A MISGUIDED AID PACKAGE TO COLOMBIA

Military Intervention Won't Solve The Drugs Problem, Argues James C.
Jones

Having worked among the peasants who grow drug crops in Colombia,
where South America's longest-running armed conflict continues to
seethe, I am troubled by the misguided premise of the Clinton
administration's proposed $1.3 billion Colombia aid package.

The declared goal of Washington's policy is to staunch the flow of
illicit drugs. But the aid package will not control drugs - because
the policy fails to recognize the roots of the conflict. In treating
rebels as narco-guerrillas, the policy ignores their 36-year-old
political agenda, which focuses on the needs of forgotten rural
citizens. The rebels come from a population that was forced long ago
to colonize remote lands in order to survive; they must be understood
first as peasants, then as insurgents.

The package's emphasis on military intervention to check the spread of
drug crops and contain the rebels whom U.S. officials hold responsible
will only prolong the violence. It could even draw the U.S. into an
ugly civil war, in a land where things are not what they seem.

The aid package is directed primarily against the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the main rebel group, which defends both
drug traffickers and the legions of peasant coca farmers. The package
will provide military support for the Colombian police in their
efforts to eradicate coca by aerial spraying. The crop spraying will
begin in Putumayo State, a southern FARC stronghold where about half
of Colombia's coca is grown. The underlying assumption is that
fortifying the armed forces will prompt the FARC to negotiate.

I challenge this assumption, and question the push into Putumayo.
Recent history shows why: About four years ago, as the FARC began to
deal crippling blows to Colombia's military, it also began to behave
more like a regular army, amassing its forces and moving them openly.
The aid package, with its promised helicopters and improved
surveillance, is more likely to push FARC into its guerrilla mode than
to bring it to the peace table. It could also inspire the rebels to
launch an urban campaign of sabotage and assassination. If so,
right-wing militias would probably retaliate with increased assaults
on the civilian rural population that they think supports the FARC. An
already dirty war could get a whole lot dirtier.

The sweep into Putumayo promises equally dire consequences. In 1996
tens of thousands of southern coca farmers marched in violent protest
against aerial spraying and government neglect. Spraying makes
refugees of the many who have no food crops and grow only coca. It
enrages others who see it as a sign that the government has turned
against them. They look to the rebels, or drug traffickers, to
grubstake them until they can farm coca elsewhere. It was after
spraying reduced cultivation in Guaviare that the coca frontier
shifted to Putumayo. It could shift again.

U.S. officials are disingenuous when they say they are fighting drugs,
not insurgents. The distinction is illusory. There is only one
battlefield. The proposed aid will not only ratchet up the violence,
it may well derail the peace process. And what incentive will there be
for members of Colombia's extreme right, many of them militia
sympathizers, to support that process once they realize they may be
able to avoid making the concessions that a negotiated agreement would
require of them?

That said, there is no doubt about the FARC's capacity for brutality.
The group emerged in 1964, when soldiers trained and equipped by the
United States launched a huge land-air attack on Marquetalia, an armed
colonist commune. Among those who escaped was the FARC chief, Manuel
Marulanda, a seasoned guerrilla fighter who has now been on the run
for 50 years. Images from this era dominate the vision of today's FARC
leaders, who remain vehemently anti-American. They see the United
States as fighting a proxy counterinsurgency war disguised as a
crusade against drugs. They see the militias as an extension of the
army. And they have no illusions: They know there is only one
battlefield.

Despite its worn Marxist rhetoric, there is little evidence that the
FARC seeks social revolution or national power beyond what it needs to
bring about local change. Even its involvement in drugs reflects its
peasant origins; it acts as broker between coca growers and drug
buyers, thereby denying the two groups direct - and potentially
violent - contact. For the time being the FARC's drug involvement
remains subservient to its political agenda. But that could change.
Should the FARC overdose on drug cash, which finances its operations,
it could splinter into armed bands, at war with each other, with the
state and with society. That possibility is all the more reason to end
the conflict soon.

What also worries me is that U.S. policy largely ignores the
right-wing militias, which are in the pay of rich landowners, drug
traffickers and businessmen, who all want protection from the
guerrillas. The militias have been torturing, murdering and uprooting
peasants whom they suspect of rebel sympathies, and are responsible
for most of the refugees and the majority of the human rights abuses.
Since 1995 many of the militias have united under the notorious drug
trafficker Carlos Castano.

The war between rebels and militias is fought in the countryside,
where violence and poverty have weakened community bonds. Mistrust and
envy prevail. The wantonly violent militias have injected fear into
this atmosphere. This can lead the FARC to overreact, harassing anyone
thought to harbor militia sympathies, executing those it believes are
spies.

Castano has promised to assassinate anyone who assists rural
communities that are believed to support the rebels. That threat is a
response to the offer by Andres Pastrana's government offer to extend
rural development to FARC-held areas in return for rebel help in
reducing coca.

Human rights groups rightly protest at the the security forces' ties
to these militias. But the state's cooperation with private armed
forces has a time-honored legitimacy in Colombia.

The rebels are unlikely to abandon their weapons soon. They have
already tried a political approach, forming a party in 1985. But their
support in municipal elections alarmed landowners, who hired militias
that killed more than 3,000 party supporters, candidates and elected
officials.

There are two areas in which prompt change might bring peace much
nearer: agrarian reform, especially land reform, and neutralizing the
militias. The government has long stalled on both fronts.

The United States must support the very peace process that its
proposed military aid imperils. It should provide the assistance that
Colombia needs to carry out reform. It should lower its profile,
encourage European assistance, and give more space and resources to
the United Nations. If Colombia's government can forge domestic
consensus, and if the U.S. can draw more on its intellectual assets
and less on its military ones, there is a reasonable chance that peace
(and drug control) can come about.

James Jones, a Washington-based consultant, served from 1997 until
July 1999 as a regional adviser to the U.N. International Drug Control
Programme in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia