DEMAND THWARTS U.S. BID TO STOP COLOMBIA DRUG FLOW

Why Rumsfeld Is Skeptical

With the delicacy of someone seasoned by much experience near the
summit of government, Donald Rumsfeld has indicated strong skepticism
about a policy from which this country may reap a bumper crop of
regrets.

Asked about the $1.6 billion - so far - undertaking to help fight the
drug war in Colombia, Rumsfeld said he had not formulated an opinion.
However, he embroidered his agnosticism with thoughts antithetical to
the program for which George W. Bush, during the campaign, indicated
support.

In his confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld, the next secretary of defense,
said combating illicit drugs is "overwhelmingly a demand problem,"
and added: "If demand persists, it's going to get what it wants. And
if it isn't from Colombia, it's going to be from someplace else."

Indeed. In authorizing the aid for Colombia, Congress demanded,
delusionally, the elimination of ALL of Colombia's coca and opium
poppy cultivation by 2005. That would almost certainly mean a
commensurate increase in cultivation by neighbors.

One reason Colombia is the source of nearly 90 percent of the world's
cocaine and a growing portion of heroin is that U.S. pressure on coca
and poppy production in countries continuous to Colombia, especially
Peru and Bolivia, drove production into Colombia, where coca
production has increased 140 percent - to 300,000 acres - in five
years.

Now, pressure on Colombia is pushing production into Colombia's
neighbors. The New York Times reports that cocaine-processing labs
have recently been found in Ecuador's Amazon region. This is evidence
that local peasants, who have crossed the border in recent years to
work in the cocaine business, are "returning with the drug expertise
they have acquired in Colombia."

The $1.6 billion in U.S. aid for Colombia will mostly pay for
helicopters that Colombia's military will use to attack drug
factories and 17,000 Marxist guerrillas, who are the world's most
affluent insurgents, waging a war now in its fourth decade.

The guerrillas also are opposed by right-wing paramilitary forces -
8,000 strong and growing - that are increasingly involved in drug
trafficking.

Kidnapping has become industrialized in Colombia, and assassins can
be hired for "a few pesos," according to Brian Michael Jenkins, an
analyst of political violence and international crime. He says
Colombia's 30,000 murders unrelated to war translate into a rate that
in the United States would mean 250,000 murders a year.

Colombia has Latin America's fourth-largest economy and one of its
highest literacy rates. It has 40 flourishing universities and pays
its debts. Yet a Gallup poll reveals that 40 percent of Colombians
have considered emigrating and 60 percent know someone who has
emigrated in the last two years.

Colombia's drug-related agonies are largely traceable to U.S. cities.
Although one-third of Colombia's cocaine goes to Europe, America's
annual $50 billion demand is a powerful suction pulling in several
hundred tons of easily transportable and staggeringly profitable
substances.

Here is the arithmetic of futility: About one-third of cocaine
destined for the United States is interdicted, yet the street price
has been halved in the last decade of fighting the drug war on the
supply side.