RETHINKING PLAN COLOMBIA: SOME WAYS TO FIX IT

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - The Colombian soldiers look young. A little
disinterested, perhaps. Or maybe just scared. One by one, they
politely stand in the spare courtroom and state their names and
ranks. They are charged with planning and carrying out the murder of
10 US-trained counternarcotic policemen and a civilian - at the
behest of narcotraffickers.

But this is simply a preliminary hearing. More than four months after
the May 22 massacre in Jamundi, the prosecution of this high-profile
case has barely begun.

Oscar Hurtado, the civilian judge tapped in June, passed the case to
a military tribunal in July: "I'm not going to risk my life," he
explained. "I feel threatened ... there are no guarantees of my security."

In August, the Attorney General's office angrily sent the case back
to Judge Hurtado - who proceeded to check into the hospital, citing
heart-related problems.

"This fits squarely with an ongoing pattern of impunity," says Maria
McFarland, Human Rights Watch's Colombia researcher. "For years, the
Colombian military has had problems with committing human rights
abuses ... and it's extremely rare for anyone to get arrested or prosecuted."

Local papers are already dubbing Jamundi another Guaitarilla, in
reference to a southwestern town where seven police officers and four
civilians were shot dead by the Colombian military in March 2004. In
that case, evidence was destroyed, the facts were never aired in
civilian court, and the accused soldiers were eventually absolved by
a military court.

But in Washington, Jamundi continues to resonate, giving ammunition
to those who say that Plan Colombia, the US' six-year $4.7 billion
program to fight the drug trade, needs a serious overhaul.

"The US has to stop being a cheap date ... doing everything and
expecting nothing in return," fumes Rep. Jim McGovern (D) of
Massachusetts. "We are sending billions of dollars to bankroll the
Colombian military and are being told everything is terrific. And
then bang, this happens. Where is the outrage?"

Congressman McGovern sees Jamundi as indicative of a much larger,
institutional problem. "Just how far have the drug mafias penetrated
the military? Just how cowered are the courts?" he asks. "All the
money we have sent down there has basically not worked."

Right after the massacre, McGovern proposed cutting US aid to
Colombia's military and police next year - expected to be over $700
million - by $30 million, a symbolic gesture. The proposal failed,
but 174 congressmen supported it.

Meanwhile, the Senate appropriations committee has balked at the
State Department's certification of Plan Colombia monies this year -
a certification that came three days after the massacre and did not
mention it. The committee continues to withhold its support for the
funding, a portion of which is supposed to be tied to human-rights
practices, until it receives satisfactory explanations for what
happened in Jamundi and in several other reported cases of abuse and
corruption.

"The White House insists it is winning the war against drugs. Those
boasts fly in the face of the facts, but the White House would rather
stick to a flawed plan than to admit that their approach isn't
working and to fix it," says committee member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D)
of Vermont. "Congressional oversight ... has been sorely lacking," he
says. "It is past time for an honest reassessment of Plan Colombia."

Reevaluating Plan Colombia, say critics, requires a look at the
priorities set by Washington that shape the way the war against drugs
is waged. When experts and politicians are asked what changes might
yield better results, the responses often divide into two different approaches.

The first is the school of alternative development. Sandro Calvani,
director of the UN's office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia (UNODC)
argues that Plan Colombia's heavy focus on aerial spraying needs to
be supplemented with increased efforts to deal with the social and
economic roots of Colombia's coca industry. Specifically, he wants
the US and others in the international community to offer strategies
- - and funds - for rural development that would ensure alternative
livelihoods for poor farmers who face destruction of their chief cash crop.

"Why do Colombians go back to replanting coca? Because it's easy, and
no one talks to them about doing something else," says Mr. Calvani.
The alternative development programs that have been attempted, he
says, show clear, impressive results. A UNODC survey released in June
shows that 70 percent of the fields eradicated through Plan Colombia
are replanted. But if farmers receive alternative development
assistance, states Calvani, the percentage of coca fields replanted
dives to 3 percent. They're replaced with coffee, hearts of palm, and
red beans. "Once coca peasants live on licit crops for one year, they
never go back to the illicit economy," he says.

Pablo Casas, a security expert at the Bogota-based Security and
Democracy foundation, says aerial spraying also comes at the expense
of combating the criminal structure higher up. "Eradication targets
the smallest cogs in the machine," he says, "We need to focus on the
money laundering businesses, on attacking the imports of cocaine
precursors into Colombia, on intercepting the final product, and on
weeding out corruption." Targeting the farmers and failing to provide
them with alternatives is not only an opportunity cost, he argues, it
is counterproductive, causing greater poverty and displacement.

Some $1.2 billion has been spent directly on eradication between 2000
and 2005, but alternative development projects have garnered $213
million in the same period. "When it comes to fighting drugs, there
is no real division of the pie," says Calvani. "Practically the
entire pie is used for interdiction ... and anything else gets thrown
a cookie."

White House drug czar John Walters replies that security must be
established in an area first. "Alternative development is most
effective when conditioned on a police presence," he says.

At a Congressional hearing in Washington last week, House Republicans
noted the rising cocaine use in Europe, and called for European
governments to engage more in Colombia's drug fight. Rep. Dan Burton
(R) of Indiana said Europe needs to fulfill its pledges of "soft-side
assistance."

Europe says it opposes aerial eradication on environmental grounds
and extols the alternative development option. "The US does not have
enough faith in alternative development, and the Europeans have
faith, but do very little," says Calvani.

Increasingly, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe himself has also
voiced criticism of the eradication focus and begun calling for a
more "multidimensional approach."

"We cannot disconnect alternative development from this war," he said
last week, speaking to the Colombian American Association in New
York. "It is necessary to eliminate crops, yes. But we need to
combine this with options, and with better access to markets," he said.

Mr. Uribe's administration is lobbying for Colombia to be
reclassified as a US "strategic partner" in the war on drugs - a move
that would give Bogota greater control of where money was spent.

If awarded this freedom, he would, for example, suggest expanding the
Forest Warden Families program that pays farmers monthly stipends in
return for keeping their land free of illicit crops. "We have 43,000
families looking after 1.7 million hectares. In that area, coca
production has fallen 80 percent and we have recovered 236,000
hectares of forest where coca was being grown," said Uribe last week.
"The results are spectacular."

The continued US focus on aerial spraying, despite questionable
results, has to do in part with who's in charge of the drug fight,
admits one State Department official. Development and social experts
have, historically, been far less involved and listened to, she
claims, speaking off the record because she is not authorized to
discuss the subject. The defense and security voices - with their
more combat-oriented approach - have the upper hand, she notes.

The post-Sept. 11 discourse used by President Bush and adopted by
Uribe (including rechristening narcotraffickers and guerrillas as
narcoterrorists) has made it even harder to replace "hard" measures
with softer ones. The US political cycle also plays a part in
drug-fighting methods, adds Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug
trafficking at the University of Miami. "No one in the US wants to
look 'soft' on drugs, and nothing looks tougher than spraying
hundreds of thousands of hectares of coca fields," he says. "Talking
about [alternative] development won't get you re-elected."

The second school of criticism wants to take the drug-war debate off
Colombian soil. These critics say the solutions lie on the side of
drug consumption, not production. The Washington Office on Latin
America (WOLA), an advocacy group, argues for dedicating more funds
toward drug prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation programs in the
US - and for scaling back altogether on programs aimed at stopping
the supply of drugs from Colombia. US treatment programs, in
particular, have been proven effective. They cite a 1994 RAND Corp.
study that found that if the goal was to reduce cocaine use in the
US, treatment of heavy cocaine users was 23 times more cost-effective
than drug-crop eradication and other source-country programs, and
three times more effective than mandatory minimum sentencing.

But only about 17 percent of Americans who needed treatment for an
illicit drug use problem in 2004 received it, because of prohibitive
costs, insurance limits, or other barriers, according to WOLA.

Assertions by the White House drug czar's office that the vast
majority of the drug-control funding already goes toward battling
domestic demand are dismissed by WOLA, which does not consider
spending in the US on law enforcement as part of the demand-side solution.

"Six years into Plan Colombia the mili-tary is murdering in broad
daylight. We are bolstering militaries and ignoring human rights,"
says John Walsh, a drug policy expert at WOLA. "Yet we continue to
perpetuate the illusion that some supply-side solution exists. The
opportunity cost of that is that we are not investing enough in
managing the demand in the US. The real game is here."

Monica Fernando Santacruz Ospina is tired.

Her husband, Maj. Elkin Molina, the officer in charge of the police
unit slain in Jamundi, would have turned 36 this month. Normally, Ms.
Fernando, his wife of 10 years, would buy a giant cream cake for the
occasion. She is a great cook, she clarifies, but she has trouble
with cakes. And a birthday demands a cake.

This year, she went to put flowers on his grave instead. It was
raining, and she was crying, and she felt like just lying down in the
ground beside him.

They had lunch together the day of his death - grilled chicken and
vegetables, she remembers, because he was on a diet. She had said:
"May God be with you," when he left the house. He kissed their
9-year-old, and told him to stop playing Xbox and do his homework.

Later, while visiting with a neighbor, Fernando's police
walkie-talkie started crackling (she was issued the radio as the wife
of the unit commander).

"Don't shoot us! Have mercy! We are police. We are fathers!" she
heard familiar voices screaming. She knew who was yelling, but she
refused to accept it. Again and again, she tried to reach her husband
on the radio.

"I want to know who ordered this," she says today, pushing her hair
away from her face. "I am scared no one will pay."

Since the massacre, Fernando and her son have relocated from Cali to
Bogota, and, with the help of the police and the US Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) agents who had trained her husband, she has gone
back to school. She's studying criminology.

"I want to make sure my husband's death was not in vain," she says
defiantly. "I refuse to be scared out of fighting back." Fernando
then slowly puts her head in her hands and begins to sob. She is
stressed, she apologizes, because she does not really know how or
when it will all end.

In Washington, Anthony Placido, the DEA's chief of intelligence,
understands. "A war has a definable beginning and end. This is not
that," he admits, putting aside the usual terminology. "We are more
like gardeners, pulling up the weeds," he says. "We are not going to
raise a flag and say, we have won. We can't declare an end, a victory."

Back at the courthouse in Bogota, the preliminary hearing for the
Colombian soldiers on trial for the Jamundi massacre is cut short
because of a technicality. The young soldiers shuffle out of the courtroom.