A LATIN AMERICAN LEBANON

Colombian Judge Luz Nagel was our guest two weeks ago on TVO's
Diplomatic Immunity. This smart, courageous lady had survived three
assassination attempts - including one in which a burly attacker armed
with a submachine gun burst into her Bogota office. Judge Nagel
managed to draw a pistol and shoot her assailant before he could fire.

War, anarchy and random violence are engulfing Colombia. "How," I
asked the judge, "can your country be saved?" Her reply stunned me.
"What we need in Colombia," she replied, "is General Pinochet."

She was referring, of course, to the tough old general - a political
prisoner of Britain's socialist government - who crushed a Marxist
revolution in Chile, and restored his nation to order, prosperity, and
democracy.

Say "Latin America" and North American minds go blank. Our neighbours
on this immensely rich, fascinating hemisphere might as well be on another planet. But, as this column warned from Bogota in 1998, Colombia is now forcing its way into our consciousness as an unavoidable crisis that demands decisive action.

Colombia supplies 80% of the billions of dollars in cocaine and heroin
entering North America. Vast narco-profits have corrupted governments
across Latin and Central America, and Mexico. Miami has become the
Casablanca of North America.

Unable to staunch the inflow of drugs, the Clinton administration has
declared yet another "war" against narcotics. But almost everyone
knows such wars are futile. One might as well try to ban nicotine, the
"gringo" addictive alkaloid we sell to Latin America. The only way to
stop the drug trade is to legalize it, or adopt the Iranian solution
of executing anyone convicted of drug dealing.

Drugs, however, are not really the primary concern: far more urgent is
the threat of fast-disintegrating Colombia turning into a Latin
version of strife-torn 1980s Lebanon - or, far worse, another Vietnam.
Colombia is now a big-time crisis.

This lush, rich nation of 37 million, which produces oil, gold,
emeralds, coffee and perhaps the world's most beautiful women, has
been in civil war for 52 years. From 1948-58 "La Violencia" - a
mindless carnage between political and economic factions - cost
250,000 lives. Marxist rebellions, backed by Cuba, erupted in the
1960s and have continued to the present, costing 23,000 lives and
consuming up to 4% of Colombia's annual output.

This month, President Bill Clinton requested US$1.6 billion from
Congress to buy helicopters for the Colombian Army and raise two new
counter-insurgency battalions. This makes Colombia the third-largest
recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. But even these
large sums won't end the multi-faction war in Colombia.

PLUNDERING AND MONEY-MAKING

Two extremely vicious Marxist groups - the FARC and smaller ELN, with
20,000 guerrillas between them - now control 60% of Colombia. They
earn US$200 million annually from kidnapping, extortion, and
protecting drug producers. Plundering and money-making have replaced
Marxism as the rebels' main motive.

President Andres Pastrana's well-meaning but struggling government
barely controls Colombia's cities. During my last visit, people were
being kidnapped in downtown Bogota in broad daylight. From 1990-94,
2,300 people were kidnapped for ransom by guerrillas.

Colombia's 144,000-man armed forces are ineffective, immobile, and on
the strategic defensive. Half its soldiers are conscripts who are
exempted from combat. As a result, the government uses 5,000 rightist
paramilitaries to fight the leftist bandit armies. Add in drug gangs
from the scores of cocaine mafias that replaced the now defunct
centralized Medellin and Cali narco-cartels. All sides in this
extremely dirty, chaotic war routinely massacre civilians.

Washington's big worry is that Colombia's anarchy could spread to
neighbouring Panama, which was part of Colombia until detached by the
U.S. in 1903, and even close the Panama Canal, which has now reverted
to Panamanian control. And to neighbouring Venezuela, America's
principal foreign oil supplier, itself highly unstable and in the
throes of a populist military revolution.

BANDIT ARMIES

Colombia's bandit armies could easily extend their operations into
cocaine-producing northern Peru, which already has two Marxist
insurgencies and to unstable Ecuador, which has just suffered a coup;
and to the forgotten little states of Guyana and Surinam, turning the
entire northern rim of Latin America into a war zone resembling
Indochina in the 1960s.

Alas for Colombia and the U.S., Gen. Pinochet is unavailable for a
second rescue mission. Meanwhile, the U.S. is steadily getting sucked
into the Colombian war. The CIA, DEA, FBI and Special Forces have
large numbers of men already deployed undercover in Colombia. More
U.S. "advisers" and technicians are to soon follow. It seems only a
matter of time before the U.S. is forced to commit combat units to
shore up the disintegrating Colombian Army - good morning,
Vietnam.

A far better strategy is for the Organization of American States to
send a large combat force to restore order in Colombia before the war
becomes a continental crisis. The ABC powers - Argentina, Brazil and
Chile - should provide the core of the intervention force's ground
troops, with contingents from Mexico, and, yes, Canada. Let the U.S.
provide command and control, intelligence, air support, transport,
logistics, finance, and a modest number of combat troops. This is the
only realistic solution to a problem that can no longer be ignored.