THE COKEHEADS' COUNTRY

If it weren't for the fact that so many Americans working for Fortune 1000
companies think the most important thing in life is sucking cocaine up
their noses, nobody in the U.S. would much care about Colombia. But the
reality is that tens of thousands of Colombians -- peasants, judges,
mayors, journalists -- have died with bullets in their heads so that
American office workers could feel unusually good about themselves for a
few hours. Until George Soros spends enough money to make recreational
drugs legal at corporate lunches, it will be America's problem that the
sovereign nation of Colombia is on its way to becoming the world's first
drug republic.

Alas, Colombia is a case study in how U.S. policy makers fail at what they
get paid to do.

Colombia is a nation of 38 million people, where a homicidal guerrilla
movement's modus operandi is to invade a town, murder the mayor, open the
jails and start taxing the peasantry who raise coca plants for the drug
lords. The heavily armed guerrillas then protect everybody in the
production line from the Colombian military and police. Because of the
resulting stalemate, Colombia's hapless president has effectively ceded
control of an area about the size of Switzerland to the guerrillas and
their drug-gangster partners. In short, rural Colombia is close to what a
country will look like, say Russia, when the law finally loses for good and
the criminals win.

Colombia's President, Andres Pastrana, has been in the U.S. this week to
plead his case to the United Nations and to meet with President Clinton and
members of Congress. He wants $3.5 billion in international aid. Colombia
is the U.S.'s number one supplier of cocaine. While coca cultivation is
down in neighboring South American countries, Colombia now reportedly looks
like the coca equivalent of a Nebraska cornfield.

So what have we done about all this?

In 1993, the Clinton administration shifted the emphasis of drug control
policy away from attacking drug traffickers along their transit routes in
favor of moving the anti drug offensive into the source countries. The
weapon of choice is crop eradication. Not surprisingly, Colombia since has
grown increasingly violent. Indeed, thanks to the healthy cocaine export
market (that is, American users) and a stepped up effort to eradicate the
plants, guerrilla tax coffers are brimming. As a consequence of this fiscal
surplus, the gangsters are able to buy plenty of weapons.

In other words, with Colombia's guerrilla gangster army armed to the teeth,
it is U.S. policy to fight them with herbicide. How did U.S. policy arrive
at such a dead-end?

Step one was to reach an American political consensus that Colombia should
be forbidden to use its army to fight back. The Colombian army was
portrayed in the U.S. and Europe as a "human rights violator." The
existing, largely incompetent army has long been weakened by its own
historic isolation from the civilian government. But the U.S. Army program
at Fort Benning, Ga., which teaches Latin American officers how to behave
like professionals, has cut funding for students and is under pressure to
close.

Working out of this mindset, Congress says it is in favor of sending
military funds to Colombia to fight the drug lords, but it can't be used to
violate the human rights of the guerrillas. So what's left? The U.S.
exhorts Colombia to bomb the fields!

Without a modern, efficient army, Colombia can never establish law and
order outside the big cities. As a result of U.S. policy, drug money from
our value free yuppies fuels a law-of-the-jungle rural society in Colombia
where the winners rob, kill, kidnap, maim, and extort the weak. This is the
manifesto of both the Marxist guerrillas and their enemies, the vigilante
paramilitary. Millions of peasants are caught in this crossfire.

This thriving criminal underworld threatens to destabilize the entire
Andean region. Guerrillas are now popping up in Ecuador; and they have long
taken advantage of the wild, untamed Venezuelan border area. The U.S.
military withdrawal from the Panama Canal also weakens the region.

With no upside in sight, President Pastrana wants to strike some kind of a
peace deal with the guerrillas, though they've virtually made
double-crossing his overtures an entertaining national sport. Still, even
the white-flag waving president now seems to recognize that reasonable
negotiations require that the state regain some control and that to do so
Colombia is going to need a strong, modern, professional army. We should
help them acquire it.

For now, though, it is de facto U.S. policy to deprive the people of
Colombia of any such ability to clean up their own mess. So long as the
Clinton administration and Congress are willing to hold this position, they
should stop whining all the time about our drug problem with Colombia.
America's cokehead population may be irresponsibly narcissistic, but on
this subject their political leadership is hardly less self indulgent.