THE DRUG WAR

Plan Colombia: Chillingly Familiar

As in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago, the United States has embarked on the
phantasmagoric enterprise of destroying the countryside of Colombia in
order, supposedly, to save it.

In the 1960s, the mission was called Search and Destroy. Today, it's Plan
Colombia, the objective of which is to eradicate cocaine drug lords,
leftist and rightist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary vigilantes, thugs
and thousands in between. In Vietnam, the enemy was identified as Communists.

In Colombia, everyone seems to be a potential enemy. The U.S Congress
quietly approved U.S. armed intervention in Colombia last month, complete
with at least 60 Black Hawk and Huey-2 helicopter gunships with U.S. crews.
U.S. Army Special Forces are already training two Colombian battalions in
counterinsurgency. President Bill Clinton is expected to endorse the
mission Aug. 30 on a one-day visit to Colombia.

Most Americans seem to have no idea that Plan Colombia threatens to suck
the United States into the longest and most brutal civil war in the Western
Hemisphere, which has lasted on and off for 160 years. It has never been
explained to them, just like Vietnam was never explained at the outset.

In another ghastly reminder of Vietnam, the administration has persuaded
Colombia to develop a powerful biological herbicide against coca and heroin
poppy fields. It is a fungus known as fusarium oxysporum, derived from the
coca plant. Washington's idea is to spread it across hundreds of thousands
of acres cultivated for poppies. Nobody appears to know the impact of this
fungus on humans, which evokes memories of the Agent Orange defoliant in
Vietnam that killed and maimed the Viet Cong and Americans alike.

Plan Colombia is the result of the administration's festering frustration
over its continuing inability to stem the huge flow of cocaine and heroin
produced in Colombia, notwithstanding billions of dollars spent over the
years on interdiction and for what passed for co-operation with Colombian
authorities.

The plan's chief author is the White House drug czar, Gen. Barry M.
McCaffrey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command. Congress allocated
$1.3 billion to put it into action. To the extent that it can be
understood, the plan calls for the elimination of the guerrillas, no matter
their allegiance, who guard the fields, so small aircraft can safely spray
the fungus over the poppy plantations.

This task is to be carried out by U.S.-trained Colombian counterinsurgency
battalions ferried to the poppy fields by U.S. helicopters. Nothing has
been said about what would happen should a U.S. chopper be shot down and
members of its crew killed or injured.

A complicating factor is that a half-dozen guerrilla wars or conflicts are
currently underway in Colombia, making it difficult for McCaffrey to decide
whom and where to hit. The most important guerrilla group is the FARC
(Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), whose 15,000
troops occupy the southern departments of Putumayo and Caqueta, an area the
size of Switzerland, and function as a virtually independent coca-rich state.

The FARC's ranks have swelled since the U.S. launched Plan Colombia. The
counterinsurgency battalions will have a tough time with the
Marxist-Leninist force, as will their U.S. advisers. The Vietnam-era
question of how many Americans will be needed to overwhelm the guerrillas
will surely arise. In the north, the ELN (National Liberation Army), a more
politically moderate organization, controls its own smaller mini-country,
equally wealthy in coca. It has no more than 5,000 fighters. Then there are
right-wing paramilitary units at war with the guerrillas and local peasants.

In Brasilia last week, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, on a
mission to sell the plan in Latin America, was told that Brazil would have
no part of it. Most other Latin American governments feel the same way,
leaving Washington isolated in its undertaking. Perhaps the greatest threat
and tragedy facing the U.S. in its Colombian venture is that the plan was
developed by men and women who know little of Colombia's history, culture
and politics.

The shakiness of U.S. knowledge of Colombian history is best illustrated by
the widely repeated falsehood that the civil war there has been going on
for 40 years. Actually, the first great civil war that would define
subsequent ones erupted between the Liberals and the Conservatives in 1840,
21 years after Simon Bolivar won Colombia's independence from Spain. These
wars never really stopped, and a key milestone were the savage riots in
Bogota, the capital, in 1948, when the leftist liberal presidential
candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was murdered.

The civil war - the violencia - continued after 1948, leading to military
coups, a restoration of formal democracy and the emergence of large
guerrilla forces.

What's left of that democracy today is in tatters, and Plan Colombia will
clearly not rescue it. It is difficult to "save" a nation about whose
history and identity Washington policymakers know so little.

Tad Szulc is a Washington-based writer.