PLAN COLOMBIA: IS THE U.S. ADDICTED TO MILITARY FIXES?

(CNN) -- Relations between the United States and Colombia have never looked
rosier: The U.S. Congress recently voted overwhelmingly to give a record
$1.3 billion in emergency aid to Colombia and the surrounding region. Then
President Bill Clinton waived most of the human rights conditions imposed on
the aid in advance of his landmark visit to Colombia on August 30.

But even as the ties between the two governments become increasingly close,
a debate is heating up over the escalation of U.S. military involvement in
Colombia's battle against narcotics trafficking and guerrilla insurgencies.

More than $900 million of the U.S. contribution to "Plan Colombia" will go
toward military and police equipment, including attack helicopters and other
lethal aid.

Clinton signed the waiver authorizing the release of the aid despite
concerns about human rights abuses by the Colombian military. Clinton said
Colombian President Andres Pastrana is committed to reforms and his
anti-narcotics strategy needs "to have a chance to succeed."

Critics say, however, that intensifying the government's war with the
guerrillas will inevitably lead to more human rights violations and have
little or no impact on Colombia's drug trade.

Fears have also been raised that the United States may be getting dragged
into a Vietnam-style quagmire.

"I want to help Colombia, which is facing threats from left-wing guerrillas,
right-wing paramilitaries, and drug traffickers allied with both," said Sen.
Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) in a June 20 speech.

"But I cannot endorse a proposal that would vastly increase our military
involvement in Colombia that is so poorly thought out and suffers from so
many unanswered questions. Although the administration does not like to talk
about it, this is only the first billion-dollar installment of a multi-year,
open-ended commitment of many more billions of dollars."

Complicating the issue is the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

"Clinton is coming to Colombia for domestic political reasons and that's to
allow [Democratic presidential candidate] Al Gore to say that the Clinton
administration did not neglect or underfund the drug problem in Colombia,"
former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette told Reuters.

No Easy Solution

"Whenever you see a whole bunch of money thrown at the military that's
always the quickest of fixes. But there is no short-or medium-term solution
for Colombia," said Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy, a
think tank in Washington, D.C.

"We do need to support the Colombians in many ways," Isacson added.

"It's by far the worst humanitarian crisis in our hemisphere. You really
can't sit idly by when 300,000 people a year are being forced from their
homes. Children are being tortured. There is an average of 10 political
killings a day. But if we're going to be strengthening institutions of the
Colombian government, we should be strengthening the non-military ones at
least as much, if not more, than the military."

'Push Into Southern Colombia'

The most controversial part of the aid package is $442 million slated for
the "push into southern Colombia." The campaign will send Colombian troops
trained and armed by the United States into territory held by the country's
most powerful guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
or FARC. The troops will descend on the area in Black Hawk and Huey
helicopters to battle the guerrillas for control of the coca fields.

"There's 2,800 guys in three different battalions," Isacson said. "They're
going to give them a few months training. None of them have a high school
education. They're going to send them into this zone where FARC has been
running the show since the early 1960s. It's very easy to predict it's not
going to go well for these battalions and their expensive helicopters. If
this fails, what comes next? That's what scares the hell out of us."

"I think it's going to be an unmitigated disaster," said Bruce Bagley, a
professor at the School of International Studies at the University of Miami
and an expert on Latin American drug trafficking and security issues.

"Along with a technological escalation of the war, we are going to see the
Colombian military cutting wide swaths through the countryside with
extensive human rights abuses," Bagley said. "U.S. officials are in effect
turning a blind eye. They talk a good game but they have done very little to
make sure that human rights will be monitored as the war escalates."

Bagley said the military invasion, combined with an aerial herbicide
spraying program, will simply drive the production of coca leaves out into
the country's vast agricultural frontier.

Tens of thousands more peasants will likely flee into the country's already
overburdened cities or join the ranks of one of the many guerrilla groups in
the countryside, he said.

"We are moving very hard on the military side and very weakly on the rural
development side, leaving the peasantry with no real alternatives."

About $174 million of the U.S. aid will help fund alternative development
programs and to help people displaced by the fighting and the crop
eradication program.

"Most of this money will go to the U.S. bureaucracy or the Colombian
bureaucracy. And parts of it will be lost to corruption," Bagley said. "Very
small amounts of the already inadequate funds will be destined to arrive in
the rural areas. It's far too little money, coming far too late, to be of
any help to those people."

'Doing Nothing Is Worse'

Although two Republican Senators -- Mike DeWine of Ohio and the late Paul
Coverdell of Georgia -- first proposed a major Colombia aid package, it
found wide bipartisan support.

Many of the legislators who ultimately supported the aid package, however,
acknowledge that it is flawed.

"Am I satisfied? No," said Rep. Sam Farr (D-California), who worked on
amendments that shifted some of the funds in the original proposal away from
the military and into humanitarian programs.

"There still isn't enough money put in there to deal with displaced persons,
but I felt that we had made a substantial effort and that I could vote for
the package," said Farr, who spent two years in Colombia in the 1960s as a
Peace Corps volunteer.

"There is a problem in Colombia and walking away from that problem will not
solve it," Farr said. "Doing nothing is worse."

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) is one of several U.S. legislators who have
gone on fact-finding missions to Colombia.

"As I met with Army and Marine Corps personnel from the United States
advising [Colombian] troops in Tres Esquinas, a remote location in the
Putumayo province, it is clear that these men in the Colombian army were
prepared to put their lives on the line to stop the narco-trafficking that
ultimately will corrupt and kill so many Americans," Durbin said in a June
21 speech.

"I think we have to stand behind them. We have no other choice. To step back
and say we will do nothing now is unacceptable."

Pastrana Under The Gun

U.S.-Colombia relations frosted over in 1995, after Colombian President
Ernesto Samper was accused of using drug money to finance his election. The
Clinton administration "decertified" Colombia, removing its status as a
fully cooperating partner in the U.S.-led war on drugs. Aid to the country
was mostly curtailed, except for funding for the anti-drug efforts of the
National Police.

Relations warmed considerably when Pastrana won the presidency in 1998. The
United States granted Colombia $289 million in counter-narcotics funds that
year, catapulting it into the third largest recipient of U.S. aid, behind
Israel and Egypt.

Despite U.S. support, Pastrana faced an uphill battle. His attempts to
negotiate peace with the two main guerrilla groups in the country fell flat
and he was forced to concede large tracts of land to the rebels.

Pastrana's popularity rating plunged along with the economy, which has now
reached a 70-year low.

Meanwhile, coca production doubled between 1997 and 1999, according to the
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which says that 90
percent of the cocaine reaching the United States originates in Colombia.

At the urging of Washington, Pastrana's government issued a comprehensive
strategy in 1999 to reverse the spiral of violence and drug trafficking.
Known as "Plan Colombia," it calls for $7.5 billion over three years to
combat narcotics trafficking, insurgencies and institutional corruption.

Colombia has pledged $4 billion to the plan and asked the United States to
contribute as much as $2 billion with the balance to come from multi-lateral
institutions such as the World Bank and the European Union.

Human Rights Waiver

The Clinton administration lobbied hard to get funding for the plan. The
Colombian aid package went through months of wrangling in the House and
Senate before a compromised version passed in July.

Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) proposed an amendment that would have
transferred $225 million of the aid budgeted for the military campaign in
southern Colombia into domestic drug treatment programs. It failed to pass.

The final package includes $122 million for human rights and justice
programs in the region, $29 million more than the administration requested.

It also required Colombia to meet certain human rights conditions, but
allowed Clinton to waive the certification process in the interest of
national security.

Sen. Leahy, who helped write the human rights conditions into the aid
package, urged Clinton not to exercise the waiver.

"Waiving the conditions would contradict the intent of the law and make a
mockery of the arguments and expectations of the many supporters of Plan
Colombia in Congress who insisted that the conditions are necessary," Leahy
said in an August 18 statement. "They said they were 'meaningful conditions'
to 'ensure respect for human rights.' They said that the conditions were
'safeguards,' that this was 'an amendment with teeth.' These strong
statements will be nothing more than empty words if the conditions are
waived."

Clinton signed the waiver on August 22.

Pastrana "has submitted legislation to the Colombian parliament ... for
civil trials for allegations of military abuses of human rights," Clinton
told reporters. "And we also have a system in place for specific
case-by-case investigation of serious allegations."