COLOMBIA'S U.S. CONNECTION NOT WINNING DRUG WAR

BOGOTA, Colombia-Andres Pastrana became president of Colombia last
year amid high hopes here and in Washington that he could bring an end
to years of violence, drug trafficking and government red ink. But by
most measures, things only have gotten worse.

Although Pastrana kept his pledge to begin negotiations to end a
40-year war with Marxist guerrillas, progress at the bargaining table
has been slow. As the guerrillas battle -- and beat -- the Colombian
army, drug cultivation in territory they control has continued to increase.

For the Clinton administration, Pastrana's leading foreign backer, the
belief that peace was achievable and would provide a victory in
Washington's drug war has descended into gloomy uncertainty. The
administration continues to support the negotiations -- set to begin
this week -- as the best long-term anti-drug strategy. But it largely
has lost control of its Colombia policy to a small group of
conservative House Republicans who charge Clinton with "coddling
narco-terrorists."

The partisan feuding in Washington, according to Pastrana's
government, has exacerbated Colombia's problems.

"It's very difficult for us," said a senior Colombian diplomat. "It
reminds us of Central America. To make peace doable, in today's world
you need the support of the United States, and the fact is that every
day" the Washington policy war "draws attention away" from the peace
process.

"We are the ham in the [U.S.] sandwich," said Pastrana, whose election
ended years of U.S. ostracism of Colombia under his allegedly corrupt
and drug-tainted predecessor, Ernesto Samper. Today, Pastrana said in
a recent interview, Colombia policy has become more useful as a tool
"for hitting your government than for helping or hurting our
government."

Meanwhile, as Pastrana frets and Washington quarrels with itself,
Colombians long used to living on the edge now fear they are about to
fall off.

Cocaine production is up 28 percent, and the diversification of drug
mafias into heroin has made Colombia the biggest supplier to the U.S.
East Coast.

Despite its agreement to come to the negotiating table, the biggest of
Colombia's three rebel groups -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, FARC by its Spanish initials -- is bigger, richer and better
armed than ever before. FARC and two smaller insurgent groups together
took in an estimated $900 million in "taxes" imposed on drug
traffickers for protecting cultivation zones. The rebels and the army
are accused of widespread human rights abuses.

Kidnapping for ransom -- the rebels' second biggest income source --
has reached terrifying proportions, with a dozen American and many
more Colombian victims this year. Many hostages have been killed, even
after ransom was paid, and the State Department last month strongly
warned all U.S. citizens against traveling here.

International organizations estimate that as many as a million
Colombians -- a number exceeding the exodus from Kosovo -- have left
their homes, fleeing the fighting or fearing reprisals from one rebel
group for alleged sympathy with another.

Refugees, drug lords and warfare have begun to spill across Colombia's
borders into Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Panama, threatening
to destabilize the region.

Just as ominously, at least for Colombia's monied elite and
sophisticated business community, the economy has gone from bad to
worse. The only country in Latin America to have consistent economic
growth over recent decades, Colombia this year moved into the negative
column. Last month, its credit rating was downgraded in New York,
making it more difficult to try to recover from a major January
earthquake that decimated the main coffee-growing region.

Pastrana has met three times with FARC leaders. Negotiating teams have
been named, a joint agenda established and the first negotiating
session is set for Wednesday -- far more than any previous Colombian
government has achieved. The rebels, he said, are tired after four
decades of inconclusive fighting, and want to be part of modern Colombia.

But in the absence of tangible results from the talks, many
Colombians, even among the majority who strongly support Pastrana's
initiative, are worried that their president is giving up far more
than he is getting.

In a bold but risky move that led to the resignation in May of his
defense minister and threats of a walkout by most of the army's
generals, Pastrana agreed to a FARC demand to withdraw the army from
an isolated, Switzerland-size zone of south-central Colombia where the
guerrillas had long prevailed.

Although the army is gone, Pastrana insisted that the government has
more presence there than ever before. "Practically every senior
official of the government has been there. American congressmen have
even been there," including a June delegation of House staffers led by
Rep. William D. Delahunt (D-Mass.).

Late last month, Pastrana persuaded Richard Grasso, chairman of the
New York Stock Exchange, to travel to the area to impress on FARC that
without their cooperation, there may not be much of Colombia left to
fight over. Grasso told reporters he had stressed "the opportunities
capital markets will present to Colombia when a peace is achieved."

But FARC has rejected a cease-fire, continued fighting and done little
to promote peace other than show up at the negotiating table.

"We need some kind of gesture from the guerrillas for us to start to
believe" in the negotiations, said Juan Manuel Santos, an opposition
leader.

Pastrana said he recognizes time is running out, and has told FARC
"many times" they need to build public "confidence in the process." A
useful first step, he said, would be "to pledge their respect for
international humanitarian law. Give up kidnapping and terrorism --
that would be a gesture to start the talks off right."

Meanwhile, mere launching of the peace initiative with FARC appears to
have made the security situation worse, as both the guerrilla National
Liberation Army and a powerful right-wing paramilitary army --
originally formed by landowners to combat the guerrillas but now
deeply involved in drugs and terror itself -- have stepped up
operations out of what is seen here as fear they will be left out of
any new political arrangement.

"I am skeptical of a Colombian peace process that results in 16,000
square miles of territory being given to narco-guerrillas, who work
hand-in-hand with the world's most dangerous drug dealers," Rep.
Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House International
Relations Committee, said Thursday in the latest of a year-long
drumbeat of statements opposing the Colombian peace process.

As they continue to oppose administration policy in Colombia, Gilman,
Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and
a few others, have instituted their own anti-drug policy. Last fall,
they spearheaded an effort to triple the administration's military aid
request for Colombia to $300 million -- making it the world's third
largest recipient, surpassed only by Egypt and Israel.

The House Republicans have put their money on Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano,
chief of the Colombian National Police and, in the words of one senior
Republican aide, "the best cop in Latin America." Nearly all the
additional funds were earmarked for high-tech equipment to help the
police spray fungicide on the coca fields that provide the raw
material for cocaine and the opium poppies used to make heroin.

While aerial fumigation is his principal weapon against drugs, Serrano
also has had some success in finding and destroying the labs that
process drugs for export and arresting traffickers. He is credited
with dismantling the powerful Medellin and Cali drug cartels, although
Serrano himself admits that as a result, the drug trade here has
exploded into hundreds of smaller groups that in some ways are more
difficult to crack than the big cartels.

Serrano hopes to expand his fumigation efforts this year to the high
mountain areas where opium poppies are grown. The six new U.S. UH-60
Black Hawk helicopters scheduled to arrive in September thanks to
congressional largess will carry more police greater distances to
secure guerrilla-guarded areas and allow the spray planes to operate.
Once he begins the assault against an estimated 15,000 acres of
poppies, Serrano said in an interview, he should be able to eliminate
them within three years.

Although the White House and the Pentagon thought sending the Black
Hawks unwise, Republicans saw it as a "no-brainer" way of getting rid
of all Colombian heroin in a short time, said the Republican aide.

Judging by the recent past, however, cutting narcotics production by
fumigating drug crops is a Sisyphean task. According to a June 22
report prepared for Congress by the General Accounting Office, cocaine
cultivation in Colombia has increased 50 percent during the past two
years of intensive fumigation, as the guerrillas have expanded their
areas of control and the traffickers have developed higher-yield plants.

Many Colombians -- including Pastrana -- worry about the long-term
effects of spraying large amounts of poison on ever-larger swaths of
Colombia's most environmentally sensitive regions. They say that
without a well-financed development program to give peasant farmers
another way to make a living, it is a short-term strategy at best.

For the Clinton administration, the concentration on fumigation by
police as the most visible part of U.S. policy has other
complications.

Because the guerrillas and their paramilitary rivals control virtually
all of the drug cultivation areas, it is usually impossible to spray
the fields without first battling the rebels, a job assigned to the
army.

In the view of the White House and the Pentagon, the police -- no
matter how many helicopters they have -- are limited in their fighting
ability. By giving them ever-more sophisticated equipment, the
administration says Congress is weakening the morale and fighting
effectiveness of the army, and thus undermining Pastrana's bargaining
position with the guerrillas and ultimately the drug war itself.

"We're not against counternarcotics," said a senior administration
official. "But in the end it only works if the people in the country
buy it. This is not some kind of 21st-century imperialism."

The Colombian military, according to the GAO report, "lacks a
long-term strategy and effective leadership; suffers from poor morale;
and has inadequate equipment, logistics, and training." Unlike the
police, the army also has a long and dismal record of human rights
abuses that restrict the amount of U.S. aid it can receive.

The army has been defeated in virtually every large-scale encounter
with FARC, which pays its 15,000 troops three times what army
conscripts make, according to U.S. and Colombian government sources.

But the Colombian government and the Pentagon maintain that only by
trying to make the army better -- rather than largely ignoring or
castigating it -- can both the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics
battle be won. It is a problem that occupies more Pentagon attention
than those anywhere else in the hemisphere -- "much of my waking and
some of my sleeping hours," Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, head of
the Miami-based Southern Command, said last month.

The Pentagon and the State Department note that, under Pastrana, human
rights violators have been purged from the army's senior level, which
they say is now committed to extending the purge down the line and
punishing violations. But they acknowledge it is a slow process.

Although it is hard to quantify precisely the division of U.S. aid
between the police and the Colombian military, the Pentagon estimates
the ratio at 10 to 1 in favor of the police. It would like to bring
the two more in balance.

For the moment, with little money and a relatively small pool of
human-rights-vetted Colombian troops available, the Southern Command
is training a 950-soldier counternarcotics army battalion it expects
to be ready by December, and construction is nearly finished on a
U.S.-funded army-police intelligence center at Tres Esquinas in
southwest Colombia. Although the counternarcotics and
counterinsurgency wars are sometimes difficult to tell apart, Wilhelm
insists that army use of U.S. equipment and training will be
restricted to known drug-producing areas.

Meanwhile, Serrano, who frequently flies to Washington to consult with
Gilman and others, already has faxed his fiscal 2000 police request
for $51 million in aircraft and other supplies the administration did
not ask for.

Last Tuesday, a bipartisan group of House members introduced a
resolution commending Pastrana's peace efforts and reaffirming U.S.
support. Although Gilman declared the proposed resolution "dead on
arrival" in his committee, it was seen as a step forward in the
Pastrana and Clinton administrations' efforts to broaden congressional
interest in Colombia.

Both governments acknowledge it is an uphill fight. A fledgling
administration effort to nudge the peace process along was quickly
extinguished last December, when congressional critics learned of a
secret preliminary meeting between FARC representatives and a State
Department official. Less than three months later, the FARC ensured
there would be no further contact when they kidnapped and killed three
Americans.

For now, said Pastrana's planning director, Jaime Ruiz, the
administration could help Colombia return to fiscal health by
supporting the government's economic initiatives and putting in a good
word with the international financial community.

With the White House unwilling to invite a high-visibility partisan
battle over an issue as sensitive as the drug war, there is little
indication it is prepared to do more. It has argued that the stakes
are high in Colombia, and that "you cannot solve this problem only by
giving [the police] a bunch of guns and helicopters," in the words of
the senior administration official. But as the stated goals of its
policy seem ever more distant, he said, "the difference in approach
between us and Congress becomes more difficult."

Colombia Sliding

Colombia, wracked by drug trafficking and guerrilla activities, has
continued to slip during the first year of the administration of
President Andres Pastrana, who had raised hopes in the United States
and Colombia for peace and economic recovery.

Foreign debt has continued to grow:

in billions of dollars

'88-93 average 17.4

'94 21.8

'98 Aug. 32.7

'99 first quarter 33.8

The unemployment rate has increased:

'88-93 average 10%

'94 8.9%

'98 Aug. 15.2%

'99 first quarter 19.5%

Despite two years of extensive herbicide spraying, the areas of coca
cultivation have grown:

in thousands of acres

X Net cultivation

Y Spraying activity

Z Coca killed

1996

X 166

Y 40

Z 6

1997

X 196

Y 102

Z 48

1998

X 251

Y 163

Z 34

SOURCES: Colombian government, U.S. government