TO FIGHT THE DRUG TRAFFICKERS

A SCANTLY remarked but crucial aspect of the war on drugs is that it
engages the United States in the internal affairs of countries with weak
institutions and a strong nationalist streak. This requires Washington to
temper its impatience on drugs with an awareness of internal complexity and
national feeling. Nowhere, with the possible exception of Mexico, is this
more important than in Colombia, a country torn by insurgency, violence and
corruption and the source of most of the cocaine and heroin entering the
United States.

Colombia's newly elected president, Andres Pastrana, a former journalist
with a reputation for honesty, has been in Washington seeking help for his
country's drug dilemma without upsetting its political equilibrium. He is
pursuing a policy of opening up a political space and giving a military
free pass to draw in guerrillas of the left, undertaking military and
judicial reform to reduce paramilitaries of the right and meanwhile taking
on the drug traffickers, who have their own connections on the two flanks.

To Washington's conservatives, taking on the traffickers means shooting up
their infrastructure and spraying peasant coca and poppy fields. The
Republican Congress showed its muscle by inserting several hundred million
dollars' worth of unsought drug-fighting military aid into the omnibus
budget bill. President Pastrana sees how such tactics as applied in Peru
are driving coca cultivation into Colombia. He believes that crop
substitution in a framework of national development is the more effective
strategy for Colombia.

That leaves the question of what is the more effective U.S. strategy. As
the center of global demand, this country has its own responsibilities in
interdiction and law enforcement and even more, in development, education
and treatment. Colombia and other drug sources lack the weight to shape
U.S. policy the way we can influence theirs. It makes for an unequal
relationship, and Americans must tend to it.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski