COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Patrick Keaney's article on "Colombia's 'Dirty War' " [News and Features,
February 15] was excellent. With the expansion of the Clinton
administration's $1.3 billion Plan Colombia military-aid package into a
broader Andean initiative, it's becoming increasingly difficult to
distinguish US anti-drug efforts from Cold War-era counterinsurgency.

Not only is the US government turning a blind eye to paramilitary
human-rights violations, it's facilitating a very real environmental
threat. In an effort to eradicate coca plants, toxic herbicides are sprayed
indiscriminately from above, hitting water supplies, staple crops, and
people. This drives peasants further into the Amazon basin, which in turn
leads to more rain-forest destruction.

Plan Colombia could very well spread both coca production and civil war
throughout the region. Communist guerrilla movements do not originate in a
vacuum. US tax dollars would be better spent addressing the socioeconomic
causes of civil strife than by applying overwhelming military force to
attack the symptoms. We're not doing the Colombian people any favors by
funding civil war. Nor are Americans being protected from drugs.

Destroy the Colombian coca crop, and production will boom in Peru, Bolivia,
and Ecuador. Destroy every last plant in South America, and domestic
methamphetamine production will increase to meet the demand for
cocaine-like drugs. Sooner or later, Congress's self-professed champions of
the free market will have to wake up to the inherent failure of the
supply-side drug war.

Robert Sharpe, MPA, Program officer, Drug Policy Alliance, Washington, DC