COLOMBIA: CRITICS: COLOMBIA COULD BE THE NEXT EL SALVADOR

Comparison To Vietnam Isn't As Apt, They Say

Washington - When President Clinton said last week that the $1.3 billion
aid package to Colombia will not lead to another Vietnam, some of the
plan's main critics agreed. A better comparison, they say, El Salvador.

In the 1980s, the United States helped the El Salvadoran military, despite
its human rights abuses, to fight leftist guerrillas. In Colombia, where
the "proxy war" is against drug traffickers and the leftist forces helping
them. Clinton waived human rights rules to deliver the military aid package.

Even without Vietnam-style buildup of U.S. combat troops in Colombia, the
United States could aggravate and prolong the three-decade old Colombian
civil war, critics argue.

"No, it's not another Vietnam, but it's still the wrong thing to do," said
Lisa Haugaard, legislative coordinator of the Latin American Working Group,
a coalition of more than 60 organizations including many that opposed the
aid to El Salvador.

In a brief visit Wednesday to Cartagena, Colombia, Clinton delivered the
aid and said the United States will not get into "a shooting war" in
Colombia. "This is not Vietnam," he said.

Administration officials have long stressed that the United States won't
get dragged into Colombia's civil war. They say U.S. military aid is
intended solely to help Colombia battle drug traffickers, who account for
an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine in the United States.

In Colombia, however, the distinction between fighting drugs and waging war
is murky. Colombian guerrillas finance their insurgency in part by
protecting drug laboratories and fields of coca and poppy, the raw
materials for cocaine and heroin.

Much of the U.S. aid will pay for helicopters and other equipment for two
Colombian army anti-narcotics battalions to fight those guerrillas,
allowing laboratories to be dismantled and coca fields to be eradicated.

The U.S. military equipment is generally restricted to counternarcotics
operations. But those operations still involve Colombian soldiers fighting
guerrillas albeit guerrillas protecting coca and poppy fields.

And the United States also allows Colombia to use its U.S. counternarcotics
equipment to help friendly forces under attack and endangered by guerrillas.

"I think there is a very great danger that this kind of thing can increase
little by little, and all of a sudden you will be in far more deeply than
you ever wished to be," said Robert White, a former ambassador to El
Salvador and now president of the Center for International Policy.

White said this could lead to a situation such as that in El Salvador,
where U.S. involvement "postponed peace in Central America and divided and
angered a lot of people at home." About 76,000 people were killed in El
Salvador before a January 1992 agreement ended the 12-year war.

State Department officials did not respond to a request for comment on
parallels between Colombia and El Salvador. But in an interview shortly
before Clinton's trip, a senior State Department official said the
administration's interest in fighting the insurgency is limited strictly to
the link between guerrillas and drugs.