FOLLY IN COLOMBIA?

The $1.3 billion in military and other aid that Washington decided
last year to put into the war on drugs in Colombia and the Andean
region "marks a major shift in U.S. policy"-- one that won't help the
United States and may harm Colombia, contend political scientists
LeoGrande and Sharpe, of American University and Swarthmore College,
respectively

In the name of fighting the traffic in illegal drugs, the United
States is effectively escalating its involvement in Colombia's long
running war with Marxist guerrillas, the authors maintain. The
escalation was prompted by a dramatic increase in coca production in
two southern provinces of Colombia. These are strongholds of the main
leftist guerrilla force, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
which derives millions of dollars a year from "taxes" on the drug
production and trade. But the US "war" on illegal drugs "cannot be
won in the Colombian rain forest" say LeoGrande and Sharpe. "Even if
the United States defoliates every acre given over to growing coco.
Burns every laboratory, and destroys every last gram of Colombian
cocaine, it will have won a hollow victory. The drug business will
simply move elsewhere, as it always does." The market is too
lucrative to die.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the United States targeted the major
drug trafficking organizations in Colombia, which imported most of
their coca leaf from Peru and Bolivia. By the mid 1990s, the key
leaders of the Medellin and Cali cartels had been killed or captured,
but the flow of drugs continued. Many smaller producers appeared, and
some of the business shifted to Mexico (which became the major
supplier of cocaine to the western United States). As Colombian coca
leaf production expanded (after U.S. efforts succeeded in reducing
coca production in Bolivia and Peru), the growers. rather than the
traffickers, became the main U.S. enemy in Colombia. For all
Washington's efforts over the last decade, however, the total amount
of land planted in coca in the Andean region--almost 500.000
acres--has remained about the same. LeoGrande and Sharpe observe
"Faced with eradication campaigns peasants simply plant elsewhere".
The new eradication campaign that Washington envisions in southern
Colombia will fare no better--and "have no impact whatsoever on the
supply of drugs entering the United States."

But the shift in US policy will have a terrible impact in Colombia,
intensifying the violence and making a negotiated settlement between
the Marxist guerillas and the Colombian government more difficult.
"Despite fits and starts, the peace process in Colombia is not nearly
as moribund as some U.S. officials imply," the authors believe. But
instead of improving the prospects for peace, the United States "is
about to put Colombia's fragile democracy at greater risk by
escalating the new Violencia. . . . It is the people of Colombia who
will pay the price for the inability of the United States to face the
fact that its 'war' on drugs can only he won at home."