DUBIOUS COLOMBIA AID PACKAGE

AS THE U.S. SENATE prepares to vote on a supplemental aid bill that
includes $714 million for Colombia, members would do well to heed the
cautionary words of Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

Rhode Island's junior senator is chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee's Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere,
Narcotics and Terrorism. In an opening statement before a subcommittee
hearing on Feb. 25, Chafee warned: "American taxpayers need to
understand that their tax dollars are being used to dramatically and
quickly escalate a program that will involve U.S. military personnel
training foreign troops that may well become involved in a shooting
war in Latin America."

Chafee's concern is well founded. The infusion of money and weaponry
into Colombia provided for by this bill is an expansion of a policy
that has failed to curtail drug production or end a bloody 40-year
civil war. Chafee's position is also courageous. He has questioned a
bill being vigorously promoted by the Providence-based Textron Inc.,
which now stands to gain a $182.5 million windfall for its Bell
Helicopter Division, based in Fort Worth, Texas, for 33 refurbished
and 60 new Huey helicopters for Colombia.

Bell Textron has enlisted former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Tony
Gillespie to push its interests in Congress. Powerful oil interests
such as Occidental Petroleum and BP Amoco are also lobbying for the
bill.

Clinton's original $1 billion-plus supplemental aid package for
Colombia included 33 Hueys, 30 Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters,
airborne and ground-based radar, surveillance aircraft for
interdiction efforts, and money to train and arm two 1,000-man
counter-narcotics battalions.

On May 9, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a version of
the bill that reduced overall spending and expanded human-rights
funding and conditions. The committee voted to cut the Black Hawks
(used in the past by the Colombian military to strafe civilian
villages) and replaced them with Textron's cheaper Huey helicopters.
The supplemental appropriation is in addition to $330 million in
assistance already planned for Colombia for 2000 and 2001.

While eliminating the Black Hawks and strengthening human-rights
requirements are positive steps, the emergency aid would still leave
Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, after
Israel and Egypt, and the second-largest non-NATO recipient of U.S.
military training programs, after South Korea.

In a country where 2,000-3,000 civilians died last year in political
and extrajudicial killings, where the military routinely violates
human rights, and where drug production has not slowed, additional
weapons and training continue a dangerous and flawed policy.

Military training puts new tools into the hands of a corrupt and
out-of-control military that has been responsible for countless
human-rights abuses. A recent Human Rights Watch special report found
that seven Colombian officers implicated in human-rights violations
and linked to Colombia's notorious paramilitary groups were graduates
of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (SOA), in Ft. Benning, GA.

Major David Hernandez Rojas, schooled in psychological operations at
the SOA in 1991, set up the La Muerte death squad, equipped with
uniforms, guns and munitions seized from slain guerillas. Col. Diego
Fernando Fino, who took classes at the SOA in 1989, is a leader in the
Fourth Brigade, which has close ties to paramilitaries. Colonel Fino
ordered the murder of three civilians on their way to ransom a family
member kidnapped by paramilitaries, and then divided the ransom money
with his soldiers!

The Leahy Law, named for its principal sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy,
D.-Vt., is an important means of ensuring that officers like Hernandez
and Fino are not benefiting from U.S. training or using U.S. weapons.
Although the law prohibits military assistance from being transferred
to foreign military units cited by the secretary of state as
human-rights violators, it is routinely circumvented in Colombia.

Generals there have redefined the word "unit" to mean an individual
soldier, rather than a brigade or company of soldiers. Thus, an
individual soldier who has not been charged with abuses is eligible to
receive training even if he is a member of a unit responsible for
numerous violations of human rights. Analysts at the Center for
International Policy who monitor implementation of the Leahy Law
concluded that only two Colombian military units were eligible for
training in 1998. Nevertheless, 15 units received U.S. military training.

Despite enormous increases in aid to Colombia over the past four
years, drug cultivation has skyrocketed. The White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy estimates that cocaine production in
Colombia in 1999 reached 165 metric tons -- three times the 1998
estimate. At the same time, U.S. military aid jumped from $65 million
in 1996 to $300 million in 1999. It is unlikely that an increase to
more than $1 billion for 2000-2001 would reverse this trend.

President Clinton's insistence that this aid package will reduce "the
drug flow into America" while not leading to "another Vietnam" is not
reassuring. The arrest on cocaine-smuggling charges of Laurie Hiatt,
wife of the U.S. military attach who oversaw U.S. Special Forces
counter-narcotics operations in Colombia, should make it clear that
military action is not the answer to the U.S. drug problem. An aid
package of this magnitude makes it difficult to ensure that U.S.
training and weapons will not simply escalate Colombia's civil war.
Robert White, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador during that country's
protracted civil war, has stated that the aid package "amounts to
intervention in another country's civil war."

Colombia may need U.S. support and assistance in bringing about a
lasting peace. This aid should not be in the form of Huey helicopters,
radar systems and military training. Rather, a new and effective
policy that addresses the problem of drug production and seeks to get
at the root causes of the civil war would provide Colombia with
substantial aid for alternative development programs, humanitarian
assistance, and the strengthening of its judicial and civil
institutions.

The citizens of Rhode Island should consider the implications of a
militarized aid package being promoted by corporations like Textron,
which is, in the words of one Bell Helicopter lobbyist, "just trying
to sell helicopters."

Frida Berrigan is a research associate at the World Policy Institute,
in New York. Carol Bragg is with the Rhode Island Committee for
Nonviolence Initiatives and serves on the National Council of the
Fellowship of Reconciliation.