U.S. STUCK IN COLOMBIA

While past U.S. aid has had little or no positive effect, Americans
are supposed to believe that any delay in new spending means
catastrophic damage.

The senate will soon consider President Clinton's proposed $1.6
billion package to bankroll the government of Colombia's war against
leftist guerillas.

The aid windfall purports to help staunch the flow of drugs from
Colombia. But there is no reason to expect further U.S. anti-drug aid
to be anymore effective than past aid. Even worse, there is a growing
danger that the United States will be bumbling into a civil war.

The Clinton administration is hitting the panic buttons on the aid
package; one administration official whined to the Washington Post on
Tuesday, "Every week we are losing ground" in the fight against drugs.

While past U.S. aid has had little or no positive effect, Americans
are supposed to believe that any delay in new spending means
catastrophic damage.

Colombia has received nearly $1 billion in anti-narcotics aid since
1990. U.S. tax dollars are magnificent fertilizer: coca production is
skyrocketing -- doubling since 1996 and forecast to increase another
50 percent in the next two years. Colombia nowsupplies roughly
three-quarters ofthe heroin and almost all thecocaine consumed in the
United States.

Most U.S. anti-drug aid has paid for chemical warfare: blanketing
coca-growing areas with herbicides from crop-duster planes and
helicopter gunships, a policy the Colombian minister of health
strongly opposed in 1992. Yet after continual escalation in the amount
of spraying, the amount of land in coca production is four times
greater than what it was in 1994 and now exceeds 300 square miles.

"Close enough for government work" seems to be the motto of some
anti-drug pilots. The New York Times reported allegations on May 1
that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto
schoolchildren in a Colombian village. Many children reportedly became
ill; the spraying also killed crops, chickens and 25,000 fish in fish
farms.

The Clinton administration intensely pressured the Colombian
government to allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as
SPIKE 20) to be dumped across the land, which would permit the planes
to fly at much higher altitudes, Kosovo-style.

Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and
permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton
administration decreed clean-air standards severely curtailing
Americans' exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat,
it sought to deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that
would be forbidden in the United States.

The United States is foisting itself deeper into a civil war that has
raged in Colombia for decades. There are about 200 U.S. military
advisers already on site, and U.S. personnel are now actively training
the Colombian military.

The Dallas Morning News recently noted reports that "tens of millions
of taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern
Colombia employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green
Berets, Gulf war veterans and even a few figures from covert
CIA-backed operations in Central America during the 1980s." The United
States is providing key intelligence to the Colombian military from
U.S. intercepts of guerrilla radio messages.

Increased U.S. aid will not enable the Colombian government to win a
decisive victory over the guerrillas anytime soon. The Colombian
military is renown for losing almost all of the major engagements it
fights with the guerrillas.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, recently warned that if
Clinton's $1.6 billion aid plan is approved, the United States will be
locked into "a five-to 10-year commitment, which will cost U.S.
taxpayers in excess of $5 billion."

And even if the guerrillas are defeated, it's ludicrous to pretend
that Colombians will no longer have an incentive to grow coca, as long
as U.S. laws make that crop 20 times more profitable than any other.

American-funded drug suppression efforts have resulted in a "push
down, pop up" effect: the harder the United States works to repress
coca production in one area, the more likely production is to start up
in another. It is time to recognize the futility of trying to
micromanage what foreign farmers grow.