NEXT PRESIDENT SHOULDN'T WIDEN COLOMBIA DRUG WAR President Bill Clinton's $1.3-billion anti-drug aid to Colombia was never a very good idea. And he's planning to make it much worse by expanding "Plan Colombia" -and the military cooperation that goes along with it-to Colombia's neighbors. That would turn it into a multi-billion-dollar debacle. Whoever is the next president-and both Al Gore and George W. Bush approved of the initial aid package to Colombia-should take a long, hard look at it and its implications. The Clinton administration argues that Plan Colombia should be expanded to prevent the spillover effect of cracking down successfully on Colombia's drug operations and the guerrilla war that feeds on them. Neighbors like Ecuador, Panama and Peru say that drug growers and processors pushed out of Colombia would relocate across their borders, bringing paramilitary groups and political turmoil. In fact, White House planners now say that the drug war in Latin America was never a pure Colombian issue but should always have been seen in the context of the Andean region's political and economic problems. That may be so, but that's not how the Colombia Plan was sold to Congress. If anything, the proposed expansion of the antidrug plan is a tacit admission of the futility of efforts to choke off the production of drugs. It's like trying to squeeze water; production simply shifts to where there is less resistance. If Colombia clamps down, Ecuador will start getting cultivators and processors. If Ecuador fights them, the drug makers will shift to Panama or Bolivia. Ultimately, it's a losing battle. The key is to reduce the prodigious demand for illicit drugs in the United States. That's what drives production. It's elementary economics. As long as demand for narcotics is steady or growing in the United States, there will always be producers ready to replant fields and relocate processing plants wherever they can, and to bring armed thugs along with them for security. It's a never-ending and futile round-robin that no amount of aid, economic or military, to foreign nations can solve.
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