WE'RE THE BAD GUYS - GET US OUT OF COLOMBIAN AFFAIRS

Beats me why all you right-wingers hate Bill Clinton so much.

With each passing day of his administration, he's morphing into Ronald
Reagan.

Soft on drugs? During his eight years in office, Clinton has been the
United States' No. 1 drug warrior. He pumped three times as much money
into the war on drugs as presidents Reagan and Bush, those anti-drug
pillars of conservatism.

So maybe Clinton smoked pot, even though he says he didn't inhale. He's
spent the better part of the '90s making up for that youthful lapse in
judgment and - unsuccessfully, it seems - fighting his image as a weak-
kneed nancy boy when it comes to narcotics.

Now he wants to pour more than a billion dollars into a South American
country to prop up what's essentially a right-wing dictatorship with a
brutal human-rights record. Does any of this sound familiar - like an
'80s flashback, even?

He wants to donate $1.3 billion of my money - and yours - to the
government of Colombia, to aid that nation in its war on drugs, which,
of course, is actually our war on drugs. After all, the United States
smokes, snorts and shoots most of the world's drug supply, so, without
us, the Colombian drug cartels would effectively go bankrupt.

I have a problem with this particular foreign aid for several reasons.
First, as you might already realize, is the money: $1.3 billion would
feed a lot of hungry babies in our country. To put it in perspective,
it
would also buy us four Lake Ringgolds or 65 MPEC coliseums - projects
that a lot of people think are prohibitively expensive.

And if the money was going to feed hungry babies in Colombia, I
probably wouldn't have a problem with it. But, as we've discovered
through experience, these funds will undoubtedly find their way into the
pockets of a few fat-cat generals and jefes, while poor farmers are
still forced to grow poppies and cocoa plants to feed their families.

Another thing: I'm tired of South Americans hating me for no other
reason than my citizenship in a nation that has too often meddled in
banana republic politics.

While Clinton was preparing for his trip to Colombia last week, news
reports showed government workers scrubbing the proverbial "Yanqui go
home" and other anti-U.S. slogans off walls in Bogota neighborhoods and
commercial districts.

They probably don't know that a lot of people in Texas share that
sentiment.

But you can discard that jingoism and those notions about nationalism
and financial responsibility, and you're still left with the biggest
objection: It's wrong. Morally, ethically, fiscally - viewed from any
direction, it's wrong.

It's wrong to take this war to the growers of Colombia. These people are
merely satisfying a pillar of our capitalistic society: the law of
supply and demand. We demand drugs. They supply them.

We've already turned our inner cities into battlegrounds, using shock
troops trained by domestic law-enforcement agencies. Now we're sending
military advisers and equipment into a third-world country to fight
peasants armed with hoes and scythes and whose only crime is supplying
us with the drugs we demand.

I know, I know - the drug problem in Colombia goes way beyond the
farmers who grow the crops. And I know that the drug rings are
responsible for a lot of the violence that's wracked that country over
the years. But I also know this: Of the Colombian drug cartels, only the
Cali group has ever been busted by the government.

Those cartels have been churning out cocaine (and now heroin) for at
least 15 years. Even in their heyday, when J. Edgar Hoover let them have
the run of the nation's underground, more than one American mob family
found itself under attack by law enforcement. In 15 years, the Colombian
government should have taken down more than one cartel.

So what do we surmise from that? If it's not obvious to you by now,
please refrain from using power tools in the future. But let me spell it
out, anyway: The government is a conspirator, a major player, in the
drug trade.

Notice I didn't say Colombian government. That's right - look down your
nose at the Mexicans, the Panamanians and the Colombians, because their
drug fighters have been getting arrested for years for taking payoffs
and making money from the narcotics business.

But we're not innocent, not by a long shot. Over the years, plenty of
American drug warriors have been caught with their fingers in the
"cokie" jar. The latest Yanqui drug gladiator to bite the dust -
literally - was Col. James Hiett.

Now, you could probably imagine a poorly paid U.S. private cozying up to
drug dealers in an effort to supplement his poverty-level wages. But
Hiett was the big dog, the commander in charge of U.S. anti-drug
operations in Colombia.

Hiett hasn't been accused of using drugs or selling them. But his
cokehead wife, Laurie, was caught smuggling heroin packages valued at
$700,000 into the United States. She even used the U.S. diplomatic
postal service to do her dirty work.

Colombians accused embassy officials of covering up the scale of the
smuggling operation run by the officer's wife, of trying to pretend that
her intercepted parcel was an isolated incident. They were especially
angered, though, by the sentence handed down to her husband, the
colonel, who was convicted of covering up his wife's drug dealing.

He got five months. Less than half a year in jail for proving that his
nation's drug policy is rife with hypocrisy and shot through with
corruption that infects the United States to its highest levels of
leadership.

It's not only the military. In recent years, respected U.S. banks,
politicians and civilian law-enforcement authorities fell from grace
because of their drug connections. Not too long ago, nearly every
elected official in a Rio Grande Valley county was indicted by a federal
grand jury investigating drug payoffs.

South Americans know the logic-defying double standard: We would kill
for our drugs, and we would kill to keep drugs out of our country. Is it
any wonder they hate us?

They also know that we're paying the bills for a Colombian military that
turns a blind eye to atrocities committed by right-wing paramilitary
death squads - if the military's not actually aiding the executioners
with money, training and troops.

In July, according to a New York Times report, one of those government-
backed death squads marched into a peasant village in northern Colombia.
Over the course of the next three days, they got drunk, boogied down to
music performed by villagers forced to play for their lives - and
tortured and killed more than 70 people they accused of collaborating
with left-wing guerrillas.

As the Times reporter quoted one villager: "To them, it was like a big
party. They drank and danced and cheered as they butchered us like
hogs."

Most of the dead were men who certainly could have helped guerrilla
forces. But the killers also executed at least one child, a 6-year-old
girl whose worst crime could have been nothing more than stealing candy
from another kid.

The Colombian military and police forces had headquarters only a few
miles from the village. And no, they didn't help with the massacre - not
exactly.

But they set up a roadblock down the road from the village, preventing
relief agencies and human-rights groups from coming to the peasants'
aid. They had to dam up access to the village, they claimed, because the
paramilitaries were battling guerrilla forces, making the immediate area
too dangerous.

So maybe the Colombian military - and, by extension, the Colombian
government - doesn't officially murder its people. But there's still
plenty of evidence that suggests otherwise.

And these are the folks we've thrown our weight behind? Is it me, or
does it seem like we always back the bad guys in these South American
conflicts?

If this were a movie, a lone American - usually played by Arnold
Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris - would spy the torture and killing and
concoct a plan to rescue the defenseless villagers, usually at the
expense of a corrupt military leader. In the end, the day would be
saved, thanks to a little U.S. intervention.

But all we've got is Willie Boy, who is indeed riding to the rescue - of
the bad guys. If this were a movie, he'd be played by a fat, sweaty,
beady-eyed guy in a wrinkled white suit. And in the final reel, he'd be
thrown through a banana-threshing machine by our hero - sacrificed for
the sins of all ugly Americans.

Yup, in the United States, we like our happy endings - and our coke and
smack. In Colombia, I think, the people would just like to stay alive.

So, yeah - Yanqui go home. And stay there this time.

Steve Clements' editorial column appears in this space on Mondays.
Clements is the city editor of the Times Record News