's drugs. Former 
president Bill Clinton, whom Pastrana remembered today as a staunch ally, 
pushed through a package last year that included more than 50 transport 
helicopters, military trainers and funds for development programs.

Pastrana, who was elected in 1998 on a peace platform, has argued that 
depriving the illegal armed groups of drug profits will encourage them to 
seek peace. Last week, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) 
agreed to rejoin talks with the government after a three-month lapse. 
Pastrana said he believed the 18,000-member rebel army was beginning to 
suffer financially because of Plan Colombia.

An 8,000-member privately funded paramilitary army that battles the FARC on 
the same side as the army also is profiting from the drug trade. Human 
rights groups have accused the Colombian armed forces of assisting the 
paramilitary groups. But Pastrana pointed to the government's support for a 
commission established with the FARC last week to study the paramilitary 
question and a new investigative unit responsible for identifying the 
group's financial patrons.

"The paramilitaries are not a problem between the government and the FARC," 
Pastrana said. "They are a problem facing the whole country. But they are 
the result of the guerrillas. Once there is peace with the guerrillas, the 
paramilitaries will end."

Pastrana said he had been trying to obtain a copy of "Traffic," the Academy 
Award-nominated film about the global drug trade, to get a sense of the 
popular U.S. perception of the drug war. But much of his concern today, 
expressed with animation during a 45-minute interview, centered on the more 
mundane aspects of how he intended to end his country's deep-seated drug trade.

He warned bluntly that without greater investment in drug-producing 
regions, the drug trade would move more deeply into Colombia's jungle -- or 
return in a few years. He said he hoped to lobby for more investment in 
meetings with Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Trade Representative 
Robert Zoellick and in his talks with Bush's national security team during 
a visit that begins Feb. 25.

Unemployment here is hovering near 20 percent, and Pastrana said he needed 
to create 350,000 new jobs to bring the rate down one percentage point. He 
said government and FARC officials would soon tour European and Latin 
America capitals to drum up foreign investment for rural areas that are the 
primary arenas of the drug trade and civil war.
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