ON THE PRECIPICE IN COLOMBIA

The United States last month approved a $1.3 billion aid package to
Colombia. The military and social assistance is intended to help that
country's government fight leftist guerrillas who have become key players in
the drug trade.

President Bill Clinton pledged last week during a one-day visit to Colombia
that the U.S. would not become involved in a Vietnam-style conflict, and
that the aid did not signal a return to "Yankee imperialism." It need not,
but the assistance, while well-intended, does risk drawing the U.S. into a
bloody conflict.

Quite simply, the situation in Colombia is bad. According to the country's
National Association of Financial Institutions, there was no economic growth
last year for the first time in 70 years.

Unemployment tops 20 percent.

Remedies are hard to come by, since the legislature stubbornly opposes every
initiative by President Andres Pastrana. National opinion polls show that
the president enjoys support from less than 30 percent of the population. A
legislative stalemate does nothing to boost his popularity.

Poverty has bred lawlessness. Colombia is the most crime-ridden nation in
the world.

According to government statistics, there is a murder every 20 minutes, a
kidnapping every three and a half hours (seven a day or 3,000 each year),
and six children are killed by violence every day. Mr. Clinton stopped in
the city of Cartagena because his security teams considered Bogota, the
capital, too dangerous to visit.

Then there is the country's 36-year civil war. About 20,000 armed Marxist
rebels are fighting the government. They have largely battled to a draw, but
the army has withdrawn from a 42,000-sq.-km region in southern Colombia, an
area roughly the size of Switzerland, leaving it to one guerrilla
organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Another
rebel group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, is demanding its own
4,000-sq.-km zone. Since the war began in 1964, more than 120,000 people
have lost their lives and more than 2 million have been forced from their
homes.

The civil war only exacerbates the economic woes: In the last year, the ELN
has blown up more than 300 electricity towers, causing blackouts across the
country.

Mr. Pastrana's willingness to negotiate with the guerrillas has upset
rightwingers in his country.

They have organized paramilitary organizations of their own, which has
intensified the violence. Tit-for-tat kidnappings and killings are common.

On occasion, the groups have resorted to acts designed to do nothing more
than frustrate the government's peace overtures.

Finally, there are the narcotics traffickers. Colombia is the world's
leading producer of cocaine.

It exports 400 tons of the drug each year, and six tons of heroin.

The rebels operate in the coca-growing regions of the country and there is
little doubt that they are intimately involved in and profiting from the
drug trade.

Therein lies the danger for the U.S.

Washington says its assistance will be used against drug traffickers, not
the rebels.

The aid package contains $238 million to be used for crop substitution,
judicial reform and protection of human rights.

But 80 percent of the U.S. assistance is military, in the form of 60 attack
helicopters and 500 army and intelligence instructors. If the rebels and
drug traffickers are working together, no reasonable distinction can be made
between the two and it will be impossible to avoid getting sucked into the
civil war.

That fear prompted Mr. Clinton's assurance last week that a condition of the
aid is that the U.S. would not get drawn "into a shooting war, that it is
not Vietnam." It was also a source of concern for the dozen Latin American
leaders who gathered in Brasilia last weekend for a regional summit.

They worry that a civil war in Colombia will spill over into their
countries: Either the guerrillas or the narcotics traffickers will flee to
safer areas.

Ecuador's foreign minister, Mr. Heinz Moeller, voiced a common fear when he
said that "the cancerous tumor being removed from Colombia [is]
metastasizing in Ecuador. Ecuador does not have drug plantations, and we do
not want them."

No one does. Unfortunately, no one has the strength to eradicate them --
yet. U.S. aid can help, but the lesson of Vietnam is that assistance is no
substitute for political will in the nation concerned. Colombians must want
to end the civil war. The politicians must end their squabbling and
concentrate on the real threat to their country.

And if Americans want to end the drug trade, they should do something about
the demand side of the equation.

It is America's hunger for illegal narcotics that sustains Colombia's drug
trade.

Eliminating that will do more damage to the traffickers than any number of
raids on Colombia's coca plantations.