GOING BACK TO WAR

Pastrana's New Offensive Could Turn Colombia To The Right And Drag The U.S.
Further Into The Mess

Everything has a limit - even the patience of Andres Pastrana. For three
years the Colombian president tried to negotiate a settlement of the
country's 38-year civil war. He bowed to the Marxist rebels' demand for a
haven, letting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have free
run of an enclave the size of Switzerland. Outside the haven, the
guerrillas kidnapped civilians.

They raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from the cocaine trade.

They made prisoners of police and soldiers, then executed them in cold
blood - and still Pastrana kept trying to make peace.

But his forbearance finally ran out last week after four FARC gunmen
hijacked a Colombian airliner and abducted a prominent senator from the flight.

Pastrana announced he was through with talk. He ordered the armed forces to
retake the enclave from the rebels. "We Colombians extended an open hand,"
the president said, "and the FARC has responded with a slap in the face."

THE PUBLIC'S REACTION was almost giddy.

Motorists in Bogota honked their horns in jubilation, and as Colombian Air
Force jets pummeled FARC positions with 500-pound bombs, the president's
approval rating rocketed more than 30 points, to 63 percent.

The cheers resounded in Washington, where the Bush administration is
already pushing to win more military aid for Colombia.

The euphoria won't last. The war has killed more than 30,000 Colombians in
the last decade, and now it's on the verge of an even deadlier phase, with
no military solution in sight. "I think it's quite possible that the FARC
will become more involved in terrorist activity," warns Colombia's armed
forces chief, Gen. Fernando Tapias. "It's a sign of weakness, [but] their
capacity for terrorism has risen while their ability to fight the military
has fallen."

The rebels' sense of desperation is likely to grow. So far, the U.S.
military role in Colombia has legally been confined to anti-drug
operations. But the White House appears eager to give Pastrana more help
against the FARC and Colombia's No. 2 communist rebel force, the National
Liberation Army (ELN). Last week the Bush administration confirmed it plans
to begin sharing intelligence with the Colombian government. The U.S. State
Department has listed both rebel groups as terrorist organizations, making
it that much harder for Capitol Hill to turn down requests for
appropriations to fight them. "The policy was already moving toward a
harder line," says Michael Shifter, a Colombia expert at the
Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue. "After last week's
developments, people will now be more inclined to support security aid that
is not tied to the drug war."

The line between that war and the civil war has always been an arbitrary
one. Narcotics money is what keeps the rebels in business. In a television
interview last week, Pastrana said he's seeking Washington's permission to
use U.S. helicopters and other drug-war armaments against the rebels.

Still, the decision is tougher than it might sound.

Saying yes would raise the threat of terrorist reprisals against more than
500 U.S. troops, diplomats and private contractors now working in Colombia.
But saying no to such requests has become a lot harder since September 11.

Pastrana won't be president much longer anyway.

Elections are scheduled in May, and the Constitution bars him from seeking
a second term. The biggest beneficiary is probably Alvaro Uribe Velez. The
right-wing presidential candidate, a former departmental governor, has long
denounced the peace talks as nothing more than a sham by FARC leaders. His
campaign has not been helped by allegations that political violence
worsened in Antioquia while he was governor there (a charge he disputes).
Now many voters are taking Pastrana's shift as a vindication of Uribe's
hard-line stance, which has boosted his popularity from less than 25
percent a year ago to 53 percent now. Some Colombians say the election's
outcome is a foregone conclusion. "Something very strange would have to
happen to stop Uribe from winning," says Ernesto Borda, a political analyst
at Bogota's Javeriana University. "The country sees in Uribe someone who
has the guaranteed support of the private sector, the armed forces and the
United States."

That surely overstates Washington's enthusiasm. All the same, no one in the
Bush administration is crying over the end of Pastrana's doomed peace attempts.

Skeptical from the first about the guerrillas' real intentions, U.S.
officials blamed them and their off-limits enclave for much of the recent
boom in Colombian coca production. Toward the end, Pastrana was practically
the only politician left in Colombia who still believed in his impossible
dream of persuading the rebels to lay down their arms. "Peace is something
you build day by day," Pastrana told NEWSWEEK in August 2000. Even then,
Colombians were losing confidence in the negotiations. It's too bad their
president took so long to achieve so little.

[SIDEBAR]

The war has killed more than 30,000 Colombians in the last decade, and now
it's on the verge of an even deadlier phase, with no military solution in
sight.