WE'RE TARGETING A COLOMBIA WE DON'T FULLY UNDERSTAND

Having worked among the peasants who grow drug crops in Colombia, where the
continent'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 our Colombia policy is to staunch the flow of illicit
drugs. But the aid package, which won House approval Thursday with a few
modifications, will not control drugs - because our 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 Colombia's
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.

Instead, the package's emphasis on military intervention represents a blind
zeal to check the vast spread of drug crops and contain the rebels whom
U.S. officials hold responsible. That approach will serve only to prolong
the decades of violence.

It could even draw us 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 country's major rebel group, which defends
both drug traffickers and the legions of peasant coca farmers.

The package will provide military support--better reconnaissance and
helicopters for greater troop mobility and firepower--for the Colombian
National Police in its efforts to eradicate coca by aerial spraying.

The crop spraying will begin in Putumayo State, a southern FARC stronghold
where about half of the country'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. In short, 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 their government has
turned against them. Past experience has shown that these peasants look to
the rebels, or drug traffickers, to grubstake them until they can farm coca
elsewhere.

It was after spraying reduced coca cultivation in Guaviare that the coca
frontier shifted to Putumayo. It could shift again, perhaps across
Putumayo's long border and into Ecuador, whose rickety government already
faces serious rural unrest.

U.S. officials are disingenuous when they say we 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 ongoing 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 might be able to avoid making the concessions a negotiated
agreement would inevitably require of them?

That said, there is no doubt about the FARC's capacity for brutality.

Its savage murder of three U.S. Indian-rights activists last year, and the
death it routinely rains on innocent civilians in attacks on police
outposts, are proof enough.

The FARC emerged in 1964, when soldiers trained, equipped and supplied by
the United States launched a massive 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 and conduct 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.

The FARC's focus is local.

Despite its worn Marxist rhetoric, there is little evidence that it seeks
social revolution or national power beyond what it needs to bring about
local change.

Even the group's involvement in drugs reflects its peasant origins; it acts
as broker, for example, 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. Drug money is addictive.

Should the FARC overdose on drug cash, which finances its operations, it
could splinter into numerous 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 our policy largely ignores the right-wing
militias, or paramilitaries, which are in the pay of rich landowners, drug
traffickers and businessmen--economic and power elites who want protection
from the guerrillas. The militias have been torturing, murdering and
uprooting peasants 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 in an alliance under the
infamous drug trafficker Carlos Castano.

The war between rebels and militias is fought in the countryside, where
years of violence and poverty have weakened community bonds.

There, mistrust and envy prevail.

People react to imagined slights, view a neighbor's gain as their loss, and
spread malicious rumors.

The wantonly violent militias have injected fear into this distrustful
atmosphere. This can lead the FARC to overreact, harassing anyone thought
to harbor militia sympathies, executing those it believes are spies.

I saw terror spread though a remote town in the demilitarized zone
established by the government to entice the FARC to negotiate.

As militias hovered on the zone's perimeter, the rebels went on high alert,
readying locals for an anticipated army invasion, followed by what they
felt sure would be a murderous militia spree.

Streets emptied, road traffic thinned, a nervous silence gripped the town.
The rebels posted pictures of Che Guevara in his starred beret, with one of
his poetic calls to arms as the caption.

And near each, a bucolic mural conveyed the dearness of home.

Castano has promised to assassinate anyone who assists rural communities
believed to support the rebels.

That threat is a response to the Andres Pastrana government's offer (a
cornerstone of its anti-drug policy) to extend rural development to
FARC-held areas in return for rebel help in reducing coca. Not by chance
did a rebel comandante once tell me not to worry, that the FARC would
protect us in his area.

Human rights groups rightly protest the ties Colombia's security forces
have to these militias.

But the state's cooperation with private armed forces has a time-honored
legitimacy in Colombia. Already common by the 1950s, it continued alongside
the increasing guerrilla threat.

Governments in the 1960s passed laws letting the military arm civilians, as
U.S. counterinsurgency experts advocated.

In the '80s, the military encouraged landowners to create private armies
much like those currently allied under Castano. And in the '90s, the
government created armed civilian "self-defense" groups.

Negotiating with the FARC is a prickly business to be sure. This stems from
its isolation borne of long geographic seclusion, an organizational
structure geared for war, and Colombia's yawning rural-urban divide and
exclusionary class system.

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

The most we can realistically hope for from talks at this point is that the
FARC agrees to a cease-fire.

The Pastrana government's negotiating team has won some credibility with
the rebels in current talks.

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. Pastrana's recent
cashiering of several military officers for their alleged militia links is
far from adequate.

The United States, meanwhile, must support the very peace process that our
proposed military aid imperils.

We should work to provide the assistance that Colombia needs--and needs
soon--to carry out reform.

We should lower our profile, encourage European assistance, and give more
space and resources to the United Nations, which enjoys some credibility
among the rebels and could therefore play an important role in the peace
process.

If Colombia's government can forge the domestic consensus it needs, and if
our government 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.

Stranger things have happened.

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. The views expressed here are his own.