SAVING COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- I had a chat in Bogota the other day with a group of
government officials and businessmen, and I asked them all one question:
When you go outside, how many security guards do you take with you? The
answers were: 20, 6, 1, 8, 10, 2, 3, 8 and 5. No surprise.

Some 3,000 people were kidnapped here last year by guerrillas, and many
judges and journalists threatened with chilling messages, such as having
funeral wreaths sent to their homes -- with their names on them.

This is the terrifying context we have to keep in mind as we consider
whether the U.S. Senate should approve the $1.7 billion plan to strengthen
Colombia's ability to fight drug traffickers and forge a peace with the
guerrillas. There are two ways to think about "Plan Colombia." One way is to
get wrapped up in the details -- the helicopters, the training.

The other way -- the right way -- is to step back and ask yourself what kind
of courage it takes to stay in Colombia right now and be a judge who puts
drug lords in jail or a politician who fights for the rule of law -- knowing
the criminals have millions in drug money and would kill your kids in a
second.

It takes real courage, and that's why the people trying to hold this place
together deserve our support.

Sure, the democratic government of President Andres Pastrana isn't perfect.

But it has a core of decent officials who every day risk their lives by just
going to work. Ask yourself if you would have the same courage.

I asked Mr. Pastrana why he stays. "This is our country, it's the only
country we have to leave to our children," shrugged the president, who was
once kidnapped while running for Bogota mayor. "I believe in this country so
much that even after being kidnapped, and even after having my wife's father
killed by kidnappers, my wife and I had another baby -- a girl. Look, we've
sacrificed the best policemen, the best judges, the best journalists in this
country. Whatever you want to write about us, don't write that we are not on
the front line in the war on drugs."

I asked the head of Colombia's navy, Adm. Sergio Garcia, what it was like to
be an officer here. He said it was sort of like being a movie star, with
people always trying to get at you, only they don't want your autograph,
they want to kill you -- "so even your friends don't want to be in a
restaurant with you, and they don't want their kids near your kids."

Colombians tell this joke: After God created Colombia, an angel asked God
why he gave all the beauty to one country -- rain forests, mountains,
oceans, savanna -- and God answered: "Ha! Wait till you see what kind of
people I put there!"

For years, Colombia's mafia processed cocaine grown from coca in Peru. But
as Peru drove the coca growers out, they migrated to the rain forest in
Southern Colombia -- one of the largest unbroken expanses of rain forest
left on earth, but also a region without much government. The drug mafia is
now chopping down the rain forest -- thousands of acres each month -- then
laying down herbicides, planting coca, processing it into cocaine in rain
forest labs, throwing the chemicals in the rivers, and then flying the drugs
out from grass airstrips.

Underlying Colombia's drug war is a real 40-year-old social struggle between
Marxist guerrillas and right-wing vigilantes (32,000 killings last year).
But let's cut the nonsense: Colombia's guerrillas may have started as a
romantic movement against an unjust oligarchy -- they may have started as a
movement that ate to fight.

But today, these guerrillas are fighting to eat -- fighting the government
because they make tons of money protecting drug operations in the rain forest.

In between the guerrillas and the vigilantes (who also profit from drugs),
Colombia's silent majority is held hostage.

Yes, Colombians are at fault for having been too tolerant of the early drug
lords. And Americans are at fault for their insatiable appetite for cocaine.
But here's the bottom line: If we give the Colombian majority the aid it
needs to fight the drug Mafia there is a chance -- and it's no sure thing --
that it will be able to forge a domestic peace.

If we don't -- and this is a sure thing -- the problem will only get worse,
it will spew instability across this region, and the only rain forest your
kids will ever see is the Rainforest Cafe.