COLOMBIA ANTI-DRUG AID A DUBIOUS EXPERIMENT

Those of us who have misgivings about the $1.3 billion aid package the
United States is wrapping up for Colombia cannot find much comfort in
massacres there this past week.

On Sunday gunmen executed 10 residents of two poor neighborhoods in a small
coastal town. Police are said to be investigating whether paramilitary
militias or left-wing guerrillas were responsible. Right-wing paramilitary
forces have been blamed for killing seven people Sunday on a highway near a
Pacific port. Last week in a small village six children out for a hike, and
supposedly mistaken for guerrillas the soldiers had been tracking, were
killed by members of Colombia's army.

This is an unwelcome prelude to President Clinton's visit to Colombia
Wednesday, a symbolic trip intended to promote the $1.3 billion assistance
program that will make Colombia the third largest recipient of U.S. aid,
behind Israel and Egypt.

The theoretical purpose is to help Colombia wipe out its coca crop, not to
wipe out the various insurgencies. But since cocaine production is closely
tied to Colombian politics - guerrilla forces get their support by taxing
and protecting coca fields - the drug war is inseparable from the shooting
war. Moreover, paramilitary forces have ties to the Colombian army, accused
frequently of human rights violations. Most of the money will go to train
and equip the army with helicopters that would defoliate coca fields. The
'copters are not supposed to be used to attack insurgents.

The U.S. involvement has been likened to the early years of Vietnam, but
the comparison suffers from holes. The evil we thought we had to contain in
Vietnam was not drugs, but communism. Considering that communism faded on
its own, and cocaine shows no signs of doing so, that may provide a more
compelling argument for intervention this time. But it makes the job much
more difficult as long as there is a demand for what is produced.

Colombian peasants grow coca because that is how they make money. The
United States has spent nearly $1 billion in the last decade to try to
destroy Colombia's coca crop. The result has been to push the cultivation
further into the jungle; four times as much land is in coca now as it was
in 1994.

Some of Colombia's neighbors - Ecuador, Brazil and Panama - fear that
success will come at their expense, with the movement of coca production,
and guerrillas, into remote areas of these countries. To try to keep this
from happening, the United States will provide additional funds intended to
help them seal their borders. (Of course, if that were easy, the U.S.
wouldn't have to worry about cocaine produced in Colombia.)

From a purely economic standpoint, it might make more sense to pay
Colombians to grow coffee for Starbucks. It does not help that in our
worries over the violence and the drug trade, the United States has closed
its markets to legitimate Colombian imports. Without a way to make honest
dollars, growing coca will remain a temptation too big for many Colombian
peasants to resist.

The drug traffic, and its link to guerrilla violence, are a tragic
combination for both countries, but answers are elusive. Unfortunately,
this approach looks like a dubious, dangerous experiment. It would be
wonderful to be proven wrong.