THE VIEW BEYOND CUBA

Think this Elian thing is over? Think again.

There's still plenty to keep it going: congressional hearings; the
Miami relatives' court appeals; the presidential campaign. It's got
another month in it, at least.

We become obsessed, every once in a while, with these soap-opera
stories of varying news value, and the media tend to indulge us past
the point of gluttony. But the Elian Gonzalez saga stands apart from
the parade of mega-stories (you know what they are) in some important
ways. This is no simple true-crime or girl-in-the-well tale.

For one, the cast of characters goes well beyond the usual local
rustics - here we have the president of the United States, the
attorney general, Fidel Castro, the major-party presidential
candidates and Sen. Trent Lott. For another, there are genuine
international implications here.

And that's a problem. We don't expect to draw any foreign-policy
lessons from girl-in-the-well stories. Here, though, we do. And the
United States' national fixation on Cuba has once again flared up, all
out of proportion.

History and the outsized political influence of America's Cuban exile
community (due in no small part to the importance of Florida in the
Electoral College math of presidential elections) have at times made
the Caribbean island appear much larger on the map than its actual
size. Right now, Cuba seems to positively loom over Miami.

We let Cuba dominate our view of this hemisphere at our own risk. It
is no longer, after all, the nearest Soviet outpost. It is a
relatively small dictatorship that, in its present form, poses no
measurable threat to the United States. But there are other situations
in other nearby nations that might.

We need look no further than our southern border. Northern Mexico has
become the corridor for a booming trade in heroin, cocaine and
marijuana. Drugs are big money - no secret there - and in this
relatively poor country, drug money has its way more often than not.
Mexican law enforcement gives every appearance now of being
increasingly influenced by drug traffickers.

The dishonest cops are on the take, and the honest ones are scared.
American officers charged with controlling the flood of narcotics over
the Mexican border worry about sharing tips and leads with their
Mexican counterparts - they know all too well that this valuable
information is often sold to the highest bidder.

The Mexican situation is alarming not only because of the sheer volume
of drugs coming into our country but because of the example posed by
Colombia's dire problems with drug thugs. There, if you haven't been
following the story, Marxist guerrillas and drug lords have entered
into a mutual-protection racket that has essentially cut off the
northern third of the country from government control.

Mexico is in the middle stages of the drug-money disease; Colombia is
a near-terminal case. The United States is trying to help reverse this
prognosis with military and financial aid that some say is too little,
too late and that others fear will mire us in another country's
unwinnable war.

Besides Mexico and Colombia, potential trouble for the United States
brews in other places to our south - Panama, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru
and Ecuador among them.

For the moment, these problems might lack the emotional draw of the
Cuban soap opera. But we simply can't ignore the larger picture facing
us in the Americas. The actions we should take, if any, are open to
debate.

To debate, however, we need first to be aware.