Dealing with Drugs and Revolution

OUR MORAL OBLIGATION TO COLOMBIA

Ten days ago, the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
lobbed rockets at the inauguration of Alvaro Uribe as president of
Colombia, killing 19. Most were homeless people in a nearby slum or
children. And continued rebel violence that killed 100 more people led
Uribe last week to declare a state of emergency.

The dramatic inauguration-day attack - apparently made possible with
training by the Irish Republican Army - may finally persuade Washington
politicians to become serious about the rebel insurgency in Colombia and
our involvement in it.

Why should the United States care about Colombia?

Besides being three times the size of California and strategically located
between Central America and the rest of South America, it is the source of
almost all the cocaine on U.S. streets. Political and economic instability
there feeds more of the same throughout the Andes.

But our role is far more complicated. Americans provide heavy financial
support for both sides in the decades-long Colombian war. Simply put, we
have backed ourselves into a corner there. As long as Americans fund the
violent groups trying to overthrow Colombia's government, it is morally
imperative for us to fund that government's effort to defend itself and
Colombian democratic institutions.

War is not the preferred choice for Bogota or Washington. One of the first
things Uribe did after his landslide electoral victory was to ask the
United Nations to help negotiate an end to the war. Secretary General Kofi
Annan agreed to do so.

But Uribe was elected because he offered an alternative to former President
Andres Pastrana's three-year "peace offensive" that collapsed in February.
The new president insists that FARC must give up its strategy of fighting
while talking. FARC responded with rockets on inauguration day.

Where did FARC come from? When the communist world imploded more than a
decade ago, guerrillas worldwide lost their funding. But not FARC, which
immediately replaced Soviet aid with dollars, and lots more of them, from
the United States.

In fact, both of Colombia's remaining guerrilla armies, and paramilitaries
who emerged later to fight the rebels in that half of the country the
government -doesn't control, became major players in the illegal drug industry.

The director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, John Walters,
recently reported that the three get more than $300 million annually this
way.
FARC gets the lion's share, helping it persist in its effort to overthrow
Colombia's democracy.

But how are we responsible for funding FARC? Follow the money. Since the
1960s, many Americans have used tons of drugs. In moral righteousness,
legislators made drugs illegal, but they -can't stop people from using
them. Predictably, the incentives for producers to serve this insatiable
American (and later European) market were enormous.

The result of market demand and Washington prohibition made this drug war
mess inevitable. It has been disastrous in the United States but often even
more catastrophic abroad, particularly in Colombia. In 1998, hundreds of
Americans, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, sent an open
letter to the United Nations arguing, "The global war on drugs is now
causing more harm than drug abuse itself."

In Colombia, the drug nightmare has brought death to tens of thousands,
driven hundreds of thousands from their homes and prompted rampant
kidnappings and widespread corruption.

Venezuelan American journalist Carlos Ball has correctly said, "The war on
drugs has done more harm to democratic institutions in Latin America than
all the communist guerrillas of the past 40 years."

The only real way to treat the underlying problems is some form of drug
legalization. But politicians -haven't shown such wisdom or courage.
Dealing with symptoms is as far as they have gone.

Since 2000, Washington pumped nearly $1.7 billion into Colombia, plus
hundreds of millions more in interdiction money, making Colombia the third
largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world. The bulk of the aid was
military and, until very recently, directed exclusively into the drug war
on the ridiculous grounds that the drug and guerrilla wars can be
separated. What has all this money bought us? U.S. government figures show
that the cocaine crop increased substantially last year.

But this war cannot be fought by military means alone. The United States
must also support a broad, integrated program of national reform. Such a
program would range from resettling hundreds of thousands of internal
refugees to "reinserting" guerrillas who wish to rejoin society, from
developing the justice system and reducing corruption to strengthening
democratic institutions generally.

Former President Pastrana's $7.5 billion Plan Colombia, launched several
years ago, included much of this. We sent our billion-plus dollars, but
funding for non-drug programs remained largely on paper. Colombia had no
money of its own.

The Uribe government knows it will need to defend human and civil rights.
Abuses by the military or paramilitaries will make it more difficult for
Washington to give full support to Uribe.

The terrorist bombs during Uribe's inauguration sent a message to Americans
as much as to Colombians. If they heed it, Washington politicians may
finally be ready to face some of the realities of the terrorist challenge
in Colombia.