A START ON THE ROAD BACK TO SANITY FROM PLAN COLOMBIA

HOW to make enemies, squander billions and accomplish nothing: That's
a U.S. program called Plan Colombia. Its central idea is to slow the
flow of cocaine into the nostrils of American night-clubbers by
poisoning crops in the Andes.

Five billion wasted dollars later, cocaine surges cheaper and purer
into our cities and suburbs. Since 2000, Plan Colombia has sprayed an
area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island. Meanwhile, Colombia's coca
acreage rose 9 percent last year.

Indigenous peoples have been growing coca in the Andes for the last
2,000 years, give or take a few centuries. These farmers are not keen
on having their culture destroyed as they're dragged into our
War-on-Drugs lunacy. You can imagine.

So why do we do it? Here's a hint: Almost half of the $630 million in
military aid to Colombia last year was scooped up by U.S. defense
contractors. There's money in the madness.

Democrats have started on the road to sanity, though not quite getting
there. Now the majority in Congress, they pushed through a House
spending bill that lops the share of Colombian aid money going to
military (mostly drug-eradication) programs to 65 percent of the
total, down from 80 percent. Spending less on a dumb program makes it
less dumb, one supposes.

But Democrats have also held up the Colombia Free Trade Agreement,
which is none too smart if they want Colombians to sell us stuff other
than cocaine. More on that later.

As originally conceived by Bill Clinton and then-Colombian President
Andres Pastrana in 1999, Plan Colombia was more into building schools
and promoting human rights. Wiping out coca fields played a smaller
role. The Republican Congress wanted it to be more about defense
spending and prevailed -- at which point the European Union decided
not to participate.

President Bush has never been a great fan of nonmilitary solutions,
and his recent budget request sought to continue Plan Colombia's
hard-power bias. Bush sees no weirdness in having U.S. planes dump
chemicals on campesinos to stop a drug that he won't deny having taken.

Colombia is a violent place. Marxist guerillas, right-wing
paramilitaries and drug gangs have all committed unspeakable
atrocities there. Some supporters of Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe
had been linked to right-wing militias accused of killing union organizers.

But nothing in Colombia is simple. Uribe insists he has no direct ties
to the paramilitaries, and the government has arrested politicians
connected to them. Murders of union organizers are down more than 60
percent from the level in 2001.

So when Democrats refused to extend free trade to Colombia, their
agenda wasn't entirely human rights. It was also a pretext to take a
stand against another free-trade deal. "They had just let Panama and
Peru slip through," says Julia Sweig, a Latin America expert at the
Council on Foreign Relations. "Their price was going to be Colombia."

Furthermore, Uribe did a bad selling job during his recent visit to
Washington. Accustomed to working with Republicans, he neglected to
cultivate the labor and civil-rights groups that Democrats work with.

Sweig believes that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic
leaders understand that an agreement with Colombia is needed. It will
eventually happen.

Americans should know that their drug users account for much of the
estimated $4 billion in cocaine that Colombia exports a year -- with
most of that money going to vicious guerrillas and paramilitaries. A
free-trade agreement would encourage more peaceful kinds of commerce.

In the meantime, let's acknowledge reality and decriminalize drugs.
That would close down international drug trafficking overnight.
Really, what Andean peasants cultivate on the sides of their mountains
should be no concern of ours.

Harrop is a syndicated columnist based in Providence, R.I.