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Author: John Diamond, Washington Bureau

CLINTON'S SUCCESSOR WILL INHERIT MAJOR DRUG WAR

U.S. Committed To Plan Colombia, A Potential Quagmire

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration is preparing to hand off to the next president a large commitment to finance Colombia's drug war, an effort that will take years to yield results and could widen to neighboring countries. President Clinton and his advisers make their point again and again: The new U.S.-funded war on drugs in South America won't turn into another Vietnam. With the passage of Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion aid package, the United States is, in essence, going in with its wallet, not with its boots. Still, the hazards of what is certain to be a costly and lengthy jungle war against Colombia's drug producers bear echoes of the Vietnam conflict. Given Washington's opposition to committing U.S. troops, it almost certainly will be less costly in lives than Vietnam was, but all signs point to a long, expensive and possibly widening struggle. "Turning the situation around in Colombia will take time, probably at least three to five years," Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering said last week after returning from a trip there. "And I think this is evolving now into not just a pure Colombia issue but an Andean regional issue." Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson got a chilling reminder of the risks Friday when authorities in the violence-torn town of Barrancabermeja found a bomb alongside a road near the airport hours before the two arrived.Authorities arrested a suspected member of the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which controls a section of northern Colombia. The U.S. and Colombia downplayed the possibility that the bomb was meant for the U.S. dignitaries. Wellstone was visiting Colombia to investigate allegations that the Bogota government tolerates human-rights abuses, including kidnappings and murders, by paramilitary groups with ties to the Colombian military. Already Clinton has had to sign a waiver to keep aid money flowing though Colombia cannot yet certify full compliance with human- rights requirements imposed by Congress. "I don't think we can conveniently turn our gaze away from this unpleasant reality of the rash of extrajudicial killings, the rape, the murder, the torture, the kidnappings," Wellstone said before leaving. The ELN and the even more powerful Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have threatened to escalate violence if Plan Colombia becomes a war against rebel forces. The $7.5 billion plan was developed by the Colombian government with step-by-step help from Washington and the crucial support of House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). The goal is to cut coca cultivation in half over five years. Colombia has pledged $4 billion, and Europe promised help. Most of the U.S. taxpayer money will go to the Colombian military in the form of 60 helicopters and training for three battalions. U.S. troop presence in Colombia is capped at 500; 290 American soldiers are there now, and they are forbidden from going on patrol. The U.S. role is to finance an enormous effort by Colombian police, backed by the military, to break the drug cartels and coca- growing operations centered in the mountainous jungles of southern Colombia. More than half the total would go toward economic development to give peasants an alternative to growing coca leaves and to reverse Colombia's economic tailspin, which is producing volunteers for the two major rebel movements. Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush endorse the effort to stem the tide of cocaine and heroin from Colombia. Bush has pledged to make Latin America a foreign policy priority. "Should I become president, I will look south, not just as an afterthought but as a fundamental commitment of my presidency," Bush said during the campaign. Only a few months into its life, Plan Colombia is showing some cracks. European nations have chipped in far less money than hoped. Colombia has barely begun to spend money on the program. U.S. military helicopters vital to carrying the fight against drug cartels in jungle terrain are slow in getting to Colombia. "U.S. assistance to Colombia will take years to produce results," said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), who led hearings on Plan Colombia. U.S. policy in Colombia demands that American aid be limited to the drug war and not for the civil war. "This assistance is for fighting drugs, not for waging war," Clinton said during his Aug. 30 visit to Cartagena, Colombia, to formally present the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package to the Colombian government. But the same U.S. officials who articulate this policy admit that the guerrillas and the drug barons have become "inextricably linked," as Pickering put it recently. The problem posed by drug trafficking from Colombia is framed in stark terms. Ninety percent of the cocaine seized in the United States comes from Colombia, as does 70 percent of the heroin. Cultivation of coca, the raw material of cocaine, has more than doubled in Colombia in the past five years. The worst of the problem is concentrated in remote southern regions out of reach of the Colombian army and police. "The expansion of coca growing areas, especially in the [southern] Putumayo Department, has progressed virtually unchecked," Brian Sheridan, assistant secretary of defense for special operations, told lawmakers recently. Colombia, Latin America's oldest democracy, is struggling through the longest-running civil war in the hemisphere, dating back nearly 40 years. The government of President Andres Pastrana, who has skillfully lobbied Washington for support of the plan, has ceded a swath of territory the size of Switzerland to guerrilla control. More than 1 million Colombians are considered "internally displaced" refugees. The country has the highest kidnap rate in the world. Barrancabermeja, the town visited by Wellstone and Patterson, is the most violent town in Colombia with nearly 500 politically related murders this year alone. After Congress passed the aid package this year, Colombia became the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt. Lawmakers expect annual requests in subsequent years for anywhere from $300 million to $600 million. "We're in it for the long haul," says Sen. Joe Biden (D- Del.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Assuming Plan Colombia eventually gets off the ground, U.S. officials and leaders of Colombia's neighbors worry that success in the field may merely push trouble across borders, as drug producers and guerrillas flee a strengthened, U.S.-trained Colombian military. Pickering calls this the balloon effect: "If you push in on one end, it's bound to bulge out in others." The balloon effect is precisely how Colombia became the world's largest cocaine producer during the 1990s. Successful efforts by Peru and Bolivia to slash coca cultivation and drive out traffickers pushed problems over the remote borders into Colombia. For this reason, countries such as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina are conspicuously unenthusiastic about Plan Colombia. "Peru and Bolivia have achieved enormous successes in the last four years. It's almost unbelievable," says Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug policy adviser. "But they don't want to see it go back the other way. . . . They have huge anxieties, and they are justified." Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to Washington, says his government has no view on Plan Colombia because it is "a bilateral agreement between Colombia and the United States." "The reality is that countries would just as soon have this problem stay in Colombia and have this problem no longer be theirs," said a senior Latin American diplomat. Mainstream Colombian opinion strongly supports the U.S. help. "Many times over the past decades, Colombians have felt alone on bearing the burden of the international drug war," President Pastrana said at the Cartagena ceremony. Others view the U.S. commitment in Colombia warily. "The truth is the United States won't physically invade Colombia," former Colombian Justice Minister Edmondo Lopez wrote in Bogota's El Espectador newspaper. "The issue is another kind of invasion." In this new style, former Brazilian President Jose Sarney wrote in another opinion column, Americans "provide the means, the leaders, the material and the strategy, and we assume the risk."

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