COLOMBIA'S PROBLEM

At first ,the White House deflected any notion of expanding aid to
Colombia. President Bush said the administration would limit U.S. aid to
fighting the war on drugs rather than guerrillas. But that resolve appears
to be weakening, particularly since Colombian President Andres Pastrana
ended negotiations with rebels and reclaimed land he had ceded to them.

Pastrana's strategy has been perceived as an abject failure. He spent three
years talking to the rebels. Nothing changed. The Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia - known as FARC in Spanish - continued its regular
practice of kidnapping for ransom and collecting taxes from coca growers.
If anything, Pastrana's negotiations pushed fed-up Colombians to the right,
and that could lead to disaster insofar as American support is concerned.
More aid will not cure Colombia's ills.

Colombia's congressional election Sunday demonstrated strong support for
candidates anointed by independent presidential aspirant Alvaro Uribe.
According to recent polls, Uribe has a big lead and likely will win the
presidency in May. Uribe has severely criticized Pastrana's negotiations
with insurgents. He has called for strong military action against the FARC
as a solution to civil strife.

The problem with that is the Colombian army is, or at least has been,
ill-suited to fighting the rebels. Major Gen. Gary Speer, acting commander
of the U.S. Southern Command, told a Senate committee that Colombia hasn't
the soldiers, police, money or weapons to battle narcotics traffickers and
two guerrilla movements. Besides FARC, the National Liberation Army or ELN
also controls a part of the country.

A resolution passed by the House of Representatives this month urges the
White House to provide expanded aid to Colombia and permit those resources
to be used fighting rebels. The Colombian government is in the process of
spending $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to eradicate coca farming.

It may be that the only way to stem the cocaine tide is to defeat the two
rebel movements. But a great share of the murder and mayhem that hangs over
Colombia has been at the hands of right-wing paramilitary goon squads.

This civil war started in the 1960s. It is a war of those who have nothing
against those who control most of the nation's wealth.

No amount of American aid will eliminate the conditions that spawned this
insurrection.

Two years ago, Rafael Prado, a former defense minister for Colombia,
pleaded in an article in Foreign Affairs that Colombia had to have help. At
the time, the Clinton administration proposed to give $1.7 billion in aid
to the beleaguered country.

This was but a small part of a huge public relations campaign by the
Colombian government to lobby the Congress for aid. Prado, who gained a
senate seat as a Uribe follower in Sunday's election, described Colombia's
plight:

"The cost of the drug war has been staggering. In the last 15 years, 200
bombs (half of them as large as the one used in Oklahoma City) have blown
up in Colombia's cities; an entire democratic leftist political party was
eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries; four presidential candidates, 200
judges and investigators, half the Supreme Court's justices, 1,200 police
officers, 151 journalists, and more than 300,000 ordinary Colombians have
been murdered."

The tragedy that is Colombia needs more than American aid and a military
solution. The country needs to reinvent itself. Colombians like to refer to
their country as the longest surviving democracy in South America. But
closer to the truth is that it is a democracy for the well-heeled; for the
poor, it has been a dictatorship.