DRUG WAR MASKS U.S. AID TO THUGS

In Our Rush To Bolster Colombian Military, We Risk Another Guatemala Type
Blood Bath

Anyone wanting a vivid snapshot of the rubble of U.S. policy toward Latin
America should look at Colombia, where the Clinton administration now has
one foot over the brink of a military intervention strongly reminiscent of
John F. Kennedy's initial deployments in Vietnam in the early 1960s.

Colombia is in economic free fall, and the only comfort its beleaguered
inhabitants can seize upon is that the velocity of this collapse is at
least slower than that of neighboring Ecuador, now experiencing its worst
economic slump in 70 years. Colombia is currently suffering negative growth
and has an official unemployment rate of 19%, with the actual unemployment
rate probably more than twice that. Austerity programs administered by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have closed off any hope for
that half of the country's population that lives below the poverty line.

It shouldn't be this way. With a diversity of exports, Colombia could have
one of the strongest economies of Latin America. But it's the same old
story. Down the years, every U.S. administration has sent arms and advisors
to prop up Colombia's elites. U.S.assisted repression in Colombia has been
spectacularly appalling. According to the Permanent Committee for the
Defense of Human Rights, in Colombia, 3,832 political murders were
perpetrated in 1998, the bulk of them carried out by the army, police and
righting paramilitary groups. To lend perspective, this is about twice the
death toll in Kosovo that prompted charges of Serbian genocide and that
helped whip up sentiment for NATO's war on Serbia.

The U.S. government is now preparing to escalate vastly the money and
weapons going to the Colombian military, far beyond the $289 million
already scheduled this year, making Colombia the third largest recipient of
American aid, after Israel and Egypt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is asking for an extra
$1 billion for the drug war, said sum to go to the Andean countries, with
about half to Colombia alone. His request puts an end to any pretense that
there is somehow a distinction between U.S. backing of counterinsurgency
and counter drug activities.

The immediate cause of panic is the strength of Colombia's main insurgency,
run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In a peace feeler
earlier this year, Colombia's President Andres Pastrana effectively ceded
the FARC control over a 16,000squaremile slab of south central Colombia,
which is about the size of Switzerland. The Clinton administration was not
entirely unsympathetic to this overture, though it outraged Colombia's
traditional elites and also the military, which feels humiliated by
guerrilla strength that brought FARC forces as close as 25 miles from
Bogota in July.

For its part, FARC's leaders have plainly questioned whether Pastrana has
the ability to deliver on any negotiated settlement. Not without reason.
Every single guerrilla group agreeing to lay down its arms and enter the
conventional political arena has seen its members slaughtered by the
paramilitary groups controlled by the army and the police.

There is a powerful lobby in Washington for pouring money into
counterinsurgency in Colombia. McCaffrey explicitly disavows any
distinction between counterinsurgency and the drug war, and Colombia's
police commander, Rosso Jose Serrano, has forged close links with Sen.
Jesse Helms (RN.C.) and Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (RN.Y.), who, respectively,
head the Foreign Relations committees considering these requests for big
new appropriations to the Colombian military. Already, the Pentagon is
sending planes and personnel into Colombia. The U.S. Army's intelligence
gathering De Havilland RC7 that crashed into a Colombian mountain July 23
was almost certainly monitoring FARC deployments.

There are two faces to U.S. policy toward Latin America, both repulsive.
The first is that of economic liberalism, preaching the virtues of
uninhibited trade, open markets, privatization, structural adjustment. On
the ground, across Latin America, we see the consequence: social
devastation in 31 kleptocracies, all corrupt, many bankrupt.

The alternate face, whose fierce glare is now fixed upon Colombia, is that
of military repression. For 30 years, the U.S. underwrote genocide in
Guatemala. With 36,000 civilians already killed, Colombia could fast become
its successor, unless the U.S. Congress turns this evil back.