SAVING COLOMBIA

The overwhelming, bipartisan vote in Congress last week to appropriate more
then $1 billion in aid to Colombia, two-thirds of it military assistance,
makes clear the United States will support that embattled nation in its war
with leftist guerrilla forces heavily involved in drug trafficking. Now the
president and secretary of state should send an equally strong message --
with the same strong bipartisan backing -- that the United States prefers
and will aggressively support a negotiated peace settlement.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana has staked his government's prestige on
negotiations with the guerrillas. With two years left in his term and his
popularity waning, Pastrana risks becoming a lame duck soon if there is not
tangible progress at the bargaining table.

Meanwhile, the largest and most formidable guerrilla army, the FARC, is
recruiting new troops in anticipation of increased U.S. assistance and
heightened combat over drug eradication. Over the next several months, the
peace talks will either gain traction, or the war is likely to escalate.

To sway the balance toward a negotiated settlement, the United States must
become as actively engaged in the Colombian peace process as it has
previously been in Central America, the Middle East and Northern Ireland,
and it must press its allies in the hemisphere, Europe and the United
Nations to do the same. The danger in an election year is that U.S. policy
toward Colombia will be driven, like much of the debate over the aid
package, by the argument over who is "soft" on narco-trafficking, and the
administration might shrink from taking the steps and risks it must.

For example, a group of European nations, which will convene in Madrid next
month for a Colombian donors' conference, has proposed that the FARC
embrace manual eradication of coca production and alternative development,
with international verification, in exchange for temporary cessation of
forced eradication by the government. Such a proposal, if implemented with
real international verification, even on a pilot basis could begin to
reduce drug production, jump-start serious peace negotiations and break the
momentum of the war. But such a proposal will not be viable if the
administration, under attack by partisan critics, shoots it down
immediately as a "sellout" in the war on drugs.

As we have learned in Central America, the Middle East and Northern
Ireland, the United States, if it hopes to influence the peace process
decisively, must find a way to talk directly with the guerrillas, as the
Colombian government has urged us to do. In December 1998, State Department
officials began a direct dialogue with FARC representatives, but broke it
off under heavy fire from congressional critics after guerrilla cadres
kidnaped and murdered three American human rights activists.

When and how to talk and thereby lend legitimacy to a political-military
organization that employs terror as a tactic is a recurring dilemma in
foreign policy.

In such debates, it is far easier to take the "tough" position and say
"never" than to take the responsibility and political risk of opening up
such a dialogue.

But as successive administrations have done with the PLO, the FMLN (in El
Salvador) and the IRA, the United States needs to find a formula to talk
with the Colombian guerrillas, and a cease-fire in our domestic political
wars would make that possible.

Underlying much of the political debate that skews U.S. policy toward
Colombia are two related misconceptions: first, that there is a military
solution to the conflict and, second, that eliminating the guerrillas will
eliminate the drug problem.

The truth is that over time, U.S. military assistance and training for the
Colombian armed forces, coupled with a strong emphasis on human rights, can
begin to alter the balance of forces between government and guerrillas and,
one hopes, create real incentives for serious negotiations. But the FARC
has been waging war in Colombia for nearly four decades and is the de facto
local power in a remote region five times the size of El Salvador. No
serious observer believes a decisive military victory is in sight.

The FARC, like the paramilitary forces on the right, finances itself
significantly by protecting coca cultivation, production and transport.

But the traffickers who manage the drug trade and reap the lion's share of
profits are organized criminal enterprises, not guerrillas. A negotiated
settlement of the war with the guerrillas -- far from being the "soft"
position on drugs -- would strike a major blow against the
narco-trafficking gangs, because the violence and instability that the war
has brought to Colombia is the sea in which the drug cartels flourish.

Those who denigrate negotiations in Colombia as naive argue that the
guerrillas are so flush with protection money from drug trafficking that
they have no serious incentive to negotiate.

But Colombia's insurgencies, which long predate its emergence as a major
producer of cocaine and heroin, are rooted in its political and social history.

The FARC claims publicly that it will end ties to the drug trade and
embrace alternative development in return for social and political reforms
and safeguards for its security.

As former minister of defense Rafael Pardo writes in Foreign Affairs, "The
cost of the drug war has been staggering. 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 leftist political party was eliminated by
rightwing paramilitaries, 4 presidential candidates, 200 judges and
investigators, half the Supreme Court justices, 1,200 police officers, 151
journalists, and more then 300,000 ordinary Colombians have been murdered."

If more violence must come to Colombia in the future, it should be because
the guerrillas' claims have been exposed at the negotiating table before
the international community as posturing for tactical advantage, not
because election politics in the United States made it impossible for the
negotiations or the guerrillas to be put to the test.

The writer was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from
1989 to 1993.