DRUG WARRIORS

The new century was just 11 days old when President Clinton announced an
emergency two-year aid package for the U.S. "war on drugs" in Colombia. The
price tag? $1.6 billion.

Colombia's army and police are already the world's third-largest recipient
of U.S. assistance after Israel and Egypt. No Latin country has ever
received anything comparable to this new package.

But this is an election year in Washington. What's a billion and a half as
a down payment for a war in a country that nobody cares about if it
silences the drug czar and robs the Republicans of an election-year stick
to beat on the president and his party?

According to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who traveled to
Colombia to sell Washington's plan to the skeptical Colombian public, the
new U.S. aid will "provide substantial support for President Andres
Pastrana's plan to achieve peace, promote prosperity, protect human rights
and fight crime." Basking in the glow of her dinner the previous evening
with Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the secretary vowed "to seek
100 years of peace, democracy and rising prosperity for both our nations."

But even Clinton and Albright may experience difficulty dressing up $1
billion for the Colombian army which opposes the peace negotiations and
calling it money for democracy and human rights.

Most of the money is for the Colombian army to train and equip two new
"counter-narcotics" battalions. The new troops, trained by American Special
Forces and supplied with 63 new helicopter gun ships, will join a third
U.S.-trained and -equipped "counter-narcotics" battalion already in action.

Together, these battalions constitute the equivalent of a new,
American-created brigade. They are to be deployed to "push" the FARC out of
the southern jungles where the bulk of Colombia's cocaine is grown by
peasants displaced by the war. The new battalions will be implementing the
"McCaffrey Doctrine" alternately defined as "eradicating drugs at the
Source" or, more recently, as "breaking the narco-guerrilla drug links."

The McCaffrey strategy of eradication by fumigation doesn't work. The most
recent studies by the CIA estimate that even when plants receive a direct
hit, only 25 percent of them die. Since 1994, the United States has spent
billions to spray millions of gallons of poisonous chemicals, destroying
the fragile ecosystem of jungle rain forests.

But coca production has surged. Fumigation pushes the growers somewhere
else. It also does a fine job recruiting for the guerrillas.

Meanwhile, the human rights implications of this plan are truly sinister.
By opting to create a second, parallel army, the administration has found a
cynical mechanism to circumvent the law prohibiting American aid to foreign
armies tainted by human rights violations. It also has segued from
"counter-narcotics" into counterinsurgency without debate, all the while
denying any change in the official policy.

Yet an army, by definition, is a single, unified institution. The creation
of two armies -- one "good" army, American trained and supplied, and a
second "bad" army, which does not qualify -- for American goodies offers a
dangerous model for increased lawlessness and lack of accountability.
Furthermore, the Clinton plan lacks any strategy for insulating the new
battalions from either corrupt superiors higher up the army chain of
command (like the general who is currently in charge of the entire southern
region of operations) or from the criminal activities of military
intelligence (whom government investigators have linked to a string of
high-profile assassinations).

The consequences for Colombia, if the proposed aid package passes Congress,
will be tragic. it will mean an end to the struggling peace process; the
final relegation to complete irrelevance of a well-intentioned but weak
civilian government; and the increasing Salvadorization of the Colombian
civil war. Already two thirds of the victims of the counterinsurgency are
civilian, and 1.7 million peasants have been violently uprooted from their
homes and their land. This new U.S. policy will result in a humanitarian
tragedy of devastating dimensions.