OUR VALENTINE'S DAY PRESENT FROM BESIEGED COLOMBIA

NEW YORK

ORDINARILY we aren't nervous travelers, but my wife and I were relieved
last month when Colombia's President Andres Pastrana announced he would
hold face-to-face peace talks with the left-wing guerrilla leader known as
Sureshot. By happy coincidence, the summit was scheduled right before St.
Valentine's Day week, during the final leg of our two-year quest to adopt a
baby girl from Latin America. The last thing we needed was a flare-up in
the 37-year Colombian civil war, so we felt like sending Mr. Pastrana and
Mr. Sureshot a Valentine.

Only two weeks before, the lovely woman who runs the Casa de Maria adoption
center in Medellin had cheerfully urged us not to be scared off by the
latest bit of terror in Colombia's second city: the car bombing on Jan. 10
of an upscale shopping center that killed one person and injured 50 others.
Just a couple of rival criminal gangs at work, she reassured us, nothing
political.

Of course we weren't frightened, I said with all the aplomb I could muster.
Our first trip to Medellin in December had been wonderful and we couldn't
wait to return to the nice hotel, not far from El Tesoro, the blown-up
mall. I was tempted to joke about a delay in our earlier journey -- the one
caused by the kidnapping of two judges by left-wing agents and a resulting
protest strike by the local judiciary -- but our Good Samaritan beat me to
the punch with her own mordant sense of humor. "If we wanted things calm,
we'd live in Switzerland," she remarked. "But that would be boring."

Boring it is not in Colombia, a breathtakingly beautiful country possessed
of so much wealth (for some), sophistication and human warmth that it's
possible to overlook its terrible poverty (for most) and violence. Even so,
I now have some idea why most Colombians would like things to be a little
less exciting. Between the drug-gang militias, right-wing paramilitaries,
left-wing revolutionaries (who "tax" the drug producers), government
human-rights abusers and U.S.-funded defoliators of farmers' fields (in the
name of fighting the drug war), the poorest Colombians, of whom there are a
great many, can hardly catch a break.

Our new daughter comes from the lower classes, an economic refugee by any
definition. Her impoverished mother and four siblings live in a village
about 50 miles from Medellin -- beyond guerrilla checkpoints, where it
isn't very safe to drive -- and I suppose they've been luckier than some.
For one thing, they're still alive -- in December, the Colombian press was
full of stories about civilians being killed in the right-left crossfire.
For another, they still have a village to live in. According to Action
Against Hunger, an estimated 1.5 million people have fled their villages
because of the civil war, and "live in appalling conditions."

If it's true that only 40 percent of the country is controlled by the
government, we were fortunate to be in Medellin, where the heavily armed
"Tourist Police" keep watch over gringos in hotels. We heard small-arms
fire every night, but no one seemed to know where it came from, nor were
they very concerned. In Medellin, private security guards carry shotguns in
broad daylight, even outside the modest photo shop we visited for passport
pictures.

People got used to the status quo , and if Colombia has the world's second
highest murder rate, after El Salvador, well, you can got used to that too.
Atop the steps to the plaza in front of the Medellin government complex, a
metal barricade has been erected to prevent car bombings -- although this
hardly differs from the United States. I was warned against photographing
employees filing into the courthouse building; they might get the idea they
were targets, and I had to check my camera in the lobby before proceeding
upstairs. Adoptive parent or not, I might have been this year's Timothy
McVeigh.

If all this seems absurd -- reminiscent of the charmingly bizarre figures
produced by Medellin's favorite son, the painter and sculptor Fernando
Botero, it's entirely lost on the U.S. government. Like so many of their
arrogant predecessors, Bill Clinton and now, apparently, George W. Bush,
view Colombia as an "asset" to be protected or augmented, not a country
with people and a complicated history.

Mr. Clinton evidently thought a modest $1.3 billion investment in military
equipment and training might fix Colombia, but so far the anti-coca
herbicide campaign looks more like Vietnam -- as in "destroying the village
to save it" -- than post-Cold War "nation-building." Colombia is blessed
with an abundance of fertile land and the notion of bombing plants that are
so easily replaced has an insane quality worthy of the weirdest Pentagon
"counterinsurgency" theories of the 1950s and '60s.

The surreal nature of Mr. Clinton's "Plan Colombia" was only heightened
when the outgoing president commuted the prison sentence of Carlos Vignali,
a major-league cocaine salesman whose father, Horacio, gave $160,000 to
Democratic politicians, a sum then sweetened by a $200,000 fee to Hillary
Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham.

President Bush seems more inclined to acknowledge the crucial role of
American consumers in the narcotics trade; he even dared to say it out loud
to Mexico's President Vicente Fox. But there has been no indication that he
plans to leave Colombia to the drug cartels, Sureshot and his right-wing
counterpart, Carlos Castano, and President Pastrana. On the contrary, his
appointment of John Negroponte as ambassador to the United Nations --
Negroponte was the notorious point man for Ronald Reagan's largely illegal
crusade against left-wing revolution in Central America -- might signal a
return to the belligerent tone of the past.

I've never fully understood the American impulse to "reform" other
countries by bombing or starving them (Vietnam, Iraq, Nicaragua, Kosovo,
Serbia), massacring their natives (the Philippines) or simply invading and
overthrowing their governments (Cuba, Grenada and Panama). When not
behaving self-righteously, ours can be a generous and intelligent nation --
witness the Marshall Plan -- yet we rarely choose the generous or
intelligent option.

No better symbol points up this national contradiction than the hideous
five-year-old U.S. Embassy in Bogota, known by locals as "the bunker." I
saw the old, abandoned U.S. Embassy in Saigon before it was torn down, and
the two buildings share a bomb-proof ugliness that seems designed to
demoralize, not uplift.

Yet, from behind the bullet-proof glass on the ground floor, I heard the
old-fashioned, flat-accented courtesy I associate with the best of the
American spirit: "Mr. MacArthur, here's the visa for that beautiful baby.
We're sorry you had to wait so long; there were so many Peruvian refugee
cases today." I wondered: With all our money, can't we figure out a way to
help more Colombian babies and their mothers, instead of destroying their
crops and arming their government for another round of useless killing?

The answer came back negative upon our return to New York. We had
unthinkingly sent ahead a can of white powdered Nestle's baby formula, in
case our new daughter didn't like the new premixed brand we planned to use.
When we opened the package, we found U.S. foreign policy spilled all over
the plastic bag -- the foil seal had been broken by U.S. customs in a vain
search for cocaine.

They don't celebrate Valentine's Day in Colombia, by the way. As regards
Colombia, we really don't either.