JUST SAY NO TO THIS DRUG WAR UNITED STATES AID PACKAGE FOR COLOMBIA

"Plan Colombia" promises to escalate an intractable and brutal
conflict.

Seeking to disrupt the u.S. Cocaine market while stabilizing
Colombia's increasingly shaky government, President Bill Clinton and
his Colombian counterpart, Andres Pastrana, succeeded over the summer
in squeezing $ 1.3 billion in aid from the usually stingy U.S. Congress.

The lion's share of this package will be spent on training and
provisioning Colombia's military and police--an effort that will put
U.S. military advisors in harm's way and 63 Blackhawk and Huey
helicopters into the hands of a military notorious for human rights
abuses. The package also includes a large-scale herbicide spraying
program meant to deprive Colombia's rebels and paramilitaries of the
coca they rely on to finance the mayhem in the countryside.

The package has been sold to the American public as simply an
extension of the war on drugs, not the beginning of another misguided
U.S. intervention into another nation's civil war. But, with U.S.
military advisors already among the war dead and television accounts
of helicopter gunboat attacks on jungle guerrillas beaming into U.S.
living rooms, it is difficult to ignore the parallels to America's
divisive experience in Vietnam.

The U.S. support is the first installment of "Plan Colombia," a $ 7.5
billion program meant to end nearly four decades of conflict and chaos
in Colombia. Pastrana has had no success in securing additional
military aid from Europe, and the fiscally bereft nation is not likely
to come up with the rest of the money on its own. Be prepared for the
next administration to return to Congress for more cash. But funneling
more military hardware into this deeply troubled patch of South
America is bad news for Colombians and bad policy for the United States.

Colombia's civil war is the brutal manifestation of a complex
socioeconomic and historical confrontation between its middle- and
upper-class landowners and a beaten and disenfranchised peasantry.
Billions more in aid would not suffice to end this conflict, nor even
to undertake an eradication program that has any realistic hope of
eliminating coca from the 2 million square miles of Colombian soil
where it can be grown.

Instead of spending millions on crop spraying that may succeed only in
poisoning the Colombian countryside or on "professionalizing" a
military force already deeply entwined with right-wing paramilitaries
and death squads, a truly comprehensive and rational Plan Colombia,
say both U.S. and Colombian Catholic bishops, must move away from
military solutions. They argue that limited spending on military
training aimed at reducing human rights violations along with social
investments meant to encourage real economic development in the
countryside offer the best hope for reaching a negotiated peace in
Colombia.

But even this less-lethal alternative to an escalated drug war would
be doomed to failure without a more lucid and compassionate drug
policy here in the U.S. that includes decriminalization and more
treatment opportunities. America's $ 50 billion annual drug habit will
not change even if the current Plan Colombia is successful. It's more
likely, as Colombia's neighbors already worry, that cocaine production
would simply shift to adjoining territories.

American losses during the drug war pale in comparison to the
suffering endured by Colombians because of the developed world's
cocaine addiction. We owe it to them and our other South American
neighbors to face up to our own drug problem first before forcing a
military "solution" on them.

The Colombian people might consider coming up with a solution of their
own. How about a $ 1.3 billion aid package--not for Colombia, but the
U.S.? Colombians could put together rapid response teams of their best
addiction counselors, treatment specialists, and medical storm
troopers and dispatch them to cities and suburbs throughout the United
States, beginning a relentless campaign of medical intervention in the
U.S. communities most devastated by the chaos and violence generated
by drug use and trafficking.

Of course, accepting aid from one of the poorest nations on the planet
might be too embarrassing for the world's only superpower. But worse
than a little wounded national pride is inflicting a simplistic plan
that can only lead to more bloodshed on a neighbor that already has
suffered too many casualties in this hemisphere's bullheaded war on
drugs.