THE U.S. CONTINUES ITS STRATEGY OF 'ETERNAL WAR'

When I last visited Colombia some months back, the editor of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's news magazine Cambio lamented that his country seemed "ripe for
eternal war." The news last week that Colombia's sputtering "peace process"
was salvaged from collapse at the last moment does little to alter that
grim assessment.

The 3-year-old peace talks between the government and leftist guerrillas
will continue. But with no truce in place, so will the mutual murder,
mayhem and kidnapping that has turned this Andean nation into one of the
most violent places on Earth. Regrettably, U.S. policy does nothing except
accelerate and encourage the bloodletting.

Under its so-called Plan Colombia--a $1.3 billion, multiyear effort pushed
through in the last phase of the Clinton administration in the name of the
war on drugs--the Bush White House now pumps more than $2 million a day
into the counter-narcotics conflict. Countless federal drug and
intelligence agents act as adjuncts to the Colombian military. A couple of
hundred or more U.S. military advisors train and counsel three new elite
battalions of the Colombian army. Dozens of hi-tech U.S. combat
helicopters, including a squadron of 14 battle-ready Black Hawks, are being
shipped to Bogota. Along with them come an unknown number of
private-contract U.S. pilots and helicopter technical crews. Another batch
of private-contract Americans fly the crop dusters that spray toxic
herbicides over the coca-rich countryside. Supporting this operation are
four new so-called "forward operating locations," or FOLs--U.S .military
intelligence outposts--in Ecuador, Aruba, Curacao and El Salvador.

Now word comes that the Bush administration is considering U.S. military
aid that would be earmarked, not for counter-narcotics assistance, but for
counter-insurgency, that is, for the government's war against the
guerrillas. Already last year, one U.S. Embassy official admitted to me
that the line between the two struggles is "ambiguous." Those who have
worried that U.S. intervention in the Colombia drug war would eventually
drag us directly into that country's civil war now have genuine cause to be
alarmed.

It's no accident that Colombia is simultaneously the world's largest
cocaine producer and home to the hemisphere's most dogged guerrilla
insurgency. Both the drug trade and the guerrilla movement have grown out
of social and economic injustice endemic in rural areas of the country. A
political and economic oligarchy has monopolized much of recent Colombia
history. Disenfranchised subsistence farmers have found in coca production
their only salvation. Others have sought a better world through armed
struggle or organized crime. And all sides have an interest in the
cash-rich coca trade.

With a certain sense of irony and resignation, Colombians lump all
rifle-toting groups--from the army and police to various guerrilla groups,
counter-guerrilla paramilitary death squads and criminal gangs--under the
rubric of "armed actors." They might as well add the U.S. to that roster.

For 38 years, the guerrilla insurgency has raged. Colombian President
Andres Pastrana, whose term is up in August, has taken a two-track approach
to the crisis. While accommodating the U.S., he has also--to his
credit--aggressively pursued peace parlays with the FARC (Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents, an 18,000-strong guerrilla army that
is flush with coca dollars. To the open dismay of U.S. officials, Pastrana
granted the guerrillas a Switzerland-sized safe haven, which has been the
venue of the talks.

The negotiations have been bumpy and inconclusive. Neither side has given
very much. The government demands that rebels cease their tactic of
kidnapping and that they stop using the safe zone as a staging area for
military operations. For their part, the guerrillas demand the government
do more to reign in right-wing death squads, which have carried out a
string of horrific massacres.

Then last week, Pastrana stiffened. Giving the rebels a 48-hour ultimatum,
he demanded they either meet a series of his demands or abandon the safe
haven and face a large military offensive.

Ultimatums from any side hardly seem the remedy for what ails Colombia. In
order to achieve a lasting peace, all "actors" in the conflict will have to
make concessions of sizable proportions. The guerrillas will have to
recognize that while their call for social justice widely resonates in
Colombia, their real political support is narrow and weak because most
Colombians are appalled by their involvement in the coca industry and are
horrified by their use of often barbaric military tactics. As a result, the
guerrillas have no future other than as one more political party.

On the government side, Pastrana will have to show some real grit in
confronting and eliminating the right-wing death squads that often work as
allies with the army. But more important, Pastrana will have to make what
Italian leftist politicians call the "historic compromise"--convincing the
Colombian elites that the future of their country rests on their
willingness to accept radical economic and social reforms that close the
gaping class divide that rends the nation weak and keeps it at war with itself.

For all this to work, the U.S. would have to scale down its current
military posture and redirect its military assistance to economic
development. But that possibility seems as distant as the other two. Few
Colombians failed to see the stark symbolism in the fact that Pastrana's
ultimatum last week came just one day after an elaborate ceremony was
staged to receive the latest shipment of U.S. Black Hawk gunships, during
which U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson renewed the U.S. pledge to provide
military support. To underscore the hard-line U.S. policy, the White House
last week made a "recess appointment" of ultra-hawk Otto J. Reich as
assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs. As Colombia
teetered on the abyss of all-out war, the peace talks were, nevertheless,
rescued. Round-the-clock negotiations carried out by United Nations special
envoy James LeMoyne and, at the final moment, supported by foreign
diplomats brought both sides together just four hours before the deadline.
Now Pastrana has issued another ultimatum, giving the rebels until today to
agree to a cease-fire.

To the embarrassment of U.S. diplomacy, credit for salvaging the peace
process should go squarely to LeMoyne. A former New York Times foreign
correspondent, and armed with nothing more than fluent Spanish, a working
knowledge of the region and a mandate from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, LeMoyne kept the dialogue alive.

One can only imagine what the government of the United States--with its
enormous power, wealth and prestige--could accomplish if it followed
LeMoyne's example and put all its efforts in Colombia into the work of a
lasting peace, instead of into a seemingly endless war.