MILITARY AID TO COLOMBIA IS A DANGEROUS STEP BY U.S.

Anyone wanting a vivid snapshot of the rubble of U.S. policy toward
Latin America should glance at Colombia, where the Clinton
administration now has one foot over the brink of a military
intervention strongly reminiscent of John 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, has an official unemployment rate
of 19 percent and an actual unemployment rate probably more than twice
that figure. ``Structural adjustment'' programs administered by the
International Monetary Fund and 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 advisers 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 done by the army, police and right-wing paramilitaries.
To lend a sense of perspective, this is about twice the death rate 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
in already-scheduled assistance this year, making Colombia the third
largest recipient of American aid, after Israel and Egypt. Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, director of the 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 counterdrug
activities. A congressional amendment has forbidden U.S. military aid
to go to Latin American army units with a documented record of
human-rights abuses. But in the pell-mell rush to throw money at
Colombia's military, such niceties are being thrown over the side.

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 gave the FARC control over a 16,000-square-mile
slab of south-central Colombia, about the size of Switzerland. The
Clinton administration was not entirely unsympathetic to this
overture, though it outraged Colombia's traditional elites and much of
the military, which feels humiliated by guerrilla strength that
brought FARC forces as close as 25 miles from Bogota in July.

46or its part, the 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 paramilitaries 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 Colombian
general Serrano has forged close links with Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep
Ben Gilman, who 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 RC-7B that crashed
into a Colombian mountain in the early hours of July 23 was almost
certainly monitoring FARC deployments, with such information being
relayed to the Colombian military.

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. Colombia, unless the U.S. Congress
turns back this evil, is facing more of the same.