Foreign Policy Shifts

OUR WIDENING WAR IN COLOMBIA

ON JULY 25, 5,000 women from Colombia's rural towns and villages
arrived in Bogota with a single demand: They want an end to 38 years
of war.

After traveling for hours, the women -- mothers, daughters, sisters
and wives -- stepped off buses, joined arms and marched downtown to
call for nonviolent resistance to war and to demand a negotiated
solution to the country's armed conflict.

"We don't want to bear children for war," said Yolanda Becerra,
president of the Popular Women's Organization, one of the
organizations that convened the National March of Women for Peace.

Like most of us, few of these women know that Colombia ranks third --
after Israel and Egypt -- in the amount of assistance it receives from
the United States. What they want from the United States, however, is
not more military aid, but foreign aid that will help repair and
reconstruct their conflict-stricken society.

Most of all, these women want to prevent greater violence. In their
view, there are no good guys in a civil war that kills 3,500 people
every year and scatters tens of thousands of widows and children to
refugee camps and slums already jammed with 2 million refugees
displaced by decades of violence.

These women have watched leftist guerrillas, particularly the
Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or FARC, kidnap people and make good
on their promise to assassinate every elected official. They have
witnessed right-wing paramilitary soldiers line up the men in their
villages and mow them down with machine guns. They have been raped,
sometimes repeatedly, because they "belong" to the wrong men.

One month later, their call for a political solution is an even more
improbable goal. In the name of fighting terrorism, both Colombia and
the United State have decided to wage a decisive war to defeat the
FARC.

During his campaign for the Colombian presidency, 50-year-old Alvaro
Uribe pledged to crack down on leftist rebels. In May, frightened
Colombian voters handed him a landslide victory. Last week, just as
Uribe was about to take the oath of office, urban guerrillas launched
a barrage of mortar attacks on the presidential palace that killed 19
people.

Employing the rhetoric of the war on terrorism, President Uribe has
now invoked "a state of internal commotion," that legally permits him
to impose a war tax to build up army and police forces as well as to
launch Plan Meteor -- a national campaign to turn 1 million citizens
into government informants. It also allows him to restrict citizen
travel, censor radio and television coverage, ban public
demonstrations, carry out searches without warrants, detain people
without hearings and even redirect public funds to the military. After
90 days, he can extend the state of emergency for another 180 days.

At the same time as the Uribe administration declared a state of
emergency, the United States also shifted its policy toward Colombia's
civil war. Since June 2000, the United States has quietly escalated
its involvement in Colombia's civil war, granting the government
nearly $2 billion, mostly in military assistance. In theory, the funds
were restricted -- the United States could use these funds to
eradicate coca cultivation and production and to train Colombian
soldiers, but not to make counterinsurgent attacks against guerrillas.

The fight against the drug trade, however, failed miserably; the
amount of cocaine production only increased. Spraying mountainous
agricultural fields also destroyed edible crops and harmed the health
of many peasant families.

Last week, in the name of fighting terrorism, Congress and President
Bush authorized the Colombian government to use this military aid, as
well as 3,000 U.S.-trained soldiers, to launch attacks against
guerrilla rebels. The anti-terrorism package also provided the Uribe
government with an additional $35 million from American taxpayers. Of
this, $6 million is targeted to protect an oil pipeline -- half-owned
by the U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum Corp.-- that rebels have bombed
170 times during the past year.

Human rights groups have sharply criticized Uribe's crackdown on civil
liberties. Some Latin American political analysts worry that America's
escalating support of the Colombian government and army will prolong
the country's conflict.

Like the women peace protesters, these critics believe that only a
political solution will ultimately end a civil war that has ravaged
Colombia for the past four decades. Their argument? It took a
political solution to end the civil wars in El Salvador and other
Central American countries.

Since Sept. 11, more and more national leaders have taken up the
rhetoric of fighting terrorism whenever it has suited their political
purposes. But despite the use of anti-terrorist language by Presidents
Bush and Uribe, the Colombian conflict is not really part of what our
president has dubbed "the war against terrorism." To be sure, all
sides are guilty of committing atrocious and murderous acts of
violence. But this is a civil war, complicated by social and economic
inequality, the corrupting influence of drug money, well-armed illegal
paramilitary and guerrilla military forces and weak democratic
institutions.

More American military aid will not defeat rebels who call for the
government to cut its ties with right-wing paramilitary forces,
nationalize the oil fields and fund alternative agricultural
development, more social services and extensive job creation. Until
these demands are negotiated or some compromise is reached, no amount
of military force will end this conflict.

To put it another way, more American aid -- the kinder, gentler sort
that builds homes and hospitals and substitutes genuine agricultural
development for coca plants -- is what will help Colombia achieve the
lasting peace for which those women marched just one short month ago.