BATTLES IN THE DRUG WAR

SATELLITE photos inform the U.S. government that the cultivation of coca,
raw material of cocaine, is sharply down in Peru and Bolivia and up in
Colombia. It follows that:

When producing-country governments cooperate, it counts. A natural fungus
helped in Peru, but there and in Bolivia official policy supported
spraying, crop substitution and aerial interdiction, and they are working.
Americans and Latins alike need to know this in order to fit politically
and to keep the heat on producers and shippers.

When producer-friendly governments cheat, things fall apart. Colombia is in
transition from the former leadership's softness on the cartels to newly
elected President Andres Pastrana's toughness and imagination. The cutting
edge of his policy is his controversial reach to the country's long-lived,
deep-rooted insurgency, which feeds off the drug trade. In his effort to
wind down a 40-year civil war, he is looking to draw in the guerrillas and,
in the specific instance of drugs, to turn them from adversary to partner.

That's no easy trick: The main guerrilla group is not only suspicious but,
as a result of its isolation, simplistically, even laughably Marxist. But
Americans have their own adjustments to make.

Until now, with the guerrillas frozen in hostility, taking up a
counterinsurgency mission had a certain anti-drug appeal but put the United
States in league with a Colombian military with a bad human-rights record.
Now, with President Pastrana going personally into the guerrillas' zone to
invite them to a negotiation, Washington has to find a policy to match the
emerging Colombian flow. The administration stirred Republican fire when it
sent diplomats recently to meet with rebel officials to ask, it said, about
three kidnapped Americans. That's reason enough for contact, but the whole
American approach needs to be reviewed.