POLICIES FOLLOW PATH OF 1980S IN EL SALVADOR

U.S. Role In Colombia War Seems Familiar

WASHINGTON -- With the United States taking on a larger role in war-torn
Colombia, U.S. officials are falling back on some of the same policies used
in El Salvador during that nation's civil war in the 1980s.

Due to a growing sense of urgency about the rebel threat to Colombia's
government, the Clinton administration over the past few months has
dispatched hundreds of military advisers and millions of dollars in aid to
Colombia's police and army.

This approach reminds many analysts here of the Reagan administration's
counterinsurgency efforts on behalf of El Salvador's government, which was
fighting a fierce war against leftist guerrillas more than a decade ago.

Although some lessons can be gleaned from the U.S. experience in El
Salvador, experts here say that applying the so-called "Salvador model" to
Colombia could backfire because the conflict is a more tangled and
intractable affair.

"The temptation is to respond with a get-tough impulse," said Michael
Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. "But the
U.S. has to recognize that our ability to solve the Colombian crisis is
very limited."

In the 1980s, U.S.-backed wars to roll back revolutionary movements in
Central America sparked fierce debates in the United States and were often
front-page news.

Under President Reagan, some analysts say, policy-making toward Central
America was dominated by the CIA and the National Security Council, which
funneled huge amounts of overt and covert aid to friendly governments in
the region and to Nicaragua's Contra rebels. U.S. officials at the time
accused Cuba and the Soviet Union of aiding rebels in El Salvador and
Guatemala as well as Nicaragua's Sandinista government in an effort to
foment Marxist revolution. Many in Washington viewed these guerrilla
conflicts as a U.S. proxy war with the Soviet bloc.

By contrast, policy toward Colombia has garnered little attention in the
United States, even as the Clinton administration prepares to increase the
U.S. commitment sharply. That's largely because the Cold War ended a decade
ago, and nearly all of Latin America's rebel groups have been disarmed or
defeated in the years since.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the nation's largest Marxist
rebel group known by its Spanish initials FARC, is viewed in Washington as
a menace but also as something of an anachronism, some observers say.

Furthermore, the FARC funds its war by pulling off thousands of kidnappings
and by protecting drug traffickers. Due to this criminal streak, the FARC
has failed to inspire the international support from leftist solidarity
groups that provided a public relations boost for Central American rebels
in the 1970s and '80s.

The Colombian military, in turn, has been accused of committing human
rights abuses and of supporting illegal paramilitary death squads. For
several years, the U.S. government refused to send aid to the Colombian army.

"El Salvador was an ideological war. But Colombia is more of a criminal
situation," said one U.S. military analyst who asked not to be named.
"There are no good guys in Colombia."

As a result, it's been difficult for Washington politicians to arrive at a
consensus about what should be done.

"Few people are prepared to invest the political capital to come up with a
sustained policy," Shifter said. "There are a lot of risks and a lot of
ambivalence."

The head of the administration's war on drugs, retired Army Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, has called Colombia "a disaster" and has lobbied for billions of
dollars in military assistance.

The State Department has adopted a more cautious view. It has played a dual
role by promoting both military aid for Colombia as well as negotiations
between the FARC and the government, which began in October.

On the battlefield, the 35-year war has turned into a stalemate. U.S.
lawmakers are more concerned about drugs, since Colombia is the source of
80 percent of the cocaine and much of the heroin sold on U.S. streets.

This year, Colombia will get nearly $300 million in U.S. military aid and
has requested another $1.5 billion over the next three years. Between 200
and 300 U.S. military advisers are stationed in the country, and some of
the troops are training elite Colombian counternarcotics battalions.

Such support is about equal to the annual U.S. commitment to El Salvador in
the 1980s. So far, it has had less impact in Colombia because the nation is
about 54 times larger than El Salvador in territory.

Another parallel between the two nations is among policy makers.

Top State Department officials focusing on Colombia -- such as Thomas
Pickering, Peter Romero, and Phillip Chicola -- were once high-level
officials at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador. The
Bogota newsweekly Semana recently labeled them "the Salvador boys."

"Nobody is running around recruiting old Central America hands to do this,"
said one senior State Department official. "But some of us find this kind
of work interesting."

Robert White, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador in the early 1980s, warns
that as U.S. military aid to Colombia increases, so does the risk of
"mission creep."

"There is nothing easier than to get into someone else's civil war, and
there is nothing harder than to get out," he said. "What we did in El
Salvador was to make it our war, and to a certain extent there is a danger
of that happening in Colombia."

The administration insists that it will not get sucked into Colombia's
guerrilla war. Yet some U.S. military aid is used by Colombian troops to
target the FARC, since the guerrillas are deeply involved in the drug
trade. In reality, experts say, the drug war and the guerrilla war are one
and the same.

"Our interests are in stopping the guerrillas, and that means a
counterinsurgency strategy, but no one wants to (admit) it," said James
Zackrison, an author and military analyst based in Washington.

Hard-liners believe that the FARC has yet to face a strong enemy and that
more U.S. trainers, helicopters, and weapons for the Colombian army -- an
approach known as low-intensity conflict -- could shift the balance of
power in the war.

"The idea behind low-intensity conflict is that the United States can grind
down a guerrilla movement over time, no matter how good it is. And, to some
extent, this was demonstrated in Central America," said George Vickers,
executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America.

But Vickers points out that in Central America the dynamics were different.

In El Salvador, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN,
guerrillas relied on military aid and political support from Cuba, the
Soviet Union and the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

By intercepting arms shipments and by pressuring Moscow, Havana and
Managua, the U.S. government could, at times, disrupt the FMLN support
network.

In Colombia, however, Washington has little leverage because the FARC has
no need for outside support, Vickers said.

Kidnappings and drug deals bring in millions of dollars annually and allow
the FARC to buy top-quality weapons on the black market. Colombian army
officers complain that the rebels are better equipped and paid than their
own troops.

Perhaps the biggest problem with applying the Salvador model to Colombia is
that it's unclear whether it worked in El Salvador.

A battlefield draw combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
Sandinista election loss in Nicaragua helped to convince the FMLN to sign a
peace treaty in 1992 following a dozen years of war that killed 70,000.

Supporters of the U.S. proxy war claim that it prevented a Communist
takeover and forced the FMLN to disarm. Critics say it simply prolonged the
fighting and that a similar peace treaty could have been signed years earlier.

As for Colombia, the senior State Department official said that no matter
what the United States does, a military victory for either side is impossible.

"This is not Iwo Jima," he said. "The lesson of El Salvador is that, at the
end of the day, you are not going to have a situation where one side or
another comes out with his hands in the air."