A CALL TO ARMS IN COLOMBIA

The bombs and battles that rocked Colombia Tuesday were meant by leftist
guerrillas as a blunt message for President Clinton: If he wants a war, some
Colombians will give him one.

Clinton, the first U.S. president in a decade to visit the war-torn Andean
nation, will spend only five hours in Colombia Wednesday, for obvious
security reasons. He won't even visit the capital, Bogota. It isn't safe
with guerrillas fighting nearby.

That speaks volumes about the risks the Clinton administration is taking by
embarking on a new military strategy aimed at Colombia's narcotraffickers,
one that will cost U.S. taxpayers some $1.3 billion over two years.

The major component of that strategy involves supplying Colombia's military
with training--by as many as 500 U.S. military advisers--and about 60 Black
Hawk and Huey attack helicopters. This despite Colombia's abysmal human
rights record, which includes massacres and killings linked to the military
and to paramilitary groups aligned with it. The guerrillas, also guilty of
crimes and kidnappings, are the target of Clinton's war on drugs. They
finance their fight with drugs.

As he heads for a quick visit to Cartagena, Clinton might just as well
declare war on the guerrillas, because they already see it as such. Critics
argue this could lead to another Vietnam-style quagmire. It probably won't
be Vietnam, but it looks a lot like El Salvador in the 1980s. The U.S.
purports to support a democratic government against leftist anarchists, but
it is pushing a bad situation into more dangerous territory by intensifying
the military option and training the army.

Colombia's armed forces, having seen Clinton waive congressional provisions
to keep them accountable for human rights abuses, already have less
incentive torein in paramilitaries, which have carte blanche to kill, kidnap
and terrorize in military-controlled areas.

More than 70 percent of all the political violence in Colombia happens not
in the southeast, the target of the drug war, but in the northwest, and it
is mainly due to paramilitary activity. Clinton is right to offer assistance
to Colombian President Andres Pastrana, whose efforts to establish democracy
and the rule of law deserve support. But just fighting Marxist rebels won't
do it. Colombia has failed miserably to go after the paramilitaries, who are
also exploiting the drug trade.

Nothing the U.S. has done so far in Colombia has had any major impact on the
price or supply of drugs. The new strategy may simply cause coca production
to spill across the border into Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia. Those
countries are worried--for good reason.