Pubdate: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 1999 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Tim Golden NOW, STATE OF SIEGE, COLOMBIAN STYLE WASHINGTON -- A Latin American country slides toward chaos. Leftist guerrillas attack the government, right-wing death squads attack guerrilla sympathizers, peace talks falter. The economy spirals downward, scattering thousands of refugees, and fears of instability sweep through the region. The United States hurries to the rescue with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. With the Colombian Government facing its most serious crisis in years, Clinton Administration officials confirmed last week that they are putting together a package of military and economic assistance that could reach dimensions not seen in the hemisphere since the cold war. They are also trying to reassure anyone who will listen that Colombia today really looks nothing like El Salvador once did. The United States will not be giving Colombia lots of sophisticated weapons and aircraft, the officials say, nor will legions of Colombian soldiers be training at Ft. Bragg. American military advisers in Colombia are to help troops there fight the drug trade rather than insurgents, except where the insurgents protect the trade. "There are, in my view, few if any really logical, easy comparisons to make between El Salvador 10 years ago and Colombia now," said the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas R. Pickering, who once presided over the military build-up in El Salvador as the United States Ambassador there. Still, there are many in the Administration and many more outside it who see quicksand in Colombia. The government that Washington is supporting in BogotE1 is weak and increasingly unpopular. The army it trains has been ineffective on the battlefield and frequently complicit in the massacres of civilians by rightist paramilitary groups. The rebel armies it hopes to bend have held out in the jungles for decades. The Administration is also on unsteady ground at home: For domestic political reasons, it has proclaimed a central goal in Colombia -- curtailing the drug trade -- that will likely mislead Americans about what it hopes to achieve there. What has panicked both the Clinton Administration and Congressional Republicans is not so much the latest turn in Colombia's cocaine problem as the growing troubles of its new President, AndrE9s Pastrana. Little more than a year after Mr. Pastrana came to power with bold concessions intended to bring the biggest rebel army to the negotiating table, the talks are stalled in the earliest stages, the guerrillas appear stronger and more recalcitrant and the President is widely criticized as naEFve. Unrest within the armed forces has surged and paramilitary killings have continued. The country's long-buoyant economy, having made it through the regional debt crisis of the 1980's relatively unscathed, is suffering its most severe recession in decades. Whether the United States sinks deeper into Colombia's troubles or helps to solve them may ultimately depend a good deal on how it defines its objectives there. Over the last three months, officials have gone to unusual lengths to reconsider those aims: Working groups have been set up, strategy papers have been prepared and assistant secretaries of all sorts have shuttled back and forth to BogotE1. Yet even as that review got under way, senior officials seemed to limit its parameters: The center of American policy, they insisted -- "the spear point," as Mr. Pickering put it -- will remain the illicit drug trade. Colombia's drug problem has taken a significant turn for the worse. Over the last several years, as the authorities in Bolivia and Peru have made headway in intercepting drug planes and helping poor farmers supplant crops of coca, the raw material of cocaine, drug producers have sharply expanded their fields in remote, sparsely populated areas of southern Colombia. That shift has strengthened both the Colombian producers and their guerrilla allies, who profit by taxing the coca fields and hiring out to guard jungle air strips and drug-processing labs. Nonetheless, the drug "emergency" that some senior United States officials have begun to describe does not necessarily threaten new waves of cocaine washing onto American streets. It is not clear how or even whether the shifting of coca crops around the region will affect the availability or price of cocaine abroad. Nor, despite technological advances in tracking drug shipments through the Caribbean, can the Administration promise that better-funded interdiction efforts will seriously reduce the flows of cocaine and heroin into the United States. According to several officials, most of the aid proposals being circulated internally would give relatively short shrift to such basic (and comparatively inexpensive) solutions as the training of Colombia's judges and the strengthening of its notoriously porous prisons. Instead, American "counternarcotics" aid will aim to help the security forces beat back the guerrillas in southern Colombia so that crop-spraying and lab raids can proceed. As illogical as the assurance increasingly sounds, Administration officials continue to insist that the United States will stay out of the civil war. In private, at least, such officials are more candid about acknowledging that a decade after the cold war's end, the drug fight is the only policy objective likely to win political support for the $1 billion to $2 billion in aid that they have talked of putting forward over the next three years. (Even then, a Colombia package will have to compete in the weeks ahead with foreign-aid proposals ranging from help for peacekeeping in Africa to support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.) It is hardly disputed that the United States has other significant interests in Colombia, from oil fields to radar stations to the stability of a democratic ally. In recent months, State Department and National Security Council officials, in particular, have pressed for what they call a more "integrated" approach -- one that might include trade benefits, development aid and human rights programs as well as military support. But as Colombia's military leaders showed their wish lists around Washington last week, it appeared that some central issues remained unresolved: how the beleaguered military might best be strengthened, how the guerrillas might be drawn into serious talks, and how those two goals interlock. I N a July 20 letter to Mr. Pastrana, President Clinton suggested a new point of departure for American policy, saying, "The hardest step may be the first: convincing all sides in Colombia that a military solution is not possible and that all will gain from a negotiated settlement." But neither Mr. Clinton nor his senior aides have explained clearly how this might be achieved. Administration officials have begun trying to recruit other Latin American countries and United Nations mediators to bring pressure on both sides. In the meantime, the search for a comprehensive strategy in Colombia continues to resemble a free-for-all in which different factions of the Administration have put forward different aid proposals -- many of them with different implications for how to wage peace. Some United States officials, including the commander of American military forces in Latin America, Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, argue that only significant reverses on the battlefield will bring the rebels to the bargaining table. But at the pace at which the United States is now training and re-equipping the Colombian military, officials say it could take years to start changing the military balance. Critics of the policy also ask what might happen if Colombia's generals gain unexpected ground against the guerrillas -- and decide to continue fighting in order to press for a better deal. "So far, the thinking has not gone much beyond, 'Let's get some helicopters in there,' " said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research group based in Washington. Viewed from Washington, the greatest difference between Colombia in 1999 and El Salvador in 1979 may be that virtually no one in the White House now believes Colombia's Government is in any immediate danger of falling to the rebels. That consensus may make it harder for officials to argue for a huge "emergency" infusion of American aid. It could, however, be the basis for an approach to Colombia's problems that might be sustained even when the flow of illicit drugs fails to miraculously end. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea