"A REAL DRUG WAR" : COLOMBIANS MARCH FOR PEACE

The millions who marched Sunday to demand peace in Colombia deserve to have
their message heard not only by their own leaders but by U.S. policy-makers
as well. The United States is funding both sides of Colombia's civil war,
and peace there can't be achieved without changes in the U.S. government's
counterproductive roll.

Colombia's civil war is the biggest conflict in the Western Hemisphere
since the end of the Central American insurgencies of the 1980s. Like these
rebellions, Colombia's war is rooted in Latin America's chronic tensions
between the elite and the disposessed. The largest rebel group, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC,
is Marxist in ideology and has been fighting for nearly four decades. The
government, though democratic in character, has its main power base in the
military and the more wealthy sectors of society.

To this familiar political equation has been added a new and volatile
variable: drugs. Colombia is the world's leading producer of cocaine and is
also becoming a major source of heroin. The multibillion-dollar drug trade
affects Colombian politics at every level. The front lines of the war
against drugs that U.S. politicians have declared are in Colombia.

The FARC and lesser rebel groups control about 40 percent of Colombia's
territory, including some of the country's main coca producing regions. In
recent years the guerillas have provided growers, refiners and smugglers
with protection in return for a share of the profits. Thanks to this
partnership, the FARC now has 15,000 regular soldiers and can take on the
Colombian military in direct engagements. Every American who buys cocaine
is helping arm the FARC and its partners.

The Colobian government, for its part, is dependent on drug money of a
different sort. Colombia is the world's third largest recipient of U.S.
militatry aid, after Israel and Egypt. The money is used to resist the FARC
and suppress the illicit drug trade, two missions that are blurring into
one. President Andres Pastrana visited Washington, D.C., last month seeking
$1.5 billion in military aid over the next three years. He was warmly
received by Congress and by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton
administration's chief of drug control policy.

With so much fuel pouring in, extinguishing Colombia's conflagration will
be difficult. The FARC and other rebels have been successsful in the field,
reducing their incentive to negotiate. When Pastrana declared a rural
demilitarized zone as a gesture of good will toward the guerillas, he was
criticized in the U.S. Congress for caving in to the FARC and the drug
lords. Paramiltary groups-some linked to the military, some financed by the
drug trade, some organized as private armies-have emerged as an
uncontrolled, and perhaps uncontrollable, obstacle to peace.

Yet the FARC and the goverment are negotiating. Sunday's nationwide
protests, timed to coincide with a resumption of peace talks, showed that
ordinary Colombians are fearful and wary of violence. The United States'
sympathies should lie with those people, even if it means supporting an
agreement that calls for power sharing between the FARC and the government.
The United States should also be willing to follow through with a
commitment to sever rural Colombians' dependence on drug crops, which the
FARC says could be done in three to five years with sufficient resources.

The alternative is for the U.S. government to sponsor one side in an El
Salvador-style war while U.S. drug consumers sponsor the other. Colombians
should not have to pay the price for the United States' inability to
reconcile its hostility toward drug producers and its inability to control
demand for their products.