COLOMBIA MARCHES

IT IS STUNNING that as many as 10 million Colombians took part in weekend
peace demonstrations meant to impart momentum to peace talks now resuming
between the government and the guerrillas. The former leftist who was quoted
as saying, "The entire country wants peace" surely was on the mark. A
wasting civil war has been going on for decades, taking tens of thousands of
lives and crushing national prospects.

Unchecked, it will only get worse.

Peace talks are bound to be part of the answer.

The rebels wave a social justice flag, and appeal to -- and manipulate -- a
constituency of the deprived. The government makes what it can of the ugly
fact that the rebels live off the international drug trade, and in a kinder
world the drug connection would cost its upholders a place at the national
table.

But this is not the world Colombia lives in.

In fact, the rebels' drug connection is the government's ticket for large
and increasing -- and ineffective -- American military aid. This is
happening even though the government's tactics are divisive in Colombia: The
authorities are less confident of a military victory and readier for
political accommodation than are the army and the paramilitaries. There is
also an argument in the United States, where congressional hard-liners find
the Clinton administration soft on the drug war.

But these are sterile policy debates that will not be soon or easily
resolved and that would probably not matter much if they were. For the war
in Colombia, though it has 100 percent Colombian roots, has become
Americanized -- not by official American aid but by private American demand
for Colombia's cocaine and heroin.

Take away the drugs, and Colombia would be just one more struggling Latin
democracy.

With the drugs, it stands on the brink of becoming what Latinist Mark
Falcoff calls "a narco-revolutionary regime . . . a new kind of rogue actor
in international politics." A policy that pays no more than lip service to
the role of American drug demand is destined for grief.