REVIEW U.S. AID TO COLOMBIA

U.S. support for President Andres Pastrana's peace initiative has been
badly shaken by mounting evidence that Colombia's guerrillas are on the
warpath.

It is welcome news that Washington is rethinking and reviewing the U.S.
commitment of $1.3 billion to Plan Colombia. The most recent alarm sounded
when three members of the Irish Republican Army were arrested as they were
about to leave Colombia. It is alleged that they had been teaching the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, to manufacture
and use sophisticated terrorist bombs. This news prompted a sharp reaction
from State Department spokesman Philip Reeker, who said: "No one should be
in any doubt that the United States would be greatly concerned about any
assistance, information sharing, training or collaboration with the FARC,
which is a terrorist organization." That statement was followed by the
announcement that a top State Department official, Marc Grossman, who is
under-secretary of state for political affairs, will be heading to Bogota
next week with a group of officials to discuss policy with President
Pastrana. The FARC's IRA connection has been confirmed by tapes of
telephone conversations released by the Colombian Army. A FARC commander
can be heard discussing Semtex, a highly explosive substance which is a
signature weapon of the IRA. He refers to "los tres monos" (the three
monkeys) as trainers.

The reference is to the three arrested men from Northern Ireland, one a
notorious IRA bomb expert.

The FARC commander speaks of using Semtex bombs for urban terrorism,
noting, "We must hit the cities hard." Last month a government-funded study
by the RAND Corporation strongly criticized President Pastrana for ceding
an area the size of Switzerland to the FARC for a safe haven. The study
pointed out that the FARC have set up a "state within a state" in the
territory and warned that the guerrillas are using the protection money
they are paid by drug traffickers to arm themselves with modern weapons.

The RAND study takes President Pastrana to task for refusing to acknowledge
that the guerrillas are guarding the coca and poppy fields and receive
financing from the drug cartels in return. For the first time, the State
Department on Thursday directly charged the FARC with using the
demilitarized zone granted the government for narcotics trafficking and to
hold kidnap victims and army and police prisoners. If, as seems more and
more likely, President Pastrana's peace initiative fails, the Bush
administration should help him devise a strategy to force the FARC to the
negotiating table. In Central America, guerrilla insurgencies were not
replaced by genuine peace processes until such time as the guerrillas
realized that they could not win by military means.