WAR ON COLOMBIANS

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 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, the killing of six people took place in northwest Colombia while
an army helicopter hovered overhead and soldiers were on patrol nearby.

Nonetheless, 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 admitted 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 instead 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 and 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. 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-'80s, to put down their arms and participate
in elections was met with the slaughter of thousands of their supporters as
well as candidates. Meanwhile, 37 human-rights and other nongovernmental
organizations in Colombia have stated that they will not accept any funds
from "Plan Colombia," the program that our massive aid package - $1.3
billion, with $860 million for Colombia - is partially funding. And
neighboring states - including Ecuador and Peru - are beginning to worry
that continued escalation of the war will spill over into their territories.

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."

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
in Washington.