US involvement in Colombia's long running civil war could lead to an even greater humanitarian tragedy there, writes Ana Carrigan

President Clinton last week announced a two-year, $ 1.6 billion emergency aid package for Colombia. The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, travelled to Colombia to sell Washington's plan to the sceptical locals. She said the new US assistance would "provide substantial support for President Pastrana's plan to achieve peace, promote prosperity, protect human rights and fight crime".

Basking in the glow from her dinner the previous night with the Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, she promised "to seek one hundred years of peace, democracy and rising prosperity for both our nations".

Unfortunately, the hype accompanying this new aid package is even more misleading than usual. Factually, the terms of the new aid represent a radical Uturn in US-Colombia policy that will draw the Americans into the middle of Colombia's civil war.

Eighty per cent of the new aid will go to the Colombian army to train and equip two new "counter-narcotics" battalions. The new troops, trained by US Special Forces and supplied with 63 new helicopter gunships, will join a third US-trained and US-equipped "counter-narcotics" battalion already in the field. Together, these battalions constitute the equivalent of a US-created brigade.

They will be deployed in the southern territories - which have been controlled by the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) for the past 30 years - to implement the policy of Gen Barry McCaffrey, alternately defined as "eradicating drugs at the source" and, more recently, "breaking the "narco-guerrilla" drug links. Their specific mission: to "push" the FARC out of the southern jungles where the bulk of Colombia's cocaine is grown.

Ironically, Mr Clinton's decision to go to war with the FARC has occurred precisely at the moment when it appears that the FARC's political leaders are emerging to take up the slack in long-stalled negotiations with the government.

Last week, when negotiations reopened the FARC leader, Mr Manuel Marulanda, startled the participants by turning up full of good cheer and optimism. This week, FARC leaders met inside the Colombian DMZ with the UN Secretary-General's newly appointed Special Representative to Colombia, the Norwegian diplomat, Mr Jan Egeland.

Mr Egeland's brief, which includes seeking international economic support to underwrite peace in Colombia, will not be helped by the new US policy. It is difficult to imagine that the UN will be too keen about putting up bridges, roads and clinics just to have them knocked down by US bombs.

In the longer term, the most dangerous implications for the future resulting from new role of the US as a protagonist in the war, go to the core issues that make peace in Colombia so difficult to achieve.

US involvement sends a direct message to the Colombian elites that when the going gets tough Uncle Sam will be there to bail them out. Their resolve to resist the political, economic and social changes on which any peace accord depends will have been stiffened.

Then there is the all-pervasive impunity that has virtually destroyed the Colombian judicial system, shredded the rule of law, and led to one of the gravest crisis of human rights in the world. The US will become complicit in underpinning the institutionalisation of further impunity for the atrocities committed daily against civilians by the paramilitaries, frequently with army assistance.

These are dark times in Colombia. Unless more politically courageous and honest policies emerge within the next US administration, the "Salvadorisation" of the Colombian civil war is now inevitable.

In a country of 40 million people, where two-thirds of the victims of the counter-insurgency are civilian, and 1.7 million peasants to date have been violently uprooted from their homes and their land, such an outcome will result in a humanitarian tragedy of devastating dimensions.