PLAN COLOMBIA FAILS

Re John Negroponte's May 22 Other Views article, Helping Colombia is
in our national interest: Negroponte wants to keep pumping in $15
million a week to fund military drug enforcement. The results? Cheap
cocaine on our streets, traffickers pushed from Colombia to
destabilized neighbors, twisted paramilitary pay-offs and corruption
in counter-narcotics programs.

Since 2000, we've spent billions of dollars in Colombia through Plan
Colombia. The only thing we've bought besides 475 extradited drug
traffickers is a military presence next to Venezuela.

While Negroponte claims we have have captured 550 tons of cocaine,
just wait until fall when the heroin distilled from al Qaeda opium
gets here -- a by-product of "Plan Afghanistan."

As for the idea that free trade helps folks "climb out of poverty,"
if that's true, then NAFTA should have reduced illegal immigration
from Mexico instead of encouraging it. And people's wages in Mexico
should have risen by now, not floated off to cheaper China.

That's free trade for you.

ROBERT DOLLAR, Miami