SO-CALLED 'NARCO-GUERRILLAS' COULD BE MORE USEFUL AS ALLIES THAN AS ENEMIES

A FEW statistics first. One million Colombians have been forced from
their homes by more than three decades of civil war and tens of
thousands more have died. The armed forces of Colombia have been in
steady retreat and have progressively abandoned nearly 40 per cent of
the country to guerrilla control. With a history like that, it would
be naive to imagine that the government of Colombia is either strong
or free of corruption.

Powerful groups include not only the traditional oligarchy - the
landowners, cattle ranchers, coffee barons and industrialists, but
also those who have made their fortunes in one way or another out of
the white powder that is America's favourite recreational drug -
cocaine. Anyone who makes it to the Colombian presidency without some
of that money in his war chest, however many times it has been through
the laundry, clearly has a talent for miracles.

A few more statistics: the UN tells us that the drug business is now
worth $ 400 billion a year, nearly as much as the global tourist
industry. The same organisation estimated that 218 million people are
consumers of drugs, some 10 per cent of them of cocaine and heroin.

Colombia now has a new president - Andres Pastrana, elected last
summer. In the few months since his election, Mr Pastrana has done two
things that have already earned him a footnote in the history books.
In July, even before he had been sworn in, he made a high profile
gesture toward Colombia's biggest guerrilla army - the FARC (Armed
Forces of Colombia), flying to meet the leaders in an encounter that
made a dramatic front page picture for all the Colombian newspapers
and even made the inside pages of an international press that has
shown itself largely indifferent to Colombia's troubles.

President Pastrana's second diplomatic triumph came last month when he
became the first Colombian president in more than 20 years to make a
state visit to Washington. The US likes Mr Pastrana, so far at least.
His economic policy suits the interests of American business and he
talks the language of the market. His trip to Washington should,
therefore, have been a harmonious affair, but it was not. True, the US
promised another $ 280 million in anti-drug and development money, but
instead of staying quiet and posing for the photo opportunity in the
posture of grateful supplicant, Mr Pastrana had the temerity to
question the US approach to eliminating drugs in his country. It did
not go down well with the Republicans in Congress, who like to round
up votes by grandstanding about the "war" on drugs. They complained
that Mr Pastrana was selling out by seeking a deal with what the US
right wing likes to call the "narco-terrorists" of the FARC.

LUMPING together the guerrilla threat and the drug menace was one of
George Bush's more inspired moves. Casting around perhaps for an enemy
on the scale of the collapsed Communist menace, the then President
Bush declared cocaine to be the US's "most serious problem".

Since he declared his war on drugs in the early 90s, millions of
dollars has been poured into an aerial crop-spraying programme that
has caused serious environmental damage in the producer countries of
Latin America, without having any impact on the traffic. Despite the
tough talking and the cash, ($100 million dollars a year and rising)
it has been a resounding failure. Cocaine seizures have increased, but
so has the flow of drugs reaching the market. The Latin American
traders have gone into global marketing and have steadily expanded the
area under cultivation. US-financed planes, meanwhile, spray toxic
chemicals on large tracts of South American land, damaging people and
banana crops, but hardly touching the resilient coca bushes.

In Colombia, in the last four years of enforced spraying, the land
devoted to coca cultivation doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 hectares.
Last week, in a mocking footnote to the idea that it would be helpful
to use Latin American armed forces in the "war" on drugs, US customs
officials discovered nearly a ton of cocaine on a Colombian airforce
plane that had landed at Fort Lauderdale. The Colombian airforce chief
resigned, but nobody imagines that his resignation will make any difference.

What might make a difference is an approach to development that
accommodates the needs of Colombian peasants to eat and feed their
families - a need advocated, in theory at least, by the FARC
guerrillas. As Mr Pastrana said in Washington, the "war" on drugs was
not only an expensive waste of time and effort, it was also an
obstacle to a peace settlement and peace in the political war is a
pre-requisite for any success in the drugs war. When they met in July,
the FARC leadership told Andres Pastrana that they, too, were willing
to co-operate in drug eradication, if a satisfactory peace deal could
be reached and if eradication was rationally pursued. Mr Pastrana
appears to have recognised that the cocaine trade has its roots in his
country's political and economic conflict and that so-called
"narco-guerrillas" of the FARC could be more useful as allies than as
enemies.

This month, the FARC and the government are to conduct an experiment:
five municipalities in the south of Colombia - some 3 per cent of
Colombian territory - will become ceasefire zones for 90 days while
peace talks are pursued. There are many obstacles to the success of
those talks, not least the reluctance of Colombia's oligarchy to make
the kind of concessions to the rural poor that might have prevented
the war in the first place. There is also the question of US
hostility: the initiative has been criticised in Congress because,
Republicans complain, it will interfere with the drug eradication programme.

Pastrana's initiative is full of risks, but it is the first serious
attempt to make peace in Colombia for nearly 20 years. To begin the
process at all, he has had to defy ideological enemies in Bogota and
in Washington who prefer cartoon ideology to reality. To carry it
through, he will have to make economic and political concessions that
will prejudice serious economic interests at home and abroad. If he
pulls it off, it will be a near miracle. But just by taking the first
step, he has dared to say that the "drug war" emperors have no
clothes. For that, he deserves a salute from us all.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady