THE GREAT COCAINE QUAGMIRE

Can Bush Resist Expanding Clinton's Colombian Drug War?

On December 19th, 2000, American-made Huey helicopters swooped into the
Guamuez Valley in southern Colombia, and Washington's new War on Drugs
began. In January, two 900-man battalions of United States-trained and
- -equipped Colombian troops deployed these Vietnam-era helicopters in their
mission to raid cocaine labs and protect crop-dusting planes across 1,500
square miles of Putumayo province, home to roughly half of the country's
coca fields.

It is all part of Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion aid package brought to you
by Bill Clinton's drug warriors and bequeathed to the Bush administration.
The idea, of course, is to cut Colombia's cocaine production by destroying
the plants and processing labs. But most of Putumayo province is controlled
by the country's most powerful Marxist guerrillas, who have waged a
murderous civil war in Colombia for decades.

Even more violent are the nation's right-wing paramilitaries, the
hemisphere's most notorious death squads. Since September, they have
wrested parts of the province from the guerrillas. With Plan Colombia,
America is plunging into a primary battlefield of one of the world's most
brutal, complex and longest-running conflicts, a war that makes mid-1980s
Nicaragua look like paintball.

In his previous incarnations as national security adviser and chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State Colin Powell formulated his
now-famous doctrine that America should stay out of wars in which we have
no clearly definable goal, no exit strategy and no advantage of
overwhelming force.

The Bush administration seems to have made an exception for Colombia. Even
though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted during his confirmation
hearing that "if demand [for drugs] persists, it's going to find ways to
get what it wants," President Bush and Gen. Powell have endorsed the plan.
The administration is likely to do a full review in the next few months,
but for the moment it will probably keep the helicopters rolling off the
assembly lines and into Colombia.

It is unlikely that Colombia will become another Vietnam for the United
States - we hire others to fight our wars these days. But Americans may
die in Colombia. On any given day, there are 250 to 300 uniformed Americans
in Colombia's war, most of them special forces, doing intelligence training
and running radar stations.

Another 300 or so civilian contractors fly crop-duster planes and carry out
other jobs. The guerrillas have announced that they consider Americans
legitimate military targets; in February, they shot at American civilian
contract workers.

There is little reason to think that the plan will accomplish what
Washington hopes: reducing the amount of cocaine on our streets.

A military strategy has never been successful in cutting the supply of drugs.

As for Colombia, the military aid is likely to make things worse - to widen
the war, handicap the peace talks between the government and the rebel
groups, embolden the hard-liners and cause more civilian deaths.

And since the military aid is going to an organization that maintains
strong ties to the paramilitaries, Plan Colombia will indirectly associate
the United States with these killers.

In the first seventeen days of 2001, twenty-three massacres took place in
Colombia. The country has always been spectacularly violent - perhaps a
quarter-million people died during a dispute between two political parties
in the 1950s. Today, different factors are responsible for Colombia's
pathology - most recently, cocaine.

Colombia, the size of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined, and mainly
covered by dense jungle, supplies ninety percent of America's cocaine and
seventy percent of its heroin.

Five years ago, Colombia grew a negligible amount of coca leaf. It imported
coca from Peru and Bolivia, processed it and shipped it north.

But as coca cultivation dropped in those two nations, the business moved to
Colombia, which now grows almost three-quarters of the world's coca leaf.

Colombia was never Sweden, but cocaine has eroded what little authority the
government did have. The narcos control whomever they want. Judges face the
constant dilemma of plata o plomo: silver or lead, a bribe or a bullet; the
police are corrupt and the military more so.

Cocaine also has fueled Colombia's forty-year war. The several different
Marxist insurgencies should have given up when the Soviet Union died. But
the war goes on. One of the groups, the National Army of Liberation, makes
most of its money from kidnapping and extortion.

The larger group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),
kidnaps and extorts, as well. But it also taxes coca growers, and U.S.
officials charge that it is gradually moving up the coca chain into
outright trafficking. Drug money helps compensate for the guerrillas' lack
of civilian support.

Cocaine has also given rise to the right-wing paramilitary death squads.
While the guerrillas are moving into the cocaine business, the paras began
as traffickers in the 1980s. Today, their leader, Carlos Castano, a drug
trafficker himself - according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
- - admits on television that coca finances seventy percent of his group's
activities. The paramilitaries are fighting the FARC for control of the
coca territory of Putumayo, where the military efforts of Plan Colombia are
concentrated.

Colombia's war is not civil in any traditional sense.

The general population provides no support - only bodies.

Nearly 2 million people have fled the war zones for Colombia's cities as
the paramilitaries have destroyed village after village.

There were more than twelve political killings a day last year, and the
paras were responsible for seventy-five percent of them, according to
human-rights groups.

The vast majority of the victims, among them children and the elderly,
simply had the bad luck to be living in the wrong town. The paras have also
killed thirty human-rights activists in the last three years and many
journalists, labor organizers and peasant activists.

Colombia's military is complicit in these crimes.

In the last few years, the number of atrocities committed by the army has
dropped - because soldiers have apparently farmed out the killings to their
allies in the paramilitaries. The U.S. State Department is well aware of
the military's involvement: The Department's own reports document the
paras' strong ties with the army and police, confirming the investigations
of the press and human-rights groups.

The murders of twenty-six men in the village of Chengue on January 17th are
a chilling example.

Survivors told a Washington Post reporter that the paras had announced last
year that Chengue was a target, after which residents repeatedly wrote to
the government asking for protection. None came. Then, at dusk on the two
nights that preceded the massacre, two green military helicopters flew
above the village in slow circles.

On the day the massacre occurred, soldiers provided safe passage for
paramilitaries and sealed off the area. The paramilitary unit, led by a
woman, crushed the heads of the local men with heavy stones and set the
village on fire. A few minutes later, the helicopters returned, circling again.

The official policy of Colombia's democratic government, led by the
well-intentioned President Andres Pastrana, holds that the paramilitaries'
activities are illegal.

Some arrests are being made, but human-rights groups charge that they are
only for show. Carlos Castano has twenty-two outstanding warrants against
him. Dozens of Colombian journalists have Castano's cell-phone number, and
many have visited his compound.

But the army can't seem to find him.

When Andres Pastrana was elected president in 1998, he traveled to
Washington with a wish list he called Plan Colombia. But it had no military
component - it was essentially a Marshall Plan to reduce violence in
Colombia, asking for money for social programs. "Washington's reaction was,
'That's not the sort of thing we can fund,' " says Adam Isacson, who tracks
Colombia at the Center for International Policy in Washington. "Plan
Colombia died by mid-1999."

The resurrected Plan Colombia had a military focus.

Throughout the last years of the 1990s, a debate raged within the Clinton
administration over what to do about Colombia. One reason for the
administration's preoccupation was a sense that a large, important,
relatively prosperous and nearby nation was in a downward spiral.

The peace process was failing, the FARC was on the offensive, the military
was rumbling and, for the first time in decades, the economy was crashing.

The other problem was that Colombia's coca production was growing,
threatening to wipe out the success of the anti-coca efforts in Peru and
Bolivia. The Republicans in Congress were proposing huge military
counternarcotics packages, daring the administration not to match them.
"They wanted to accuse the administration of having dropped the ball, of
being soft on drugs," says one senior Clinton administration official.
"They had the majority and controlled the purse strings."

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug czar, took the bait. In July 1999, he
proposed spending an extra $1 billion to fight drugs in the Colombia
region, with most of the money going for helicopters, interdiction and,
most controversially, an attempt to take back the coca-growing region of
Putumayo from the guerrillas. McCaffrey often derided the drug war in
interviews, arguing that drugs should be called a cancer, not a war. But he
is at heart a military man, a former commander of Southcom, and has spent
much of his career in the company of Latin military officials.

In Colombia, he seemed just as interested in fighting guerrillas as in
stopping the flow of cocaine.

He showed little inclination to help Colombia stop the paras (who are far
more involved in drug trafficking than the guerrillas). Nor was he
interested in eradicating the coca fields under the paras' control.

McCaffrey's plan horrified others in the administration. "McCaffrey had to
be reined in," says one former State Department official. "He wanted to
take a much harder line to rescue the Colombia government from the
insurgents." The administration ended up endorsing a plan that sanctioned
attacks on guerrillas only when they were protecting drug sites.

But McCaffrey's proposal meant that the Clintonites had to propose a large
package of aid with a military component focused on guerrilla-held
territory, or else they would be accused of disregarding the dire warnings
of their own drug czar.

The administration set up working groups on various aspects of Colombia,
and Clinton officials stress that they traveled to Bogota to consult with
Pastrana's government. But Colombians and many others see what emerged as a
Washington plan. "Colombian officials were present in the meetings," says
Winifred Tate, a Colombia expert with the Washington Office on Latin
America, a liberal policy group.

But "the Colombian congress did not debate or pass the plan before it came
out." In mid-September, Plan Colombia was unveiled in English. The Spanish
version emerged several months later.

The plan came to $7.5 billion in total, with $4 billion due to come from
Bogota and $2 billion from Europe, Japan, Canada and other nations.

So far, however, European countries, wary of being associated with a
militarized plan, have contributed only a very small fraction of this. "And
because of the economic crisis, Colombia doesn't have money," says one
Republican congressional aide who supports the plan. "The only hard cash
anyone sees is what the U.S, coughed up."

Congressional support for posed the bill House Speaker Dennis Hastert and
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott were strong proponents. The bill was also
part of a much larger package of unrelated laws, and so it got very little
attention. "It's safe to say that fewer than ten members of the Senate
really engaged in the debate," says Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), who
opposed the bill and was personally sprayed by a fumigation plane during a
November trip to Colombia.

No alternative was offered on the floor of Congress, which meant that
legislators could either vote for the bill or be seen as opposing the War
on Drugs. "You can't explain the overwhelming vote for it by anything other
than people felt vulnerable to being accused of not wanting to protect
children from drugs," says Wellstone. He worries that politicians will now
treat the spending figures as a new baseline for funding the War on Drugs
in South America. "Either success or failure can be used to justify greater
U.S. involvement," he says.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says that the plan was misleadingly sold on
Capitol Hill as part of a larger package. "Our members were given the
impression that Plan Colombia was comprehensive," she says. "We were told
that it contained a great deal of money for social and health and the rest,
and our piece was only one part of it. Well, the money didn't exist, and we
still haven't seen it."

Then there was the little matter of the helicopters. The original Clinton
bill contained money for fifteen small Hueys and thirty Blackhawk
helicopters, which are expensive and temperamental, but larger, more mobile
and more capable.

After Congress finished with the plan, there were forty-two Texas-made
Hueys in the package, and only eighteen Connecticut-made Blackhawks. "It's
hard to find anyone in the leadership who isn't from Texas," says Rep.
David Obey (D-Wisc.). "A number of helicopters were bought on the basis of
where they were made. It was a political compromise rather than a military
necessity."

Few members of Congress believed the plan would accomplish its goals, says
Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy
group that works on Latin American issues.

Shifter's organization held panels on Plan Colombia for members of
Congress. "People walked away from the meetings saying, 'This is going to
happen, but I'm not confident it's going to work,' " says Shifter. "There
is the feeling that our drug policy has failed, but in an election year the
temperature of drug policy always goes up.

"There was an itch," Shifter continues. "People felt that they needed to do
something. Nobody else had a practical alternative. There was a vacuum, and
it was filled by people who tried to drive home the drug issue.

It was policy by default."

Although the military component overshadows everything else, mllions of
dollars in Plan Colombia are actually going to programs that will help the
Colombian government fight crime and reduce violence.

Plan Colombia will help train judges, prosecutors and police.

Human-rights groups will get bodyguards. There is $68 million for
alternative development and crop substitution, $37 million to help those
fleeing the war and $51 million to improve human rights. "If you look at
the overall budget numbers, the relative increases in the non-military side
are substantially larger than on the military side," says one former
Clinton administration official.

But most of the money funds a classic War on Drugs. Nearly $200 million
goes for drug interdiction in the Andean region, including $62 million for
intelligence. Within Colombia, $642 million will go to the military and the
police. The cornerstone of the strategy is the push into the coca fields of
guerrilla-controlled southern Colombia, which began in December.
Eventually, there will be thirty-three old and at least sixty new
helicopters transporting troops from three new battalions formed and
trained by the United States.

Colombia's army claims that the herbicide spraying killed 70,000 acres of
coca a third of the region's total in the first six weeks, but along the
way, the planes have also fumigated yucca and plantain, as well as many of
the farmers who grow them. But even success is failure when it comes to
eradicating coca. The coca crop came to Colombia because the United States
was "successful" in reducing it by sixty-six percent in Bolivia and by
fifty-five percent in Peru. When the government of Colombia began spraying,
coca then moved to the Putumayo province, which was under guerrilla
control. If spraying is effective in Putumayo, an area the size of
Maryland, there is plenty of acreage for first-class coca cultivation
nearby. "This is a very expensive game of hopscotch," says a Republican
congressional aide who favors Plan Colombia.

More harmful still, the planting could shift back into Peru and Bolivia -
and into Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela - countries that are still cocaine
virgins, unexposed to the violence and corruption that drug trafficking
brings. Even before Plan Colombia began,' there was some spillover, with
cocaine-processing labs showing up in border towns in Ecuador, and the
occasional skirmish between guerrillas and paras.

But the neighbors are now terrified that Plan Colombia will push coca
cultivation onto their territory and bring them thousands of new refugees
from the fighting.

The plan's designers acknowledge that this likely to happen, and have
included $180 million - which is not enough to help these countries cope.

Some Latin American leaders, such as Venezuela President Hugo Chavez,
oppose Plan Colombia because they oppose whatever comes from Washington.
But the fears of other neighbors are more genuine.

They have never favored a militarized approach to drugs.

Latin America has long had a consensus that American consumers are killing
Colombia - not the other way around - and that Americans should take care
of the problem at home.

The most pernicious aspect of Plan Colombia is that by sending the message
that Washington does not care about paramilitary ties, it has allowed the
military to tighten its links to the paras and undercut the government's
ability to break them. The military push will not go into the northern
zones where the paras control the drug traffic - only into areas
historically under guerrilla control.

Before Plan Colombia, the United States did not share non-drug intelligence
about guerrilla activities with the military, for fear it would be passed
to the paras and used against innocent civilians.

But we are sharing such information now.

Congress wrote a clause specifying that before the aid could begin,
Colombia had to dismiss military men credibly accused of collaboration with
the paras, and try them in civilian courts instead of in military courts,
where they are virtually always acquitted.

But Congress also added waivers, which allowed the aid to go through for
"national security" reasons even if these conditions were not met. They
have not been met, and President Clinton used the waivers to get the money
flowing even though Colombia had made virtually none of the human-rights
improvements in essence, winking at Colombia's military and blowing the
opportunity to use the aid as leverage to control the paras. "From the
beginning of the process, I can't think of a meeting with the Colombians
where we didn't talk about human rights," says one former Clinton
administration official.

But you can talk all you want. It's the money that counts.