Colombia Anti-Drug Aid is Replay of Reagan's Mistakes

by Randolph T. Holhut

Colombia cultivates nearly 300,000 acres of coca and 7,000 acres of poppies -- almost of all of which, when transformed into cocaine and heroin, gets shipped to the U.S. Despite 15 years of drug crop fumigation that has defoliated more that 500,000 acres of farm land, net coca cultivation is up by 50 percent.

Drug producing countries have long maintained that they are merely responding to the demand for drugs in the U.S., and if we were to realistically deal with the demand side of the problem, the supply side would dry up.

But drug treatment programs in the U.S. range from meager to non-existent, and our nation's prisons and jails are filled to the brim (two million inmates and counting) with users and low-level dealers. Instead, we insist upon waging a "war" on drugs that our nation has paid dearly for over the past 30 years.

Now, we are getting ready to deepen our military involvement in Colombia. The Clinton Administration has proposed a $1.6 billion in military aid for the Colombian army and security forces. The money will be mainly used to destroy drug crops and to train and equip several battalions of U.S.-trained anti-drug soldiers.

Sound familiar? Sound a lot like the money and U.S. "advisors" that were sent to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s? It does to me, and to many others who see what's happening in Colombia as a replay of the U.S. interventions in Central America two decades ago.

Even if this latest aid package is rejected by Congress, Colombia gets $150 million of U.S. military aid each year and is now the third largest recipient after Israel and Egypt. But the Colombian army is dirty as can be. It has a long record of human rights abuses and corruption, and is many years away from becoming a professional and honest fighting force.

The army has focused its attention on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Marxist guerrillas who are protecting the poor peasant coca farmers in the southern part of the country. The right-wing paramilitaries in the north, which are much more involved in processing and shipping drugs, get a free pass because of the army leadership's ties with these groups.

For the past three years, the FARC has been negotiating a peace deal with the Colombia government. It has offered to end the guerrilla war it has waged since the 1950s and end coca production in the territory it controls. In exchange, the government would spend money to develop markets for alternative crops. With the collapse of the Colombian economy (1 in 5 workers are unemployed, the peso's value has gone down nearly 50 percent against the American dollar and 1.5 million people are refugees), the plan has been shelved.

Economic development, not military intervention, is what will solve the drug problem in Colombia. But President Andres Pastrana won't get that sort of aid from Washington. Instead, he will get more U.S. military aid that could end up sparking a full-scale civil war.

The U.S .strategy seems awfully muddled. If the avowed goal of U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey is, in his words, to "wipe out drug production at its source," why will the U.S. aid be used to fight the FARC guerrillas without creating a similar plan to take on the paramilitaries?

Why is more U.S. money being spent on subsidizing a civil war in Colombia instead of expanding surveillance and interdiction of drugs by the Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Agency? And why aren't more efforts being made by the U.S. to get the Colombian peace talks going again?

None of these questions are being answered by President Clinton, McCaffrey or anyone else in Washington. And the risks of increased U.S. involvement in Colombia aren't being explained to the American people.

As bad as the Central American wars of the 1980s were, the impending civil war in Colombia has the potential to be even worse. For example, the civil war in El Salvador took place in a country of 8,000 square miles with a population of 5 million. There were 80,000 deaths over 12 years. Colombia covers 440,000 square miles and has 40 million people, several large cities, plus the Andes and the Amazon as hiding places for the guerrillas.

If a civil war spills out from Colombia, with thousands of refugees flooding into neighboring Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and Panama -- democracies that are as fragile and impoverished as Colombia -- who knows what happens next?

One thing is certain to happen, though. The international drug traffickers will pick up their production centers and move them north to Panama or south to Brazil, because no matter what happens in Colombia, the vast U.S. cocaine market will remain and there is plenty of money still to be made at minimal risk.

It can't be repeated enough. More guns and helicopters and anti-drug battalions will not end the Colombian drug mess. Reducing drug demand in the U.S., more interdiction of drugs being shipped to the U.S. and working to bring peace in Colombia through diplomacy and economic development are the options that will work. Failing to implement them means risking a terrible and destructive war that will cause great harm to many people while leaving the drug lords untouched.