HISTORY SHOWS WHY MILITARY STRATEGIES WON'T END COLOMBIAN DRUG TRADE

President-elect- George W. Bush should scrap the Clinton administration's
disastrous plan to pour $1.3 billion into a hard-punching strategy aimed at
knocking out Colombia's drug trade. The project is doomed.

One former top official from the Department of Justice told me once that
attempts to force a showdown between Latin American governments and drug
cartels -- to stop the cultivation of marijuana, heroin or coca -- is like
pouring money down a rat hole. It won't work.

A military-based strategy is useless in the rugged jungles and mountains of
Latin America. State-of-the-art weaponry and highly trained soldiers will
be ineffectual. Drug cartels will shift their cocaine operations to Brazil,
Ecuador, Venezuela or Peru, Colombia's neighbors, who have serious
socioeconomic problems of their own.

Anti-drug strategists in the Pentagon and the White House fail to consider
the psyche of the region's poor and the motivation of Latin America's
poorly paid and badly led military forces.

No amount of training or education of Colombia's military will prompt
enough of them to put their lives on the line in a showdown with the
powerful, ruthless and well-armed drug syndicates. Why should they?

They believe that the drug problem is an American problem -- not a threat
to Colombia, Mexico or Central America.

Generals and other officers in Latin America don't always recognize that
drug syndicates slowly undermine the authority of their governments. Unless
checked, those syndicates could topple the fledgling democracies that have
replaced centuries-old dictatorships and elitist attitudes, the legacy of
the Spanish conquistadors of the 15th century.

When Columbus discovered the New World, he unknowingly opened the portals
to a flood of soldiers of fortune. Their only goal was gold -- as much as
they could steal from the advanced Inca, Maya and Aztec civilizations.

In their greed, and backed by the Spanish crown and the Roman Catholic
church, they pillaged and brutally destroyed those advanced nations,
replacing them with a highly stratified society in which the conquering
louts, many of whom were illiterate, were granted enormous tracts of land
called haciendas.

Their goal was not to bring science and education. Nor did they attempt to
assimilate the best of the New World's indigenous civilizations with those
of the Old World. Rather, they wanted to maintain power, enslave the
Indians and keep the poor under control.

Those powerful hacienda owners dictated who would govern so those at the
top were not threatened in any manner. The cult of "strong man" government
was born in Latin America.

For nearly half a millennium throughout Latin America, the military had one
major role: Protect the elite and brutally repress any attempt at
democracy. Governments ignored education, except for the elite few, sensing
that an educated populace could import democracy.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church, also working with the elite,
inculcated an attitude of fatalism among indigenous peoples and the poor.
They taught that whatever happens in one's life is the will of God and must
be accepted. In recent years, that church has taken an attitude of
defending human rights. It is, however, too little and too late.

The Pentagon and Clinton have devised a strategy that ignores that
historical background.

The peasant farmers, imbued with fatalism and desperate to survive in a
culture where corruption is a mainstay, are not going to abandon the only
hope they have of improving their miserable lives. In their minds, growing
coca leaves and refining them into cocaine is not wrong. They see their
government leaders as thieves and surmise that if corruption is so
widespread, they will join the pack.

No military action will stop Colombia's poor from growing coca. They are
bankrolled by the cartels' billions; losing a cocaine processing site here
and there is not disastrous.

What will surely happen is that the cartels will target for kidnapping or
assassination any U.S. advisers sent to Colombia. It will not be difficult,
given the bribes the cartels can pay to a poorly paid soldier or police
officer to look the other way.

Pentagonistas ignore the fact that, in Latin America, being an enlisted
soldier is considered one of the lowest jobs. Most are recruited from the
poorest neighborhoods and have little education. They aren't endeared to
the populace by a record of torture, of entire villages massacred and of
innocent villagers arrested.

The soldiers may run fast, shoot well and march well in staged drills, but
they will opt for the easy way out once in the field. They may seize a
suspected village, single out inhabitants and torture them for information,
then kill them and their families or throw them in dungeons, even if they
have done nothing.

Only one isolated incident of brutality will stain America's hands with
blood and turn the rest of Latin America against U.S. involvement in Colombia.

Colombia needs, more than anything, an economic rebuilding and reshaping of
its government similar to the Marshall Plan. The number and quality of
schools and universities must be increased. While police salaries and
benefits should be tripled or quadrupled to make law enforcement an
attractive career for highly educated and motivated young people, police
procedures must be reformed and corruption wiped out.

There should be conferences by well-protected and well-paid committees made
up of government officials, the country's intelligentsia and
representatives from the poor. They should determine how best to wrest
Colombia from its morass of narcotic-related violence. Those committees
should also have sledgehammer power via a well-trained and equipped, highly
paid and educated police (not military) force to wield relentless pressure
against the cartels.

To do otherwise and opt for an inefficient military solution will cripple
U. S. efforts to stop the flood of narcotics.