THE DRUG WAR'S SOUTHERN FRONT

Colombia, Cocaine, And U.S. Foreign Policy

Dr. Alvaro Duenas was already harried, given that two American journalists
had pulled him from his daily research routine to grill him about his role
in manufacturing a medicine under investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration. One reporter was Laurie Goering of the Chicago Tribune,
who'd flown from Rio to Cali, Colombia, to investigate allegations of
faulty lab practices and financial foul play. The other, a Cali-based
correspondent hired to help find local contacts and translate their
Spanish, was me.

About halfway through the four-hour interview, the gray-haired scientist's
cell phone rang. Duenas excused himself for a minute, nodded his head to
the phone a few times, and hung up, looking a little pale. The reporters
pressed on. As they later stood to leave, the doctor stuck out his hand and
let loose a long breath. "Thank you so much," he finally said. The doctor's
display of gratitude was puzzling. The interview had been tense at times;
what could he possibly be thankful for?

"I was planning to visit my family farm today, three hours south in
Popayan," the scientist explained. "But I stayed to do the interview
instead. One of my sons called while we were talking to tell me the
guerrillas just attacked the area. You two saved my life."

That's something a reporter doesn't hear every day.

Two days later, things turned stranger. As we interviewed the doctor's
colleagues, we had mentioned the drug being investigated--and the millions
it was earning in the United States. Duenas' colleagues started calling him
to ask what he had done with all the cash he must be taking in and why they
weren't getting any.

Another of the scientist's sons called Goering at the Hotel
Intercontinental. "Do you have any idea how much risk you've put my father
in?" he screamed into the phone. "In this country, everyone's got a price
on his head. He could get kidnapped at any moment, thanks to you. Not only
that: How do I know you're really journalists? Maybe you're after him as
well!"

The son set to investigating both of us with the DAS, the Colombian version
of the FBI. He even called my house and asked who lived there. Finally, the
scientist, the son, and the two of us met at the hotel, and things calmed
down a bit. Goering's probe--which, for the record, turned up no
wrongdoing--was finished within a week.

But another story was far from finished. It's the story of an often dirty
war, now in its fourth decade and bloodier than ever. As the violence grows
worse, many, especially in Washington, D.C., lay the blame on the hundreds
of thousands of Colombian acres planted with coca and poppy plants. In
Washington, the favorite answer is arms, interdiction, and eradication, all
embedded in dollops of aid. How powerful a rush does the drug war's
southern front pack? With $289 million sent there last year, Colombia now
receives more U.S. aid than any other country except Egypt and Israel.

In July, five American soldiers died when their plane crashed during an
anti-drug mission--our first military casualties in the drug war. In
August, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright jotted an op-ed on
"Colombia's Struggles, and How We Can Help" in The New York Times. In the
first weeks of 2000, Albright met with President Andres Pastrana and other
high-ranking Colombian officials; it was the first time a U.S. secretary of
state had visited this Andean country in 14 years. Drug czar Barry
McCaffrey showed up in Colombia several times last year, as did Thomas
Pickering, the third-ranking official at the State Department. Also in
1999, the U.S. asked the Colombian government to come up with a plan for
the country. It did, and it's asking for $3.5 billion to implement the
package.

The so-called "Colombia Plan" is 30 pages long; it calls for social
welfare, reforms in the justice system, jobs and foreign investment,
negotiations with Marxist guerrillas who have been fighting the government
for nearly 40 years, and, above all, more muscle to fight the drug trade.
In simpler terms, Pastrana calls it "55 percent on narcotics trafficking
and 45 percent on social investment."

Military aid comes first, though. In a letter to The Washington Post last
year, House International Relations Committee Chairman Ben Gilman (R-N.Y.),
a staunch supporter of the aid, said the first thing the U.S. should send
south is 100 choppers. Second, there should be "fast-track processing of
Colombian army and police aid from U.S. stockpiles," along with increased
military training. Finally, there should be no contact with the guerrillas:
Pastrana, who's spent nearly a year trying to jump-start his peace talks
with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), should drop the
idea. (With an estimated 15,000 soldiers, FARC is the largest of the
country's three rebel armies.)

Gilman reasons that the guerrillas--and at least some of the anti-guerrilla
paramilitary armies--are getting rich by taxing the coca and poppy crops
that supply an estimated three-quarters of America's cocaine and more than
half of its heroin. Thus, the theory goes, the drug trade underpins
Colombia's long list of woes. Shoring up the army and the police will fix
everything up, paving the way for more social investment.

Sound good? Not to Robert White, former ambassador to El Salvador and
Paraguay and current president of the Center for International Policy in
Washington. White served in El Salvador under the Carter administration,
leaving shortly before President Reagan started sending men and cash to
fight the rebels there. Now he's feeling deja vu. He too wrote to the Post
last year, but his message was rather different from Gilman's. "There are
many ways to conduct foreign policy," he noted, "but surely one of the
worst is to take a complex challenge and reduce it to a single issue.
Colombia is not just the place that feeds America's voracious appetite for
illegal drugs." White is among many in both countries who are starting to
suspect that the war on drugs is part of the problem, not the solution. The
future of Colombia's 38 million citizens may well depend on how quickly
such thinking spreads.

Three weeks after my meeting at the Hotel Intercontinental, on a late-May
Sunday morning buzzing with cicadas, my home phone rang. It was Dr. Duenas'
son, screaming again--not with anger this time, but with fear. "I'm calling
from a church," he said. "My father and more than 180 others have just been
kidnapped by the guerrillas. Can you help?"

Alvaro Duenas regularly attended the Children's Mass, so known because most
worshippers attend with their families, at La Maria, a church on the
outskirts of Cali. That Sunday, he had walked into perhaps the largest
kidnapping in history, courtesy of Colombia's second-largest group of
rebels, the National Liberation Army (ELN). The guerrillas had chosen the
church because it was located in a well-to-do neighborhood and because it
was only 20 minutes from the mountains, a territory this group knows as
well as the faithful knew their social clubs and fenced-in houses.

In the days after the kidnapping, the children who give the mass its name
were released. By the end of last year, the rest of the hostages, including
Duenas, were also free. The first few groups of hostages were released
under the glare of television news cameras. From across the nation,
reporters had rumbled along mountain back roads, at times under nightfall,
racing to be the first to stick a microphone in a victim's face and ask,
"How do you feel?"

That display was the last straw in a growing movement in Colombian
newsrooms to tone down sensationalism, increase discretion, and look more
closely at the media's role in helping or harming peace efforts. A few
television stations briefly ran violent news in black and white--in
protest, and as "an invitation to reflection." There was also a "treaty for
discretion." Readers began writing to newspapers, begging for less coverage
of the guerrillas--and the paramilitary groups that combat them--and more
coverage of people working toward peace.

The 5,000-strong ELN had first claimed political motives for the
kidnapping. Then it reversed its position, seeking ransom for the remaining
hostages. The hostages' families responded by drafting and signing an
unprecedented pact. It said: We refuse to pay a dime.

The families also staged a permanent encampment--a Liberated Zone, they
called it--outside Cali's bullfighting ring, vowing to become the nucleus
for a movement to end the longest-running civil war in this hemisphere. One
of their first measures was to spread the "Don't Pay" pacts, in hopes of
shutting down one of the guerrillas'--and, to a lesser degree, the
paramilitaries'--favored means of funding their armies (along with
extortion, cattle rustling, and taxing illicit crops). According to the
Bogota-based anti-kidnapping group Pais Libre, there are more abductions
per year in Colombia than in any other country in the world, with nearly
3,000 reported in 1999. Even President Pastrana was held hostage a decade
ago, during the heyday of the notorious drug capo Pablo Escobar.

Before the last churchgoers were finally freed, some released hostages said
that those still arriba, or "up there," included a mid-level cocaine
trafficker. Rumors spread that the so-called traqueto--a local term for a
mid-level cocaine trafficker derived from the sound of a submachine
gun--was arming a battalion to go into the mountains and rescue him. Others
whispered that some families had broken the pact, even paying on three-year
"installment plans."

"It has been a difficult year," Pastrana recently told The New York Times.
That's for sure. Aside from the kidnapping at La Maria, the war left at
least 500 massacres in its wake in 1999--one, sometimes two, each day. Each
massacre meant another ghost town, as Colombia rose toward the top of
another cheerless list, with an estimated 1.5 million internal refugees.
About 95 percent of all criminal cases are unsolved, and around 16,000
public employees are under investigation for corruption. Naturally, much of
the latter is a direct product of the drug trade and the drug war, as when
drug bosses bribe their way out of prison or evidence mysteriously
"disappears" from prosecutors' offices. Under all this murky mess, the
economy is barely moving, with one out of five Colombians unemployed.

Guerrillas, paramilitaries, drugs, kidnappings, rumors, mistrust, fear: All
mix together in a pot that just barely avoids boiling over. In Colombia,
they call this la situacion --"the situation."

No wonder, then, that Dr. Duenas has abandoned ship, along with several
hundred thousand fellow citizens who fled their homeland. In Cali, at the
government office that issues passports, a harried official named Colombia
Medina reports, "Until recently, we had the parking lot attendants help
people waiting in line outside. Now, we've called in the police."

Colombians are applying for passports and visas in record numbers--in some
cities, nearly twice as many as in previous years. Bribes are rampant, and
so are false documents. "If you have a good life here," says Medina, "you
leave because they might kidnap or rob you. And if you don't have a good
life here, you leave in order to find a better life somewhere else."

Among those who stay, however, thousands are working to restore peace and
hope to their country. In one of the world's most violent countries--with
an urban homicide rate 10 to 25 times the global average, depending on the
city--some people are trying to start a peace movement. Its most visible
display took place on Sunday, October 24, when more than 100 local,
national, and international groups staged a massive march down Colombia's
streets. Five to 10 million citizens--up to a quarter of the
country--joined the parade.

The anti-kidnapping group Pais Libre was a key player in organizing the
march, and "No More Kidnapping!" was one of the most popular slogans
shouted on that drizzly Sunday. Journalist Francisco Santos founded the
group nine years ago, after surviving his own kidnapping. Santos belongs to
the family dynasty behind El Tiempo, Colombia's leading daily; both the
paper in general and his weekly column have helped mobilize different
sectors of society fed up with the violence. Last May's abduction at La
Maria gave the movement more urgency. In all the years of kidnappings, the
country had never seen so many hostages taken at once--and never, in this
devoutly Catholic country, from a church. On the heels of that crime, from
June 1 to October 24, Pais Libre led 44 marches in towns and cities across
the nation.

But the headlines on October 25, the day after the biggest march of all,
had to account for two events. Pastrana's peace talks with FARC had picked
up that same Sunday, after nine months of stalls. In a show of piggybacking
on public opinion--which could only come across as strange, since his group
had sparked part of the mass outrage--FARC leader Raul Reyes unfurled his
own list of "No Mores." First up: "No more State terrorism in its
paramilitary expression." Then: "No more increases in defense spending; no
more Gringo military aid...no more impositions from the International
Monetary Fund; no more foreign debts; no more interference from the United
States in the internal affairs of Colombia ...no more peasants without land
or credits..." The list reeled on.

FARC adopted its name in 1966, with campesino militant Pedro Antonio
Marin--a.k.a. Tirofijo, or "Sureshot" --at the helm. But its genesis dates
back to 1949, when Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was
assassinated in Bogota. Rioting followed in the streets, and a bloody war,
known simply as la violencia, flared between left and right. Two hundred
thousand died.

In 1953, the government offered amnesty to the rebels. The Liberals
accepted and laid down their arms; the Communists took to the hills. In
1960, after six years of building support in the countryside, the Communist
Party officially declared the need for an armed movement; this soon became
FARC. The government stepped up its attacks.

>From the '60s to the '90s, FARC never had more than 6,000 soldiers; it was
just one more problem in a country with plenty of troubles to contend with.
But in the last 10 years, between the economic downturn and the
government's failure to enact serious agrarian reform, life for a farmer's
son or daughter began to look less promising than ever. Colombia has an
old-fashioned Latin American economy: Corruption is rampant, business and
government are closely entwined, and wealth and land are concentrated in
the hands of a few. The guerrillas at least offer food, pay a salary (about
$100 a month more than the Colombian army), and lend some purpose to
thousands of young campesinos' lives.

By 1995, FARC's forces had swelled to nearly 8,000. In the last five years,
the group has doubled again. At 71, Pedro Antonio Marin, still called
Sureshot, may be the world's oldest Marxist-in-the-mountains.

For at least 50 years, those mountains have also been home to right-wing
paramilitary forces. The most recent army, founded in the '80s, is
Colombians United in Self-Defense (AUC), led by Carlos Castano, a man in
his 30s who permits only photos of his back in the press. The comandante
and his troops--who Castano claims "would die for me"--have a single-minded
military mission: to hunt and kill guerrillas and anyone who supports them.
In the last several years, their forces have doubled; they now have close
to 7,000 men.

Castano has ordered the massacre of entire towns where, he always insists
to journalists afterward, "We had information that there were guerrillas,
there was kidnapping, there were combats, they were holing up in people's
houses." He avers, "By killing one rebel, we save others whom they were
going to kill later." AUC, he insists, is not paramilitary; it's just
"self-defense forces." It is financed, he says, by "the people who have no
police, no army, no state. They are fishermen, lumbermen, freight
companies, businessmen, small cattle ranchers, and large landowners...plus
the money from the coca growers."

Regarding the latter, the comandante explains, "Listen, that's the nature
of the economy here. The FARC finance themselves with the same money. So I
have to take their sources away and finance my troops. [But] the
self-defense forces don't produce drugs, or protect laboratories, or export
drugs. For a long time now, there's a tendency in Colombia to treat our
problems and solutions as if it was all about narcotics and nothing else."

AUC's military stronghold is in northern Colombia; it is staffed, in part,
by former officials from the armed forces. At least one of these says he
was trained at Georgia's notorious School of the Americas. Human rights
organizations in Canada and the United States, including Human Rights Watch
and Amnesty International, have expressed concern over the links between
the Colombian army and AUC. Some Clinton administration officials and
members of Congress have urged withholding aid from the armed forces until
those links are investigated.

The army has responded to these concerns in recent months by taking human
rights courses with U.S. advisers at the Tolemaida military base, south of
Bogota. Meanwhile, Castano's group is trying to distance itself from the
army. At its last national convention, held three years ago, a document
leaked to the press complained how "participation by members of the Armed
Forces in our operations has become a big headache."

In the same meeting, the AUC leadership called for a bigger political
presence, given that "the movement...is still at the margin of politics and
the law, even though many of our collaborators, founders, helpers, backers,
and leaders are part of the day-to-day political process."

>From 1998 to 1999, U.S. funds for Colombia tripled. Because of the army's
bad reputation, the new money went almost entirely to the nation's police.
And atop that police force is Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, a self-described
"country boy" who has been key to much of Washington's recent thinking
about Colombia.

Serrano has been a policeman for 37 of his 57 years. He was head of the
anti-narcotics division when a special police unit shot Pablo Escobar off a
Medellin rooftop in 1993. In 1994, he became chief of police and set after
the Cali Cartel. Within three years, he had captured its leaders and
several other kingpins, and had purged his force of 8,000 corrupt officers
as well.

Along the way, Serrano made more than a few friends in Congress, the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the FBI, and other American law enforcement
agencies. His allies include House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Rep.
Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.), drug czar Barry
McCaffrey, and former DEA director Thomas Constantine. In 1997, Hastert
even gushed that Colombia's top cop deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

Even more remarkably, Serrano, unlike many high-level Colombian visitors to
Capitol Hill, speaks no English. "They all seem to understand my gestures
and expressions," he says with a grin.

For Serrano, resolving la situacion is simple, though not necessarily easy.
"Drugs are the devil," he says. "If we get rid of drug trafficking, then we
can reach peace." Reminded of the country's long history of violence--and
of his own description of Santander, his birthplace, as an area "where
people kill each other for nothing"--Serrano insists that "things have
gotten much worse after the onset of the cartels. This society fell apart
after drugs came on the scene."

Of course, it's the international drug war, and not the drugs themselves,
that's led to the violence. The fighting probably reached its height at the
onset of the '90s, when Pablo Escobar led a terrorist campaign against
legalizing extradition of drug traffickers to the United States. In the
first three years of this decade, annual homicides in Colombia reached 28,000.

Nonetheless, the general's friends, including drug czar McCaffrey, agree
with Serrano's assessment of the problem. At least a decade ago, the U.S.
adopted a two-pronged approach to its South American drug war: Spray the
poppy and coca fields, and jail or kill the drug bosses and others in the
complex chain of supply. McCaffrey and company are sure this strategy will
eventually work, if only given more time and money.

But there are dissenters. In the media, the universities, and even the
government, a growing group is saying that the war on drugs simply isn't
working.

Last October, at an environmental conference in Bogota, sociologist Ricardo
Vargas unveiled a study titled "Spraying and Conflict." According to
Vargas, the government's efforts to spray away marijuana, coca, and poppies
have produced some rather dubious results. Colombia's coca and poppy
fields, he notes, "have grown most in total area in the last five
years--exactly when spraying has been done." In 1994, Colombia had 40,000
hectares of coca. In 1998, there were "at least 100,000." (A hectare is
equal to about 2.5 acres.)

In this scenario, the growers are caught between a rock and a hard place.
The government has made attempts to encourage "crop substitution" to legal
commodities, such as plantains, rubber, and hearts of palms. But these have
generally been bungled. To make them work, the authorities would have to
coordinate a host of international and state agencies, mobilizing
everything from farm credit to road-building. For now, the drug war is
propping up the prices peasants can get for their illicit products: They
can earn up to $500 per month for every hectare planted with coca, while
the crops the government favors would fetch only half that in the best of
circumstances. No coca farmer is going to invest in developing a different
crop that brings such a lower return, especially with guerrillas and
paramilitaries, working with traffickers, offering growers steady buyers at
high prices and eliminating problems like transportation.

Meanwhile, the government's efforts to crack down on drugs are only
alienating farmers. Several years ago, hundreds of thousands in the
coca-growing region of Putumayo marched in protest against the spraying,
alleging that their livelihoods were being threatened and that no serious
alternatives were being offered. Some in the Colombian government countered
that FARC was behind the marches--a charge that, if true, only underlines
the ways the drug war has driven peasants into the arms of the guerrillas.

On top of that, some are accusing Roundup--the herbicide the government is
spraying--of causing health problems. "Everywhere there's been spraying,
there's been complaints," notes Vargas. Eider Meneses Papamija, governor of
the Yanacona tribe, has convinced President Pastrana to let his people pull
up thousands of poppy plants bare-handed, in order to avoid further contact
with the herbicide. He blames the spraying for respiratory, eye, and skin
infections in the Yanacona community.

The scientific auditor for the police anti-narcotics program, Luis Eduardo
Parra, says the Yanaconas' charges are "without basis," noting that Roundup
and its active ingredient, glyphosate, have undergone decades of safety
studies in the U.S., many of them conducted by the Environmental Protection
Agency. "Roundup isn't exactly water, but it's also not the worst thing in
that world," he argues.

At the same time, Parra is critical of the Colombian and U.S. governments'
overall drug strategy. "There needs to be more work on prevention, since
supply will never go down unless demand does," he says. "We don't have an
integrated vision, which is what the problem requires."

Up in Washington, Michael Shifter echoes Parra's critique. Shifter is a
senior fellow at Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank devoted to the
Americas. "Nobody here on Capitol Hill thinks that the war on drugs is
going well," he says. "Data show that it's not getting better, that
production is going up. There's a sense it's not working, that there's too
narrow an approach. For Colombia, the drug issue comes back to the strength
of the state--economically, militarily, and politically." Colombia's
government may have a lot of force at its disposal, but so do its
opponents. More important, the state doesn't have the social authority to
win its war on drugs.

The Colombia Plan was supposed to address those issues, by strengthening
the judicial system and combating corruption. But Shifter questions whether
new funds would produce the desired effects, since the plan itself is
flawed. "It's too heavily concentrated on narcotics and too geared to the
U.S. Congress," he says. "You have to ask, does it reflect Colombia's own
priorities? What's important for them? This is what seems to be missing."

In a strange disappearing act, the country's aid request was never
seriously included in President Clinton's 1999 budget, despite months of
talks in Washington and Bogota and great expectations in the Colombian
press. Clinton sent a last-minute note to Pastrana promising that 2000
would be different, and in the first weeks of the new year, he made good on
his word, announcing a revised multi-year aid package of $1.3 billion.
Secretary of State Albright spent a day in Colombia explaining the plan,
which includes $600 million to train and equip two anti-drug battalions and
at least 60 choppers. Another $436 million would go to drug interdiction
and eradication (including spraying). About 10 percent would be spent
trying to give peasants alternatives to growing coca and poppies. The aid
pitch now goes to Congress, where Clinton and Pastrana hope emergency
approval comes by spring.

Amid all the violence and intrigue, everyday life--if you can call it
that--continues in Colombia, no matter how many kilos are found strapped to
the bottoms of ships in the harbor of Cartagena, how many CEOs are
kidnapped in Cali, how many traffickers are extradited to America, how many
casualties pile up in the countryside. Colombians seem able to put up with
higher levels of violence and chaos--and for longer periods--than just
about anybody. Somehow, they maintain the hope that things will get better.

It's not as though the country lacks hardworking, creative people capable
of pushing their way through a crisis. This is the nation of Nobel laureate
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the world's most widely translated authors;
of artist Fernando Botero, perhaps the only living sculptor to have his
work displayed in the Champs-Elysees, on Park Avenue, and in the Piazza
della Signoria; of malaria researcher Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, inventor of
the synthetic vaccine (as opposed to vaccines made with the viruses).
And--speaking of scientists--of Alvaro Duenas. The hapless doctor is a
pioneer of cell-culturing techniques patented in the United States, an
accomplishment all the more impressive because he had next to no research
budget. "The Communists scared away the Rockefeller, Kellogg, and other
foundations in the late '70s," he explains.

Unfortunately, the war has forced many of the most persistent and valuable
Colombians, including all those just mentioned, to spend much of their
working lives outside the country. And while one can only admire their
capacity for hope, the people of this country could use a lot more than
that, starting with a serious re-examination of the war on drugs. The drug
war has distorted America's foreign policy, and it has done even more
damage to life inside Colombia--corrupting officials, fueling violence, and
ripping the country apart. That basic fact must be confronted if we are to
avoid more needless deaths and more wasted dollars, and if millions of
Colombians' hopes for peace are ever to come true.

Timothy Pratt ( v.comunicaciones@cgiar.org) is a writer in Cali, Colombia.
His work has appeared in newspapers and magazines in the U.S., the U.K.,
and Canada, including The Economist, The New York Times, the Chicago
Tribune, and The Times of London.