"COLOMBIA DIFFERS WITH US ON NARCO-WAR TACTICS"

BY ANA CARRIGAN

When Andres Pastrana, Colombia's new president, visits Capitol Hill on 
Thursday, he will try to persuade congressional leaders not to sabotage his 
government's courageous efforts to end 35 years of civil war by negotiating 
with that country's guerrillas. Lamentably, his chances of success are poor.
   
Odds are that Pastrana's commitment to honor his overwhelming mandate 
from the electorate to negotiate will again collide with the only Colombian 
policy in town: drug czar Barry McCaffrey's counter-narcotics war. Only 
strong White House and State Department support to rally bipartisan support 
for Colombia's peace negotiations can now avert a crisis, and such support 
seems unlikely.
   
In the view of Congress, Pastrana's bold new policies are at best 
unwelcome, at worst downright dangerous.
   
Congress has only two things in mind when it focuses on Colombia: drugs, 
and narco-guerrillas. Colombian coca and poppy fields grow 80 percent of the 
cocaine and 60 percent of the heroin that reaches the United States. 
McCaffrey, determined to cut off the drug flow at the source, has declared 
war on the (*)200,00 peasants who earn a living cultivating coco plants on 
their small plots.
   
Enter the narco-guerrilla, who shoots at the US spray planes that carry 
out the crop fumigation strategy.
   
McCaffrey's aerial crop eradication program in Colombia is the most 
ambitious of its kind in Latin America. It has brought  a war of herbicides 
and helicopter gunships to the southern coca fields and _ despite official 
denials to the contrary _ triggered the rapid escalation of US involvement 
with the Colombian military in the counter-insurgency war.
   
Last Wednesday, Congress overwhelmingly approved spending $208 million 
for helicopters and machine guns to help in the Colombian anti-drug effort. 
And it went a step further: it It said the money would be offered only if the 
country's leadership does not pursue, as part of its peace plan, the creation 
of a demilitarized zone in the heart of the coca plantation region. It is 
that (*)vote represents vote that representscq? the gravest threat to 
Colombia's hopes for peace.
   
Washington is confused by Pastrana. Politically and economically 
conservative, a wealthy, free-market, pro-American, clean politician, 
Pastrana appeared typecast for the role of  ``Our man in Bogota.'' But his 
refreshing independence on some of the most sensitive issues has upset 
administration officials accustomed to the servile compliance with American 
demands. They expect of Pastrana what they got from his weak, corrupt 
predecessor, Ernesto Samper, and they are not getting it.
    
Pastrana's anti-narcotic chief has publicly characterised characterized 
the aerial spraying a failure, and his environmental minister has vetoed the 
environmentally hazardous herbicide Tebuthiuron from the spraying 
program _ an addition that had been agreed to by Samper, under pressure 
from the US ambassador.
   
Nor is Washington pleased with Pastrana's six-hour meeting with Cuban 
leader Fidel Castro at the recent non-aligned summit in Durban.
   
The administration's most acute unhappiness, however, focuses on 
Pastrana's commitment to demilitarize an area the size of El Salvador in the 
heart of the coca plantations prior to initiating talks with the guerrilla 
leadership in November. Even before Congress moved to block the idea last 
week, the idea has thrown Washington bureaucrats into a ``tizzy,'' according 
to one State Department source. He said: ``This peace process has frightened 
the heck out of people here.''
   
Indeed, this could be a watershed moment in the Colombia's relationship 
with the United States. But somewhere between Bogota and Washington, the 
promise, the complexity and the enormity of what is at stake for Colombia's 
40 million people, for US and regional interests, have gotten lost in 
translation.
   
Once before, in the mid-1980s, a decade of partisan bitterness in 
Congress over Central American policies was set aside in the interest of 
supporting a bipartisan peace pact for the region.  Today, such leadership is 
again called for. Washington and Bogota need to throw away the old model 
and re-formulate their relationship.
    
Currently, the United States is committed to heavy spending to extend 
aerial crop eradication. Last year, 45,000 acres were sprayed _ yet the 
acreage of coca plantations increased 18 percent over the same period. 
Indeed, coca plantations have grown by 56 percent over the last two years.
    
Pastrana and most others realize the spraying program is a catastrophe. 
Pastrana _ who believes that under Colombian conditions growing illicit 
crops is a social, not a criminal, problem _ wants to institute a collaborative 
effort, based on Colombian manpower and US money, to erradicate the coca 
plants by hand, in collaboration with the growers. He would then offer them 
long- and short-term economic development help as part of an agrarian 
reform 
effort.

    At a first, historic meeting between Pastrana and the legendary 
68-year-old guerrilla leader Manuel Marulanda, whose peasant army has been 
at war with the state for 35 years, the army's leaders repeated their desire to 
collaborate with the government to erradicate illicit crops in return for 
development of alternative sources of income for the peasant growers.
   
In his inaugural address, Pastrana asked for international help to fund a 
Marshall Plan to build schools, hospitals, and roads and to develop 
microbusinesss to bring employment and economic development to the areas 
where the drugs now flourish. Such a plan is understandably attractive to the 
peasant army and the small farmers they represent, who are tired of the 
violence and death that come with an illegal drug trade.
    
But US members of Congress congressmen have not talked to Colombian 
coca farmers. Instead, when they fly into the country on fact-finding missions, 
they meet the Colombian police, the US military advisors advisers, and 
intelligence staff engaged in propping up the Colombian military.

Without exposure to the population, they have made up their minds to 
deepen the failed US drug erradication program in Colombia and to halt the 
peace negotiations with those they insist are criminals. Washington's 
expanded counter-narcotics strategy will continue to target narco-guerrillas, 
a composite enemy which that includes all those to whom Pastrana has given 
political status, and whose identification has permitted the obliteration of 
the line between counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency.

Ana Carrigan is a freelance writer and author of ``The Palace of Justice: a 
Colombian Tragedy.''