IN COLOMBIA, REBELS RULE WHILE THE U.S. BATTLES PEASANTS

Tuesday's hijacking of a Colombian airliner carrying 27 passengers from the
town of San Vicente del Caguan to Bogota ended peacefully when the pilot
and some passengers overpowered the hijacker, a disaffected guerrilla
demanding to be taken to Europe.

But even so, the drama underscored Colombian lawlessness and could not have
come at a worse time for Colombian President Andres Pastrana. He has been
sharply criticized for the withdrawal of the Colombian military from the
Revolutionary Army of Colombia (FARC) stronghold in which San Vicente del
Caguan is the largest population center. Nevertheless, the following day
the president agreed to a four-day extension of his government's deadline
for the rebels to either resume efforts toward peace or forfeit their
current privilege of freely roaming a 42,000-square-kilometer demilitarized
zone in the provinces of Caqueta and Meta. "I have decided to extend the
demilitarized zone until the end of this week with the only purpose of
meeting [FARC leader] Marulanda," the president told the nation in a
televised speech.

This is the seventh ultimatum the government has given the FARC, which has
repeatedly failed to reciprocate with any good faith effort toward
negotiations. What may have once been viewed as noble patience increasingly
looks like desperation on the part of Mr. Pastrana, who has staked his
presidency on finding a non-violent solution to a 40-year-old conflict.
There is mounting evidence that the FARC is not very interested in the kind
of agreement a liberal democracy could offer. That suggests that it's time
for a new strategy.

The same goes for the new U.S. administration of George W. Bush. The
Clinton foreign policy toward Colombia was a dismal failure. No less than
the stability of the region is at stake in finding a more effective approach.

The area Colombians call the despeje, or "clearance," has not only been
cleared of any army presence in the last 26 months, but also of any
effective state authority. As a result, the FARC is running the region in
keeping with its own principles, which hardly jibe with modern democratic
values.

This is not to suggest that the FARC enjoys no popularity on the ground.
Thanks to the U.S. war on drugs, which is currently defoliating coca and
other peasant crops, the guerrillas have gained some local backing. But the
unchecked authority they have been granted has destroyed civil liberties
and there are a growing number of reports of basic human rights violations
within the demilitarized zone. Guerrillas captured by the army elsewhere in
the country include many under-age rebels from the Caqueta-Meta region,
supporting peasant claims that their young sons have been conscripted, at
gunpoint, into the ranks of the guerrillas. There is no cease-fire
elsewhere in Colombia and FARC kidnapping and extortion continue unabated,
with the DMZ serving as a secure base from which to launch strikes in the
rest of the country.

It is a credit to the propaganda skills of the left that while the
Colombian army is intensely scrutinized by the international community for
possible human-rights violations, deteriorating human-rights conditions
within the DMZ have been largely ignored. Moreover, the FARC's "governance"
in the despeje highlights what appears to be the biggest barrier to peace.
The goal of social justice is a revolutionary dream, but on what moral
grounds can the Colombian government possibly make peace with an entity
that refuses to respect the most fundamental freedoms of modern, liberal
democracy?

No one wants to abandon efforts toward peace, least of all Colombians who
have seen so little of it in recent years. Yet nothing has been gained by
ceding territory to the rebels in hopes that they might eventually put down
their arms and instead compete for power in the political arena. Now even
the government is signaling that concessions from the guerrillas are in
order if the despeje is to continue. Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Emma
Mejia suggested this week that an international monitoring presence might
be a "prerequisite" for the continuation of negotiations. Other experts
warn that Mr. Pastrana will have to secure a cease-fire if he hopes to
preserve both the despeje and his administration's respectability.

Negotiations from a position of weakness rarely yield a favorable outcome.
Interestingly enough, the guerrilla movement in the north of the country,
known by its Spanish initials ELN, is preparing to negotiate largely
because it has been weakened by outlaw paramilitary groups. This would seem
to support the theory that getting the FARC to seriously negotiate will
require a strengthening of the Colombian army and its presence as a
legitimate authority in the country.

Thus far the U.S. has pledged to stay out of Colombia's conflict, branding
it a civil war. But this is naive. The U.S. has an important national
security interest in fortifying the democratic state of Colombia against a
dangerous band of terrorists. Moreover, the U.S. war on drugs has played a
major role in the escalation of Colombian insecurity and violence. Any
solution must involve a rethinking of the current U.S. strategy.

While U.S.-backed defoliation efforts in the Putamayo region, just south of
the DMZ, clearly build peasant support for the rebels, they are unlikely to
seriously impact the world supply of cocaine. All the evidence suggests
that coca growers pushed out of one region only move to another and there
are legitimate fears that the coca-guerrilla operations could spread into
Ecuador. Defoliating the entire South American continent and then the rest
of the world are the next logical steps in the current plan to end drug use
in the U.S. Meanwhile, as rebels and peasants find solidarity in fighting
anti-narcotics forces, it should be remembered that locals -- not
Washington or Bogota -- will determine the fate of the guerrilla movement,
just as they did in both Nicaragua and Peru. Development aid, promoted by
some theorists, is not going to change things in an area dominated by
Marxist and socialist politics and lacking a rule of law.

The sources of Colombia's guerrilla conflict are no doubt rooted in an
absence of equality before the law and opportunity. Economic rigidity, laws
that exempt high-school graduates from military combat, and years of
double-digit inflation are all examples of the inequity that fuels social
unrest. But alongside opportunity, there must be a legitimate mechanism for
protecting human life and liberty. A new U.S. policy in Colombia that
recognizes the futility of today's drug-war tactics, and the country's dire
need to re-establish the rule of law, is very much needed.