COLOMBIA QUAGMIRE DEAD AHEAD

One year ago this month, President Clinton publicly apologized to
Guatemalans for decades of U.S. policy in support of a murderous military
that ``engaged in violent and widespread repression,'' costing the lives of
some 100,000 civilians. That policy ``was wrong,'' the president declared,
``and the United States must not repeat that mistake.'' One year later,
Clinton is about to repeat it in Colombia.

In the name of fighting drugs, the United States is preparing to join the
Colombian armed forces in a civil war that has been raging for more than 40
years, despite the fact they have the worst human-rights record in the
hemisphere. On Jan. 11, the president sent to Congress a request for $1
billion in security aid for Colombia, up from $65 million in 1996 and $300
million last year. Most of the money will finance a new counterinsurgency
campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the
largest of three armed leftist guerrilla movements.

The insurgents are a serious force. Numbering about 20,000, they exercise
significant influence in more than half of Colombia's municipalities. Until
now, the United States has had the wisdom to stay out of the military's
protracted war with the guerrillas. The rationale for abandoning that
restraint is what drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey has called a ``drug
emergency'': a dramatic increase in coca-leaf cultivation in the southern
provinces of Putumayo and Caqueta, strongholds of the FARC. To ``secure''
these areas for drug eradication, Washington plans to outfit the Colombian
army to wage counterinsurgency war.

But even if coca eradication in southern Colombia succeeds, production will
simply move elsewhere. As long as demand for drugs in the United States
remains high, and enormous profits can be made from the illicit trade,
traffickers will adapt to eradication and interdiction programs the way they
always have: by shifting from region to region and country to country.
Decades of eradication campaigns the world over tell us the war in southern
Colombia will have no significant effect on the supply of drugs entering the
United States. The idea that we can win the war on drugs by waging war on
the Colombian guerrillas is a dangerous fantasy.

The elements of Washington's counterinsurgency strategy for Colombia are
taken straight from the Pentagon's experience not only in Guatemala, but
also El Salvador.

The new war will feature U.S.-trained and -outfitted rapid-deployment
battalions, advanced gunships, intensive intelligence gathering and hundreds
of U.S. military advisers who won't go into combat (just as they weren't
supposed to in El Salvador, although they did, as the Pentagon acknowledged
years later).

A billion dollars of aid turned the Salvadoran military into a large,
well-equipped, politically powerful force that murdered more than 70,000
civilians with impunity for more than a decade. It did not win the war. The
war ended when the United States finally recognized that it was unwinnable
and forced the army to accept a negotiated peace or face a cutoff of U.S.
aid.

The 40-year-old civil war in Colombia will be bloody and unwinnable, too,
yet we are about to plunge directly into the quagmire.