ALLIANCE WITH A PREDATOR

WASHINGTON--President Bill Clinton's trip to Colombia on Wednesday put
a presidential imprimatur on Washington's deepening commitment to the
guerrilla war there.

But all the pomp and circumstance of a presidential visit cannot
conceal the weakness at the core of this budding alliance: The
Colombian armed forces, to which the U.S. has tied its fortunes, are
badly--perhaps fatally--flawed.

Clinton has been forced to admit as much. Despite the Colombian
government's failure to meet basic human-rights conditions imposed by
Congress, he exercised a national-security waiver allowing the
administration to send nearly a billion dollars in new military aid.

The Colombian military has a notorious history of abusing human rights
and collaborating with right-wing paramilitary death squads during its
four decades of armed conflict with Marxist guerrillas. Under pressure
from national and international human-rights groups, the military's
direct involvement in abuses has declined in recent years, but
politically motivated murders by its paramiltary allies are on the
rise. By leaving the dirtiest work in this war to the paramilitaries,
the regular army can claim a cleaner human-rights record as it seeks
more military aid from Washington. The recent massacre of dozens of
peasants in the village of El Salado illustrates the modus operandi.
Hundreds of heavily armed paramilitaries occupied the village and held
a kangaroo court, summarily executing peasants they suspected of being
guerrilla sympathizers. The carnage went on for two days while the
Colombian armed forces not only refused to intervene but also blocked
access to the village by outsiders.

The Colombian armed forces' record of brutality and impunity moved
Congress to impose strict human-rights conditions on military
assistance to Colombia, which constitutes 75% of the $1.3 billion
drug-war aid package.

Short of a presidential waiver, the law requires the secretary of
state to certify that the Colombian government is vigorously
investigating and prosecuting human-rights violations by military
personnel and paramilitary leaders, and acting affirmatively to sever
the military's ties with the paramilitary groups before aid can be
sent.

Similar conditions were imposed on military aid to El Salvador in
1981, for exactly the same reasons, but President Ronald Reagan
routinely ignored them, certifying human-rights progress even when
there was none. The charade of certification on El Salvador went on
for two years until Reagan vetoed a renewal of the certification law.
During those 24 months, Washington sent El Salvador $418 million in
security assistance while the armed forces and their death-squad
allies murdered 10,000 noncombatant civilians.

Although the Colombia aid law includes tough human-rights conditions,
drug-war enthusiasts in Congress managed to insert an escape-hatch
provision allowing the president to waive the conditions on "national
security" grounds if Colombia does not meet them, thus circumventing
certification without flouting the letter of the law. That's precisely
what Clinton did Aug. 22, one week before his trip to Colombia.
Conceding that only one of the six human-rights conditions had been
met (military personnel accused of human-rights abuses will be tried
in civilian rather than military courts), the president waived the
others, tacitly admitting that Colombia's military does not meet even
the most minimal human-rights requirements.

Congress did not insert the human-rights conditions into the law to
embarrass the president, though he apparently was embarrassed about
waiving them: He signed the waiver late at night, thereby missing the
regular news cycle.

Congress insisted on the conditions because a military unwilling to
comply with them is an unworthy ally for the United States. To finance
an escalation of Colombia's combat capability despite its depredations
is to be complicit in the increased carnage that is apt to follow.

No presidential waiver can absolve Washington of that moral burden.

Reagan certified Potemkin progress in El Salvador because fighting
communism in Central America was more important to him than human rights.

Clinton waived the human-rights requirements in Colombia because
fighting drugs in the Andes is more important to him than human rights.

Both presidents make the mistake of thinking that U.S. security
interests and human-rights concerns are in conflict.

Protecting human rights is a prerequisite for the successful defense
of U.S. long-term interests in Colombia. The United States cannot
build stable democratic allies out of regimes that have predatory
military institutions at their core. Granted, Colombia today is more
democratic than El Salvador was in 1981, and its armed forces are more
professional. But a military that routinely kills civilians with
impunity and makes common cause with paramilitary terrorists is more a
threat to democracy than a pillar of it.

The human-rights conditions imposed by Congress give the Clinton
administration a potent policy instrument to force the Colombian
military to clean up its act, but circumventing the conditions by
granting a waiver has sent exactly the wrong signal. The Colombian
armed forces and their paramilitary partners, like their Salvadoran
brethren before them, are bound to conclude that Washington's concern
for human rights is nothing but window dressing to sell the policy
domestically. A rash of deadly paramilitary attacks in the days
following Clinton's waiver shows that the death squads are undeterred
by U.S. protestations of support for human rights.

They are watching what we do, not what we say.

Financed by drug traffickers and protected by the military, the
paramilitary right is at least as serious a threat to Colombian
democracy and U.S. interests as are the leftist guerrillas. Yet,
Washington's military aid package ignores the paramilitaries, focusing
instead on expanding the war into guerrilla strongholds.

In a speech broadcast to the people of Colombia on the eve of his
visit, Clinton affirmed Washington's support for the peace
negotiations currently underway between the government and the
guerrillas. "We do not believe your conflict has a military solution,"
he declared. "We support the peace process." But the peace process
will remain stalled as long as the Colombian and U.S. governments turn
a blind eye toward paramilitary terrorism.

The guerrillas will never agree to lay down their arms and participate
in electoral politics so long as rightist death squads roam free,
killing anyone they suspect of leftist sympathies.

Thus, the success of U.S. policy depends fundamentally on fulfilling
the human-rights conditions enumerated by Congress, not waiving them.
Within the next few weeks and every six months thereafter, the
secretary of state must report to Congress on what progress Colombia
has made toward meeting these conditions. That will be a good
opportunity for Congress and the American people to assess whether or
not the White House is willing to back up its rhetorical commitment to
human rights with actions.

If Colombia's progress is no better than it has been so far, the
president should rescind his waiver and halt the distribution of
military aid.

- - - - William M. Leogrande is professor of government at American
University. Kenneth E. Sharpe is professor of political science at
Swarthmore College. They coauthored "Two Wars or One? Drugs,
Guerrillas, and Colombia's New Violencia," in the fall issue of World
Policy Journal