AID TO COLOMBIA ONLY PROLONGS THE VIOLENCE

WHEN PRESIDENT CLINTON announced his trip to Colombia, he said his purpose
was "to seek peace, to fight illicit drugs, to build its economy, and to
deepen democracy."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Clinton administration seeks not peace but rather a military solution
to the 40-year-old civil war in Colombia. About three-quarters of its
record-breaking aid package to Colombia is for the military and police.
Like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, Clinton is convinced that
superior firepower can destroy a deeply entrenched, armed insurgency.

If this requires the continuing murder of 3,000 civilians each year, or
creating 300,000 refugees annually, that is a price that Clinton is willing
to pay.

The term "human rights abuse" is a euphemism -- let's be honest about what
our tax dollars are paying for in Colombia.

"They drank and danced and cheered as they butchered us like hogs," reports
a survivor of a recent massacre described in The New York Times. He was
describing the slaughter of 36 people in the town of El Salado, by 300
paramilitary troops in February. The troops began bringing their victims to
the town square on a Friday, and according to The Times, "ordered liquor
and music, and then embarked on a calculated rampage of torture, rape, and
killing" that lasted until Sunday. The victims included a 6-year old girl
and an elderly woman.

The Colombian army stood by a few miles away, setting up roadblocks that
prevented human rights and rescue workers from trying to help the
villagers. Last month another mass killing of six people took place in
northwest Colombia while an army helicopter hovered overhead and soldiers
were on patrol nearby.

Nonetheless, President Clinton has now waived most of the human rights
conditions that Congress attached to his military aid package, making it
clear that these types of massacres would not affect U.S. policy.

This war is not about "illicit drugs," and it never has been. According to
our own Drug Enforcement Agency, there is drug-related corruption in all
branches of the Colombian government, including its armed forces, which are
now the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world after
Israel and Egypt.

The paramilitary death squads, which are closely linked to the Colombian
military and -- according to human rights groups -- responsible for the
vast majority of political murders, are up to their necks in drug trafficking.

Their leader recently acknowledged in a TV interview that 70 percent of
their funding was from the drug trade. But our tax dollars will not be used
to go after them.

Our money for Colombia will not help "build its economy," which is
suffering through its worst recession in more than half a century. More
than a fifth of the labor force is unemployed, and millions of peasants
have no marketable alternatives to growing coca if they are to survive.
Poisoning their land, rivers and other crops with aerial spraying of
herbicides only adds further injury and more recruits for the armed conflict.

The same is true for the budget austerity ordered by the International
Monetary Fund: with Washington's backing, these policies are likely to
worsen the recession and increase unemployment in Colombia.

Widening the war will not "deepen democracy," but will further destroy what
little is left of it. By giving the Colombian government and armed forces
another enormous blank check, the Clinton administration simply encourages
more massacres as well as impunity for the perpetrators.

There is no reason for Colombian officials to make the necessary
concessions to negotiate an end to the conflict if they know they have
unlimited support for war, including massacres of civilians.

The guerrilla groups are understandably wary of a situation in which they
have no guarantees that they or their supporters could survive without
their own armed forces. Their last attempt, in the mid-Eighties, to put
down their arms and participate in elections was met with the slaughter of
thousands of their supporters as well as candidates.

We can only hope that the backlash against the administration's pursuit of
a violent solution to Colombia's civil war will continue to grow.

When Colombia's fate is left to the Colombians, then there will be a chance
"to seek peace, build the economy, and deepen democracy."