PLAN WOULD HELP COUNTRY TORN APART BY DRUGS

The Congress is approaching a vote on an aid package to support Plan
Colombia, the strategy outlined by that country's president, Andres
Pastrana, to support the United States' beleaguered neighbor in South
America.

The plan will help Colombia strengthen itself and it will help keep more
drugs from pouring into our streets and cities -- at a time when local
police departments and the U.S. Department of Justice are driving down the
crime rate here at home.

Now that we have succeeded in turning around the escalating crime rates of
the 1980s, it is time to strengthen the drug strategy to begin to choke off
the Colombian drug supply.

The strategy proposed by President Pastrana and supported by President
Clinton and many Republican and Democratic members of Congress is an
intelligent, comprehensive and rational plan that will help Pastrana and
will make the job of protecting our children from drugs easier for parents
and local communities.

But some critics of the plan believe that it will not succeed and that it
will instead draw the United States into a quagmire reminiscent of Vietnam.

The aim of the plan is not to escalate the conflict but to provide larger
measures of stability to a country destabilized by the drug trade. In
addition to the drug producers, some of the rebel groups that have been
fighting the government in that country for more than 40 years and some of
the right-wing paramilitary troops fighting the rebels have been drawn into
the drug trade as allies of the drug cartels.

In order to achieve peace, the plan calls for eradicating existing coca
production and thereafter to offer ways for farmers to grow alternative
crops after the coca fields are destroyed. It seeks to provide institutional
help to the government of Colombia to support developmental efforts to aid
long-ignored communities.

The plan builds on the very successful strategies that were carried out with
Peru and Bolivia that succeeded in reducing the amount of cocaine produced
in those two countries by 55 and 65 percent, respectively, over the last
three years, thus reducing the amount of cheap cocaine making its way into
our country.

Those who fear more direct U.S. involvement must also consider that the
overwhelming majority of the Colombian people neither support nor aid the
narcotraffickers nor the armed guerrillas and the paramilitaries who have
allied themselves with the drug barons. The plan is about providing aid to a
nation unified in order to achieve peace, stability and the elimination of
the drug cancer that is afflicting their society and ours.

Plan Colombia is an opportunity for the revolutionary forces to engage in a
meaningful and peaceful solution to Colombia's turmoil. For the guerrillas
who have been fighting the central government for four decades, the plan
offers the kind of social progress that has been the point of their
struggle.

The objective of our assistance package is to fight the cultivation and
marketing of drugs; it is not to become involved in a civil dispute in
Colombian society. President Clinton has insisted that the plan train and
use the Colombian military to protect the police officers that will carry
out the destruction of the coca fields. The package also contains funding to
support adequate measures to monitor the way the Colombian army and police
carry out their duties in order to make sure that human rights are not
violated.

Unless we act now to help Colombia, the drug lords will continue to
undermine the national government and succeed in rolling back the gains we
have made against crime in the last seven years. And they will jeopardize
other countries in the region. We cannot allow the power of the cartels to
turn back the victories we won against them in Peru and Bolivia -- a
development that would destabilize the entire region.

Certainly, we cannot allow them to continue poisoning our neighborhoods.

Many individuals in the United States put their life on the line every day
in our cities and towns to fight the war on drugs. Their dedication and
devotion has paid off with the lowest crime rates in 25 years. We can help
them and we can help protect our children by helping Colombia fight the war
on drugs before they get here. The proposal to help Colombia now before
Congress is a proposal to help ourselves.