DRUGS AND INJUSTICE: EUROPE URGED TO WITHHOLD SUPPORT

As President Clinton prepares to visit Bogota in the middle of next week
Ana Carrigan raises doubts about his mission and asks disturbing questions
concerning the real US agenda

COLOMBIA: Three weeks ago, President Clinton interrupted a family holiday
to announce that he would travel to Colombia on Wednesday next to meet
President Andres Pastr ana. His visit, he claimed, would "underscore
America's support for Colombia's efforts to seek peace, fight illicit
drugs, build its economy and deepen democracy".

Clinton will promote "Plan Colombia", which many observers see as a vehicle
his State Department has devised to permit the US to enter the
counter-insurgency war against the FARC guerrillas under the cover of
"counter-narcotics". Plan Colombia is the biggest aid package every offered
to a Latin American country.

Yet it is opposed by many in Colombia who have no sympathy with the
guerrillas, because they believe it will provide no exit from the quagmire
of 30 years of conflict. Far from bringing peace, they believe it will drag
the country deeper into bloodshed.

Besides the Colombian President, Clinton will meet selected business
interests but not the representatives of civil society, including church
groups, trade unions and peace activists, who reject the US plan.

Ironically, with Clinton keen to enhance the image of his presidency, Plan
Colombia may leave a stain on his legacy and present a poisoned chalice for
his successor. It also poses a problem for his European allies who will
need to unite if they are not to be dragged into the Colombian quagmire.

Far from helping Colombia to "strengthen its democracy", Clinton's policies
have done the opposite. The Pentagon has formed an alliance with an army
that refuses to disengage from drug trafficking and from the notorious
"paramilitaries" - Colombian jargon for right-wing death squads. "Army
watched gunmen kill Colombian peasants" is how Reuters headed its report of
last month's massacre in La Union. This is the village where an Irish
priest, Father Brendan Forde, has courageously decided to stay, despite
threats from the paramilitaries to kill more members of his "peace community".

While the US Embassy recites statistics about the number of Colombian
officers who have passed Washington-sponsored army human rights courses,
Colombians continue to be terrorised, driven into exile and slaughtered
with impunity.

La Union is just one instance in a trail of massacres - 402 last year -
attributed to "paramilitaries". Their military strategy consists of
slaughtering defenceless villagers with macabre cruelty.

However deplorable the methods of the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia) and ELN (Army of National Liberation) guerrillas, it is not
left-wing terrorism but the rapid rise in the political and military power
of the "paramilitaries" which now presents the greatest risk to the elected
government. Only Washington has the financial and political clout to rein
in this threat.

Last week there were alarming signs that the US is moving in the opposite
direction.

Serious allegations have emerged that agents of the US Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA) have offered to subsidise the "paramilitary" leader, Carlos
Castano, in return for his support in combating the traffickers.

Speaking on national television from his northern fiefdom, Castano said he
did not know whether a request for his help reflected US policy or came
from agents acting on their own initiative. A DEA informant, who says he
acted as translator at meetings between DEA agents, traffickers and members
of Castano's paramilitaries, claims it was agreed that US officials should
meet Castan o to conclude a deal.

"They [the DEA agents] were supposed to bring US Army officials, even
people from the Department of State, and a series of politicians [to meet
Castano]," he said. "They spoke of 10 or 12." The story may be a fantasy,
as the Clinton administration claims, but it would not be the first time US
intelligence agencies have had dealings with Carlos Castano. In 1993, while
working for the Cali Cartel, he collaborated with the CIA and the Colombian
police to bring down the fugitive drug baron, Pablo Escobar.

Paramilitaries have been endemic to Colombia since President Betancur began
peace talks in 1983. When Betancur opened a door to the guerrillas, the
army sought allies for a dirty war to derail the talks. They turned for
help to the Medellin cartel.

Escobar and his partners provided the money and the generals contracted
crack Israeli and British mercenaries to come to Colombia to run a death
squad school. Carlos Castano was the school's star pupil.

He has never been out of a job: hit man for Escobar; drug trafficker; death
squad leader contracted by the army to cover their tracks while they
eliminated the Union Patriotica party in the late 1980s; founder of a
paramilitary group in the 1990s which he used to murder his way to control
a neo-feudal empire stretching across half of northern Colombia. Castano's
criminal career neatly encapsulates Colombia's institutional collapse.

Today Castano is in a process of metamorphosis, from psychopathic gangster
to political icon. In the last two years he has unified the disparate,
autonomous, regional paramilitaries into a national force of some 10,000
men in uniform.

Under his leadership, this army provides the muscle for a shadowy, fascist
political movement, whose civilian leadership is invisible though its goals
are not: first, to close down the peace talks between the government and
FARC; then, to provide a launching pad for a military-civilian "national
unity government".

Castano now controls territory and population in the Middle Magdalena
valley, right up to the strategic oil refinery river port of
Barrancabermeja. Since April, he has mobilised "popular protests" against
the establishment of a neutral zone where talks with ELN leaders could begin.

The talks have been blocked for months. Last month, when the Swiss
government invited the Colombian government to come to Geneva with the ELN
leaders and a civic society delegation to start peace talks in neutral
territory, some of Castano's friends came too.

His paramilitaries almost wrecked the conference through a savage onslaught
on ELN villages timed to coincide with the talks.

After the conference, two men cornered the sound engineer in a hotel
elevator and made off with the only official recordings of the two-day
peace meetings. no's CIA contacts are back in business. Such fears may be
paranoid or they may not. But one thing is clear: in the midst of chaos,
Castano is the only political actor who is consistently gaining gound.

He now has a large, rapidly growing following in among the middle class in
Colombia. Castano personifies what happens to societies in failed states.

Next month, EU officials meet in Bogota to decide on their response to Plan
Colombia. One week ago, a coalition of 37 Colombian human rights and other
NGO groups signed a statement rejecting the plan's funds for development.
Citing "ethical and political difficulties (in) receiving aid from this
programme", they told Clinton his money was tainted.

Their message to Europe: withhold support from Plan Colombia and become
actively involved in the search for alternatives.