THE NATION

August 19, 1999

Colombia's Best Hope


By Ana Carrigan

The Clinton Administration has awakened--at last--to the catastrophe
brewing in Colombia. That is the meaning of the recent visit to Bogotá by
Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering. His message: The United States
must support President Andres Pastrana's stalled peace process and reject
calls for new military aid to the Colombian Army to fight drugs and
"narcoguerrillas." Pickering's mission was reinforced in an unprecedented
New York Times editorial by Madeleine Albright. Pastrana "needs--and
deserves--international support that focuses on more than drug interdiction
and eradication," wrote Albright. That sentence marks a historic break with
the narcotization of US Colombia policy and opens windows onto a world of
new possibilities for the Washington-Bogotá relationship. Perhaps President
Clinton will now get off the fence and provide urgently needed leadership.

For in Bogotá time is running out. Escalating rural and urban terror by
guerrillas and paramilitaries, soaring drug cultivation and the worst
economic crisis in seventy years are closing in on the courageous Pastrana.
Anticipating an eventual return to war, guerrilla kidnappings for
ransom--the next highest source of revenue for the rebels after drugs--have
multiplied. Mass abductions and random rebel roadblocks have spread terror,
bringing the war home to the urban middle class. One-fifth of the work
force is unemployed, the currency has fallen by 42 percent against the
dollar and 1.5 million people have been internally displaced by brutal
rural killings and land seizures.

The blame for this perilous unraveling of Colombia's peace process rests
principally with the leaders of the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC). Instead of talking, the FARC has used the
demilitarized zone Pastrana ceded to it as a secure environment for peace
talks to instead hide kidnap victims, forcibly recruit local
schoolchildren, intimidate the local population and create a safe haven
from which to launch large-scale offensives. Asked to account for
thirty-four people who disappeared within the zone, FARC spokesman Raul
Reyes told the press that eleven of them had been executed as army spies.
Colombians have been repelled and have lost faith in the FARC's desire for
peace. Support for the insurgents has shrunk to historic lows, and its
terror tactics have opened a dangerous political space for ultraright
paramilitaries. Pressure is mounting on Pastrana to unleash the army.

In fairness, the government's weakness, acutely visible in its inability to
halt the army's continued reliance on the paramilitaries, gives the
guerrillas good reason to mistrust Pastrana's ability to implement any
peace accords in the face of the fanatical opposition of an entrenched
minority that has sabotaged every previous peace effort for twenty years.
This past April, with crucial American help, two senior generals were
cashiered for paramilitary involvement. But Pastrana's orders to disband
paramilitary chief Carlos Castano's forces and put him and his powerful
patrons behind bars gather dust, while evidence of army participation in
paramilitary atrocities accumulates in the folders of investigators for the
Attorney General's human rights office. Castano's recent announcement that
he has fielded a new "front," recruited exclusively from former soldiers,
offers clear proof of the ideological kinship with the military that
perpetuates this criminal alliance.

Meanwhile, the single policy the United States has pursued with myopic
dedication throughout this Administration has failed. Despite two years of
extensive drug-crop fumigation, net coca cultivation has increased by 50
percent. And spraying herbicides has strengthened the FARC by driving young
peasants out of the fields and into the guerrilla army.

This year Congress tripled US military assistance to Colombia, now the
third-largest recipient of military aid after Israel and Egypt. In July
drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey recommended $1 billion in supplemental aid
to the Andean countries, with more than half going to Colombia. McCaffrey
then went to Colombia, where he declared an "emergency" caused by
guerrillas "financed by drug money" and promised efforts to find a way to
support the army and the police to fight guerrillas and paramilitaries. But
the current mood on the Hill is more frustrated than warlike. The specter
of Vietnam haunts any mention of military aid. McCaffrey's recommendation
may have support from the head of Southern Command, Gen. Charles Wilhelm,
said to believe that a punch-up with the guerrillas would be good for the
army and good for Colombia. But it is not the official US position.
Congress is waiting for the Administration to tell it what that is.

The solution to Colombia's terrible, ancient violence is economic. You
don't need a fleet of Black Hawk helicopter gunships at $16 million each to
be rid of Colombian guerrillas and Colombian drugs; you need money. The
World Bank and the United Nations International Drug Control Program are
each investing several million dollars in two pilot alternative development
projects with indigenous campesinos and coca growers inside the DMZ. Even
General McCaffrey, longtime supporter of militarized crop eradication, has
recommended $60 million for development programs in Colombia, to "provide a
rapidly expanding coca labor force with licit income alternatives" and to
avoid "violent confrontation with a displaced labor force."

In the early days of his administration, Pastrana called for a Plan
Colombia, a fund of $3.5 billion to finance his strategy of collaboration
with the FARC to manually eradicate drug crops in return for structural and
alternative development. That plan has sunk in the backwash of the
shrinking economy and the falling peso. Yet the analysis behind Pastrana's
peace strategy was soundly rooted in Colombian realities. It links
guerrillas and drugs and proposes the same solution for both: profound
structural development and alternative crops for the campesino coca growers
in return for an end to political violence and elimination of the drug crops.

So if the State Department is to give Pastrana the support he needs to put
the peace process back on track, it must forge a bi-partisan strategy with
Congress that will permit US officials to meet with the FARC, should the
Colombian government request it, without being slammed by House Republicans
for consorting with "narcoterrorists." Tiro Fijo, the 68-year-old FARC
leader, is said to aspire to be the Nelson Mandela of Latin America. Myth
or reality? Surely it is worth talking with him to find out. After all, in
Colombia nothing is quite what it seems.

        Ana Carrigan, the author of The Palace of Justice: A Colombian
        Tragedy (Four Walls Eight Windows), is writing a book of
        Colombian memoirs.

        Copyright 1999 The Nation