IS U.S. RE-CREATING EL SALVADOR?

WASHINGTON--One year ago this month, President Bill 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 they 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 (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 in El Salvador: U.S.-trained
and -outfitted rapid-deployment battalions, advanced gunships, intensive
intelligence gathering and hundreds of U.S. military advisors 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 is unwinnable, too, as Colombian
President Andres Pastrana acknowledges. Elected in 1998 on a peace platform,
he has opened negotiations with the guerrillas, and rightly so. Despite
their serious human-rights abuses and involvement with coca growers, they
are a powerful force representing a constituency with real social and
political grievances. But the guerrillas are wary of negotiations. The last
time they signed a cease-fire and agreed to participate in elections, death
squads of the paramilitary right, often paid by large landowners and
assisted by the military, assassinated 3,000 activists of the left's
Patriotic Union party, including elected officials, two senators and two
presidential candidates. Since then, the right has grow even stronger, now
numbering greater than 5,000 combatants who terrorize whole regions of the
country.

Pastrana cannot guarantee the personal security of the guerrillas if they
lay down their arms, just as the Christian Democrats in El Salvador could
not guarantee the security of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
guerrillas in the early 1980s, at the height of the death-squad violence
there. As long as the Colombian government is unwilling or unable to control
the violent right, the guerrillas dare not agree to peace.

No one doubts Pastrana's desire to halt paramilitary violence and to sever
the ties that have long existed between the paramilitary right and the armed
forces.

But Pastrana, like Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte in the 1980s,
has limited control over the military.

He has managed to reduce the army's human-rights abuses, but despite his
best efforts, he has not been able to dissolve the silent partnership
between mid-level, even senior, officers and the paramilitaries. A Human
Rights Watch report last month links half of Colombia's 18 brigade-level
army units to paramilitary violence, which is now responsible for 78% of
reported abuses, including several thousand political killings and
disappearances annually. Investigations by Amnesty International, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Colombian government
confirm the army's collusion in paramilitary violence.

In El Salvador, the army had no interest in reining in the death squads
because they were an essential weapon in its war against the left. The
Colombian situation is similar; by leaving the dirtiest work in this dirty
war to the paramilitaries, the regular army can claim a clean human-rights
record as it seeks more military aid from Washington. In lobbying Congress
for the Colombian aid package, McCaffrey echoes the arguments made by Reagan
administration officials who lobbied for military assistance to El Salvador
and Guatemala, insisting that the death squads were independent of the armed
forces.

The declassified history of those wars has revealed that such arguments were
disingenuous. In Colombia, the record of complicity is equally clear.

As in Central America, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the
Colombian armed forces will make them more powerful politically and less
answerable to civilian authority.

Senior officers are already hostile to Pastrana's peace overtures and his
efforts to discipline officers linked to the paramilitary right.

A massive infusion of U.S. aid will be seen by officers as Washington's
endorsement of their preferred strategy: escalating the war rather than
ending it through negotiation. That will make it harder to stop the
paramilitaries and harder to convince the guerrillas that the government's
desire for peace is genuine.

This month marks the 20th anniversary (on March 24) of the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. Two months before he was killed by a
rightist death squad, he wrote a personal appeal to Jimmy Carter, asking the
president to abstain from increasing U.S. military aid that "will surely
aggravate the repression and injustice" inflicted on the populace by the
armed forces. "If you truly want to defend human rights," Romero wrote, "I
ask that you . . . prohibit all military assistance." Instead, we allowed
our obsession with communism to justify arming and financing a murderous
military, and a war that could have ended with a peace accord in 1980
dragged on for another decade, killing tens of thousands of innocent
civilians. In Colombia, we are about to let our fear of drugs lead us into
an equally futile and bloody war. We failed to heed Romero's plea 20 years
ago; we ought not make the same mistake again.