The opinion of the Mercury News

DRUG USER/WARRIOR

COLOMBIA has raised a bleeding hand and pleaded for U.S. aid. It needs and
deserves our help. A neighbor, ravaged by internal conflicts, Colombia also
suffers grievously from the American appetite for drugs.

America is willing to help. Last week President Clinton signed a bill that
includes $1.3 billion in aid. Unfortunately, the aid is skewed by America's
fixation on a quasi-military war against drugs, at home and abroad.

The bulk of the aid to Colombia consists of military assistance, including
60 helicopters. Ostensibly, the helicopters, the training, and the advisory
personnel are to aid the Colombian authorities in the eradication of coca
plants, grown in remote regions of the country.

But healing Colombia will not be nearly as simple as dispatching more
helicopters with herbicides. Colombia is being strangled by two serpents,
civil strife and narco-trafficking, that are intertwined.

Rebellion among the poor and dispossessed in Colombia predates the drug
explosion. These days the insurgency is dominated by two vaguely leftist,
sometimes terrorist organizations, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC, its acronym in Spanish) and the National Liberation Army
(ELN). The FARC controls as much as a third of the country.

The rebels have inspired a counterinsurgency, known as the paramilitaries,
who are fighting the leftists by enthusiastically murdering suspected
sympathizers, more than 2,500 in the last 18 months. The paramilitaries are
linked with disturbing frequency to the Colombian military, the same
military and police who are to receive the bulk of the U.S. aid.

Left and right finance themselves with drug dollars, either directly or by
extorting protection money from narco-traffickers, who have hundreds of
millions to spare.

Between insurrection and drugs, Colombia has been drenched in blood. As
Rafael Pardo, a former minister of defense, writes in Foreign Affairs, ``In
the last 15 years, 200 bombs (half of them as large as the one used in
Oklahoma City) have blown up in Colombia's cities; an entire democratic
leftist political party was eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries; four
presidential candidates, 200 judges and investigators, half the Supreme
Court's justices, 1,200 police officers, 151 journalists and more than
300,000 ordinary Colombians have been murdered.''

More than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes. Miami is
becoming the new home of Colombia's middle and upper classes, terrified by
the guerrillas' tactic of raising money by kidnapping those who have some.

No one sees an end to either the drug war or the civil war anytime soon.

Instead of arming the Colombian military to fight drugs, the United States
should be concentrating on reducing drug use at home by offering more
treatment to users.

In Colombia, the United States should focus on bringing peace, as distant
as that goal may be. Bernard Aronson, an assistant secretary of state in
the Bush administration, says that the United States should be working for
peace in Colombia as aggressively as it is in the Middle East and Northern
Ireland.

He argues that the United States must resume talks with the guerrillas.
European nations have proposed that the FARC agree to manually eradicate
coca if the government suspends chemical eradication. Such an agreement,
internationally verified, would be a step toward political unification and
anti-drug cooperation.

In addition, Colombia needs help rebuilding its economy, now in its worst
recession in 70 years. Free trade would permit Colombian farmers and
businesses to tap into the American market.

Colombia's troubles are not nearly all America's doing, but America must
play a role in lessening them, by promoting peace instead of escalating a
drug war it hasn't won on its own soil.