ELECTIONS AND MAYHEM IN COLOMBIA

As Colombia's Sunday presidential election drew near, bookies in Bogota
could have taken bets not only on which candidate would win but also on
which would survive the campaign. In its May 11 edition, the Colombian
newsweekly Semana reported there had been 18 documented death threats
against Horacio Serpa, candidate of the ruling Liberal Party, and 25
against the main opposition candidate, Andres Pastrana of the Conservative
Party.

That, in brief, is the good news-bad news report from Colombia: An
electoral system that seems to be functioning, but amid a hurricane of
political violence and street crime that has claimed at least 31,000 lives
during the past year alone.

None of the four presidential candidates is likely to win the required 50
percent of the vote in the first round, so a runoff, most likely between
Serpa and Pastrana, is expected for June 21.

After a winner emerges, whenever that turns out to be, the United States
ought to broaden its Colombia policy from one almost exclusively focused on
drug interdiction to one that presses the country's warring factions toward
a negotiated peace settlement.

Colombia's civil war has been raging for nearly 35 years and has been
aggravated immeasurably by the country's multibillion-dollar narcotics
industry. The two guerrilla fronts, which had formerly espoused Marxist
agendas, have all but abandoned most ideological pretenses and now live on
ransoms and protection money from drug lords. The army supposedly leads the
fight against the guerrillas but in fact has delegated part of its
anti-insurgency mission to paramilitary units that operate with murderous
abandon and have turned large chunks of the countryside into human-rights
hellholes.

Those who despair of breaking this cycle of violence should remember the
recent history of neighboring Guatemala--or El Salvador or Nicaragua, for
that matter--where peace agreements were brokered even after decades of
fighting and hundreds of thousands of casualties.

The U.S., in fact, already has taken some initial steps. On May 20--and
bowing mostly to U.S. pressure--Colombia disbanded the army's notorious
20th Brigade, an intelligence unit accused of atrocities.

Additional pressure by Washington--Colombia's chief source of military
aid--should be applied to force the 146,000-man army to disassociate itself
from the paramilitary units and to investigate alleged atrocities. The
Leahy amendment, approved by Congress last year, stipulates that the U.S.
must cut off aid to any military unit of the Colombian government whenever
there's credible suspicion that it has been involved in human-rights
abuses. That's one more instance of foreign policymaking by Congress--an
unwise general principle--but it must be enforced.

America's preoccupation with narcotrafficking, however justified it may be,
has led in too many instances to a whatever-it-takes attitude toward the
Colombian military. That's myopic: Human-rights violations, whether
committed or merely condoned by the Colombian army, can only prolong the
country's nightmare and compound the difficulty of fighting narcotraffickers.

Except for retired Gen. Harold Bedoya, who is trailing badly in the polls,
all presidential candidates profess to favor a negotiated settlement of the
civil war. Independent candidate Noemi Sanin has offered to give the
guerrillas parliamentary representation, a popular stance that has left
some voters marveling that she seems to have more cojones than her male
rivals. One guerrilla front began negotiations in Madrid a few months ago,
and the other, larger one has offered to negotiate after the elections.

A final, negotiated settlement will be an onerous task, particularly if the
winning candidate doesn't get a resounding mandate. But a negotiated end to
the war is the only course that holds any promise for the long-suffering
people of Colombia, the only country in Latin America still at war with
itself.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski