BOGOTA DENIED BROAD SUPPORT FOR PLAN

COLOMBIA: The Colombian government came to the gathering of 27 nations
and several international agencies in Madrid last Friday hoping to
raise $1 billion for Plan Colombia, President Andres Pastrana's
blueprint intended to bolster Colombian peace and counter-narcotics
efforts.

But when the meeting ended, only Spain, Norway and Japan had committed
funds for a plan that the majority of Colombia's European allies,
together with Canada, find dangerously incoherent.

The Inter-American Development Bank and the Andean Corporation for
Development also jointly contributed credits worth $300 million. With
an additional offer of $131 million from the United Nations, the
government received a total of $621 million.

The Colombian government desperately needs committed multinational
financial and political support, and it needs it now, if war on a
scale never before experienced on the continent is to be averted. But
Plan Colombia is failing to inspire international confidence, since
the social and development programmes for which the government sought
support in Madrid are in direct contradiction with Plan Colombia's
other flagship programme. Under this, the US is providing $1.3 billion
for a military counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency campaign in
the Amazonian stronghold of the FARC guerrillas.

It is not surprising that the failing civilian government has lost the
political will it once had to combat the paramilitary phenomenon,
which continues to grow exponentially. Nor is it surprising that FARC
leaders increasingly sense a crippling absence at the peace table of a
viable negotiating partner.

Yet, although tenuous peace negotiations have lurched from one crisis
to the next for several months, just one week ago negotiators for both
sides finally exchanged ceasefire proposals.

Conceivably, this moment holds some potential and may present a first,
crucial turning point along the hard and twisting road towards ending
the savagery of both sides' engagement in a civil war everyone knows
cannot be won militarily.

International intervention to persuade the US to change from a policy
of aerial fumigation of coca plants to one of manual eradication,
combined with economic development, is urgent. Those the fumigation
policy identifies as the enemy are 11 and 1/2 million growers, who
could be persuaded to abandon the crops they are forced to grow by
poverty.

Last May, a political scientist, Dr Juan Tokatlian, wrote that the
time had come in Colombia for "a broad diplomatic effort with Latin
American leadership" similar to the Contadora Group effort during the
Central American wars of the 1980s.