COKE WARS: IS THIS THE REAL THING?

Old habits, like a taste for cocaine, are hard to kick - and none knows
that better than the unfortunate citizens of Colombia, who have recently
learned that America's passion for meddling in their affairs will shortly
put them back on the front lines of the latest war on drugs.

The news came three weeks ago, when Bill Clinton paid a flying visit to the
country and informed his Colombian counterpart, President Andres Pastrana,
that the US would shortly be spending all of US$1.3 billion on a massive
offensive aimed at ending the cocaine trade once and for all. And this
time, Clinton promised, the US was really taking off the gloves.

Squadrons of helicopters were on the way to spray the country's coca crop
with herbicides. And while US military advisers trained Colombian troops in
search-and-destroy techniques, agricultural consultants in US Army uniforms
would make the peasants see the wisdom of growing wholesome vegetables
rather than coca.

A compliant sort of chap, Pastrana nodded and smiled, even giving Clinton a
farewell embrace for the cameras. What else could he do but get with the
program? As a man well versed in Colombia's history, he must have known
there has never been any point in telling his domineering northern neighbor
to mind its own business; even less in urging it to set its own house in
order by reducing the demand for cocaine.

But then Pastrana has had a lot of practice at kow-towing. Ever since
Colombia defaulted on its loans, visitors from the International Monetary
Fund have been ordering austerity measures and devaluations of the
currency. Just a few days before Clinton arrived, a general strike brought
Colombia to a standstill after Pastrana obeyed the IMF and ordered mass
sackings of civil servants.

Now Clinton was issuing yet another set of imperial edicts. And no matter
how much this latest gold-plated offensive against drugs defied the lessons
of history, Pastrana must have realised there was no point in objecting. As
every Colombian schoolchild knows: In this part of the world, America gets
what America wants.

Meddling in Colombian affairs has been something of a passion amongst US
leaders for more than 100 years, certainly since President Teddy Roosevelt
engineered a revolt in what was then Columbia's northernmost province of
Panama so that he could build his famous canal.

Back in Washington, however, a few voices have questioned the wisdom of
such a massive spending spree. True, they tended to be drowned out by the
bipartisan cheers of Democrats and Republicans alike, each side eager to
show voters in this election year that they are "tough on drugs". But when
all the Pavlovian slobber dried up, the doubters remained.

Some are peacenik veterans of the "60s, who think of Vietnam when they hear
the latest talk of advisers and strategic hamlets and winning the
campesinos' hearts and minds.

Others, folks not inclined to ponytails and love beads, have been invoking
the overlooked lessons of the recent past. One of the most cogent is Ted
Carpenter, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute think tank.

"The last time the US put Colombia through this, well, it wasn't pretty,"
Carpenter recalled. That was just 10 years ago, when Washington threatened
to slap prohibitive tariffs on Colombia's exports unless the Bogota
government put the infamous drug cartels out of business.

Colombia set out to do just that - and the cartels responded by declaring
an unconditional war of their own. A car containing 500 kilos of dynamite
exploded outside the national police academy and killed 80 people. More
than 50 judges and journalists were murdered. A passenger jet was blown out
of the sky in a terror attack that claimed 107 more lives. Meanwhile, state
security forces were given free rein to protect Colombia's access to the
vital American export market.

According to one estimate, a modest one, 5700 people were murdered in 1989
alone by the police, the military and officially sanctioned death squads.

"There were no good guys," Carpenter said. "Bloodshed and mayhem were endemic.

"And when the Medellin and Cali cartels were finally broken, drug warriors
in this country and Colombia loudly proclaimed victory. They said, `The
back of the drug trade has been broken!' It wasn't - it was just
reorganising itself. But those victorious statements always get swallowed
by the Orwellian memory hole whenever we set out to make the same mistakes
all over again."

According to another think-tanker, former Princeton Professor Ethan
Nadelman, the "victory" over the cartels actually worsened Colombia's woes.
Instead of just two gangs presiding over a relatively peaceful web of
corruption, the trafficking industry is now so fragmented it is impossible
for even the participants to know who controls what, or which faction just
opened fire on the next.

"And, in addition to cocaine, Colombian gangs are now producing opium,
refining it and shipping that north as well. The leftist guerrillas are
using cocaine to finance their operations, and the landowners' vigilante
groups are using it to fund their private war against the guerrillas.

"When the US pours all these extra dollars into what is a very chaotic
situation, Colombia's agony will grow and grow and grow. Nobody in their
right mind can be happy about this."

Actually, that's not quite true.

The Lockheed Martin Corporation and Occidental Petroleum will be delighted
to see the first US servicemen heading south. Lockheed because it paid for
and publicised the election-year poll that seems to have prodded the
Clinton Administration to open its purse - a poll that showed Americans
held Democrats responsible for the rising incidence of drug use amongst
American teenagers. Now, with most of that $1.3 billion destined for
military operations and equipment, Lockheed can rest assured it will get a
slice of the action.

And Occidental? Well, after the oil company's main Colombian pipeline was
blown up 79 times in 1998, it began lobbying for more US aid to "stabilise"
the situation. Now US taxpayers will be footing the bill to keep the oil -
and the profits - flowing.

As for the supply of drugs reaching the US, cokeheads need not worry. In
1980, a gram of cocaine cost $120 in New York. Today, the same gram costs $40.