Q & A WITH COLOMBIAN DEFENSE MINISTER JUAN MANUEL SANTOS

Santos Will Meet With Barack Obama Soon After Inauguration to Try To
Persuade Him to Continue Plan Colombia, the $556-Million-A-Year U.S.
Aid Plan. He Discusses the Case He Will Make.

Soon after President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, Colombian
Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos will fly to Washington to lobby
for continuance of Plan Colombia, the largest U.S. foreign aid
program outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Colombian leaders face a steep challenge: persuading the new
administration to maintain $556 million a year in military and
economic aid as it braces for an era of trillion-dollar deficits.
Santos will have to fend off critics who say Plan Colombia has fallen
short of its coca eradication goals and that the military's
battlefield gains against leftist rebels have been stained by human
rights abuses, including "false positives" -- the killing of innocent
civilians passed off as battle casualties.

But Santos, the Harvard-educated scion of a family that operates and
partly owns his country's biggest newspaper, El Tiempo, argues that
dramatic battlefield successes against the left-wing Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas, known as the FARC, and
Colombia's importance as a U.S. ally in an often unfriendly region
are reason for Obama to not "pull the rug out from under us."

Santos was interviewed Thursday by The Times in Bogota.

This is not an ideal time to be going to Washington to look for money.

The way we see it, the cost of support for Colombia is small in
relation to the $1-trillion deficit, but that the usefulness of this
help is huge and at minimal cost compared to Iraq, for example.

When it started in 2000, Colombia was not in the hands of the state
but in those of paramilitaries and the guerrillas. I remember in
2000, when President Clinton came to Cartagena just before Plan
Colombia started, the country was on the verge of becoming a failed
state. Today, we are one of the most solid democracies, where
institutions are working, where the scandals such as false positives
have come to light because of those functioning institutions.

We are winning, but we haven't won yet. This could backfire very
rapidly. [The end of Plan Colombia] is what the rebels want.

How has Plan Colombia helped Colombia achieve this?

Military training, intelligence, strengthening of institutions and,
of course, the added military capacity that has resulted from things
like [Black Hawk] helicopters that we have received through Plan
Colombia. It's the quality of the help we get that matters. The
quality of training, of the intelligence, for example, which doesn't
cost the United States anything but which we can't produce ourselves.

And 2008 was a good year?

Last year was the best year for the Colombian armed forces in all its
history. First, there was political progress in that people mobilized
as never before to demonstrate against the FARC. Secondly, the number
of demobilized rebels rose to 3,480, the highest level in history.
Thirdly, after 44 years of our military not being able to touch the
FARC leadership -- the seven-member secretariat -- three of them fell
in 2008. Fourth, the spectacular rescue in July [of three U.S.
defense contractors, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt
and 11 others] was so extraordinary that it created a euphoria and
self-confidence in our military, and among all Colombians.

A General Accounting Office report said Plan Colombia has fallen
short of its goal to reduce coca crops by 50%. After years of
spraying and manual eradication, crops haven't shrunk much.

I think the United Nations report [on which the GAO based its
findings] contains an underlying error in the number of hectares it
says are still cultivated with coca. But look at the other links of
our policy: how all the cartels are dismantled, all the capos who
were on the FBI most-wanted list have been jailed, look at all the
cocaine laboratories destroyed, how the tons of cocaine seized by the
police almost doubled in 2008. Why? Because we are retaking control
of our territory.

And there was the "false positives" scandal in which soldiers looking
for promotions killed possibly hundreds of civilians who were then
claimed as guerrillas killed in action.

We have taken action, with a set of policies to guarantee justice,
and have told our soldiers that demobilizations, not killings, of
rebels are what count. We fired 45 officers and soldiers for sins of
commission and omission. I have no doubt that the Colombian army is
receiving more human rights training than any on Earth.

President-elect Obama is not known as an aficionado of Latin America,
and has never visited here. Does that worry you?

No, because Obama has a Cabinet that has many people who know Latin
America. Vice President-elect Joseph Biden was one of the fathers of
Plan Colombia.

How will you persuade Obama that Colombia deserves the aid?

I want to say: Listen, we're a success story here, asking for minimal
financial commitment compared with your other problems, so don't
sacrifice something that's much more important than the value of the
dollars you have invested. It's in the interest of the U.S. to
maintain a strong democracy in Colombia. And Plan Colombia is one of
the determinants.