Pubdate: Sun, 30 Jun 2002
Source: Minneapolis Star-Tribune (MN)
Copyright: 2002 Star Tribune
Contact:  http://www.startribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/266
Author: Robert J. White
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/colombia.htm (Colombia)

COLUMBIA POSES A HOST OF DIFFICULT PROBLEMS

Drowned out by the sound and fury of the Middle East, a nasty dilemma 
closer to home is testing the United States. The dilemma's name is 
Colombia, where President Bush, like Bill Clinton before him, seems 
determined to make a bad situation worse.

Colombia has long been the epicenter of the U.S. war on drugs. Official 
strategy has been to break the cartels, interdict drug shipments, catch the 
traffickers and thereby win the war. Aided by money, advice and prodding 
from the United States, Colombia followed that strategy. The cartels 
folded. Interdiction intensified. So did arrests. As part of President 
Andres Pastrana's "Plan Colombia," the government entered negotiations with 
guerrilla leaders who had been financing their revolution with drug money.

In the past two years, U.S. support for Colombia, mainly in military aid, 
rose to $1.7 billion. But as critics had warned, Plan Colombia failed. 
Colombian coca production increased. Guerrillas took advantage of 
Pastrana's earnest efforts at negotiations to enrich themselves further, 
meanwhile raising the level of violence. Right-wing violence increased even 
faster; by most estimates, private paramilitary groups opposing the 
guerrillas accounted for 70 percent of the killings of noncombatants.

Nearly two years ago a working group convened by the Council on Foreign 
Relations issued a brief, prescient report. While the group strongly 
favored helping Colombia's government, a majority objected to the heavy 
emphasis by the administration (at that time, Clinton's) on military aid. 
Most of the group believed that "U.S. military assistance to Colombia will 
not only fail to solve Colombia's worsening crises, it will not measurably 
reduce illicit drug cultivation nor curtail the export of drugs from 
Colombia to the United States."

The Bush administration chooses to overlook such reminders. Earlier this 
month Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's president-elect, visited Washington to seek 
more U.S. aid and to allay concerns about his hawkish reputation. His 
pledge to respect human rights was as welcome to his listeners, including 
Bush, as his promise of an energetic pursuit of the war on terrorism.

The emphasis on terrorism was astute. It fit nicely with the 
administration's post-Sept. 11 priority and implied that Uribe would be a 
successful peacemaker where his predecessor had failed. Bush's spokesman 
said the two presidents discussed, among other things, "the need to fight 
terrorism within the framework of democratic institutions and full respect 
for human rights."

But Bush and his aides show little enthusiasm for making the framework 
sturdy. Current law requires that military aid be conditioned on Colombia's 
respect for human rights. A bill the administration sent to Congress 
seeking supplemental appropriations to counter terrorism would have 
eliminated the human rights requirement. To their credit, both houses of 
Congress rejected that idea.

Even with the rights requirement in place, the administration seems 
undeterred. Consider: Colombia's paramilitaries are on the State 
Department's list of terrorist organizations. In March the department's 
human rights report noted that in 2001, "Members of the security forces 
sometimes illegally collaborated with paramilitary forces." The department 
asked major human rights organizations whether Colombia was complying with 
human rights norms. The uniform answer was no. In May the State Department 
certified Colombia in compliance and released the first part of the 
military aid appropriated earlier for this year.

The dilemma for the United States is that doing nothing for Colombia would 
be terrible, but much of what this country has done so far is worse. 
Ironies abound. Colombia is South America's oldest democracy; it has a 90 
percent literacy rate; until recent years it had a vibrant economy. Yet its 
democratic government is only nominally in charge of an army led by an 
elite officer corps with the ranks peopled largely by the poor; high school 
graduates are exempt from conscription.

If the United States needs to do something different, so does Colombia. As 
has been evident all along, the answer to illegal narcotics lies not in 
trying to cut supply but in reducing the drug abuse that creates demand. 
U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad of Minnesota is one of the lonely Republican voices 
speaking that truth. Among his unlikely allies is Democratic Sen. Paul 
Wellstone.

Doing something different means more than just saying no to current policy. 
It means changing the aid emphasis from military to civilian: for example, 
encouraging stronger Colombian civil institutions including the courts and 
police. It means doing more to help resettle those made homeless by 
violence; Colombia has one of the world's largest number of internally 
displaced -- refugees within their own country.

The initiative must come from Colombia. As a start, it needs to bring a 
reformed army under firm control of the elected government. Precedent 
suggests an unpleasant alternative. In the 1940s Colombia slid into a 
paroxysm of bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands died. That reminder 
should be incentive enough for insisting on reform, a reminder for 
Americans North as well as South.

- -- Robert J. White, retired editorial page editor, writes on foreign affairs.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom