NEW PRESIDENT MUST NOT IGNORE WARNINGS FROM SOUTH AMERICA

PARIS - Not much has been said about the impact elsewhere in South
America of Plan Colombia, the U.S. program for semi military
intervention in Colombia.

The Washington debate has been about whether sending $1.3 billion in
mostly military aid to Colombia - helicopters, arms and military
training programs - will produce any drop in the amount of drugs
available on the U.S. market and whether American soldiers might be
drawn into the fighting between the Colombian Army and rebel groups
that control regions where the raw drugs are produced.

What it will do to Colombia itself has been a second-rank worry, and
what it might mean to the future of U.S. relations with the rest of
South America has hardly come under discussion at all.

Among all the institutions concerned with relations among the Western
countries, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations' 30 year series of
biennial Atlantic Council conferences has been all but alone in
bringing South Americans into a policy debate usually dominated by
North Americans and Europeans.

The latest Atlantic Conference, held early this month in Puerto Rico,
where the series began in 1970, provided a sober South American
contribution to the usually Washington obsessed U.S. policy dialogue.
Washington's plans for Colombia provoked the most anxious discussion.

Before World War II, Washington's influence on the Americas was
unassertively exercised and only distantly felt by the advanced South
American states of the continent's "Southern Cone": Argentina, Brazil,
Chile and Uruguay.

The United States had dominated Central America and the Caribbean
island-states since the early 19th century. Mexico had made the most
powerful challenge to U.S. interests and ideas with its 1910
revolution and subsequent expropriation of U.S. oil industry holdings.

Washington's attention to the Southern Cone states was mainly
commercial until 1940. The major South American states were
economically as closely attached to Europe as to the colossus in the
north. Their cultural ties were much closer to Europe than to the
United States.

The war changed that, largely eliminating European influence.
Washington was acutely concerned about the strategic security of the
region and about Latin American resources, which were in great demand.

Those wartime attentions, prolonged by the Cold War, brought creation
of the Organization of American States in 1948, confirming a de facto
U.S. sphere of influence that persists to this day. In recent years,
economic links have further tightened. U.S. exports to South America
rose by more than 40 percent from 1991 to 1999, and the increase in
U.S. investment is even higher.

The Argentine scholar Felipe de la Balze, a member of his country's
Council on International Relations, told this year's Atlantic
Conference that the success of NAFTA and general agreement in South
America on the so called Washington consensus on trade expansion and
economic integration had created a very favorable climate for
cooperation between the United States and South America.

He argues that South America (apart from Central America) "is ready
for an assertive U.S. regional initiative" to consolidate relations,
not only in trade and commerce, but in ideas and institutions.

However, many Latin Americans criticize the United States because of
its aggressive, and largely unilateral, counternarcotics policies.
Washington is seen as projecting onto other countries the destructive
consequences of a domestic problem that it is unwilling or unable to
address effectively at home.

The congressional requirement that Latin American (and other)
countries be "certified" annually for their cooperation with U.S. drug
policies - or suffer economic sanctions - is seen as peculiarly
humiliating and regarded with particular anger.

According to participants in the Puerto Rican conference, this has
made it possible for drug traffickers, as well as left-wing insurgents
who are the de facto allies of the drug merchants, to present
themselves as the defenders of national sovereignty.

Plan Colombia, aggressively backed by the Clinton administration
(under pressure from elements in Congress), has found little support
in Latin America. Its critics argue that by militarizing and
internationalizing the Colombian conflict, Plan Colombia threatens to
merge the drug war with the traumatic indigenous civil struggle that
has been going on for most of the last half-century in Colombia.

The result of that could be destruction of the Colombian state itself,
unable to re-establish its authority in the southern regions now
controlled by ostensibly left-wing rebel movements, cooperating with
the drug traffickers.

Critics say that by eliminating all chance of political dealings with
the rebels, the U.S. intervention will undermine the legitimate
government in Colombia while driving drug growers and shippers over
the frontiers into neighboring countries, promoting the same
politico-criminal anarchy there.

Fortunately, doubts are mounting in Washington. On Nov. 16, the
chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Benjamin
Gilman, a New York Republican who was formerly a supporter of Plan
Colombia, said he had changed his mind and now thought the United
States was on the brink of making a "major mistake."

A new administration will soon take office, probably one skeptical of
intervention in other people's civil conflicts. The new president,
whoever he is, should listen to South America's warnings.