STICKING WITH COLOMBIA

WITH AN extraordinary personal effort, Colombian President Andres Pastrana
has managed to rescue the peace process he launched more than two years ago
with leftist insurgents who for three decades have plagued his country and
who now feed on and foster its booming drug trade.

After 15 hours of talks over two days with Manuel Marulanda, the grizzled
chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Mr. Pastrana
emerged last Friday with an agreement that will restart negotiations about
a cease-fire and an exchange of prisoners, and extend for another eight
months the existence of a safe haven his government ceded to the guerrillas.

Mr. Pastrana may have headed off a major escalation of violence in a
country that is already losing a dozen people a day to fighting.

At the same time, the Colombian president has essentially perpetuated a
status quo that -- until recently, at least -- has been as unsatisfying for
most Colombians as it has been advantageous for the guerrillas. The FARC
has used its Switzerland-sized haven to increase drug cultivation,
assassinate local officials, forcibly recruit youths for its armed units
and hold more than 450 government police and soldiers captive in open-air
pens. Meanwhile, it has refused to negotiate seriously; since many of its
units are far more involved in raising money from drugs and kidnapping than
in politics, many Colombians question whether any accord could interest
them. Frustration with the guerrillas' growing strength, and the
government's relative weakness, has helped triple the size of the
right-wing militias, which are now as implicated in drug trafficking and
human rights atrocities as the leftists.

Colombia's foreign minister will be in Washington today to explain this
messy and dangerous situation to the Bush administration, for which
Colombia is likely to be a major and continuing problem.

By now, U.S. interests in this country of 40 million, the hemisphere's
fourth largest, go well beyond the cocaine trafficking that was the narrow
focus of the Clinton administration: Colombia's conflict is threatening to
spill over into neighbors such as Brazil and OPEC member Venezuela, and has
become a major concern for leaders around Latin America. A $1.1 billion
U.S. aid package, part of a larger program called Plan Colombia, passed
Congress last year with bipartisan support, but the military component of
the package is beginning to prompt a debate reminiscent of those over the
Central American wars of the 1980s.

So far the Bush administration has been understandably cautious; Secretary
of State Colin Powell has said he supports Plan Colombia, but believes
there is no military solution to the problem.

That seems a good place to begin. Helping Colombia will require
strengthening the army enough to pose a genuine threat to the militias of
the left and right and eradicating the coca fields that fund the outlaws
and strengthening democratic institutions such as the judiciary so they can
combat human rights violations. Some early results from Plan Colombia give
cause for hope: Since the middle of December, aerial spraying operations
backed by two U.S.-trained mobile army brigades have wiped out huge tracts
of coca in Putumayo province, a stronghold of the FARC as well as of
right-wing paramilitaries. The challenge for the new administration will be
to stick to this difficult course -- and to convince Congress and the
public that the effort is worthwhile.