Danger: U.S. could go to war on the wrong side Miami Herald Commentary By Jonathan Power 27 August 1999 This Month's News | CSN Home

The world may drop its jaw at the idea of a NATO-like international military intervention to pacify leftist guerrilla groups, army-backed and fascist-inclined paramilitaries and the world's most ruthless drug cartels. But some in Bogota are touting it as a necessary solution.

And if not an international force, then the U.S. military.

Don't drop your jaw. None other than the U.S. commander in chief, Bill Clinton, said last month that vital American interests are at stake in Colombia and that it is "very much in our national security interests to do what we can."

When the U.S. President uses these code words, it essentially means that the backbone of the U.S. military, intelligence and national-security bodies has decided that the United States is prepared to go to any lengths -- even war -- to deal with the problem.

Clinton's statement may have been sparked by the relatively trivial loss of a U.S. military reconnaissance plane flying over Colombia. But it comes after a long period of slow-burning, mounting frustration at the inability of successive Colombian governments to get to grips with the armed gangs that threaten to destabilize the government and with the narcotic traffickers who supply hard drugs to the American market.

If U.S. intervention were likely to be evenhanded, perhaps there could be an argument for it. After all, Colombia often is exhibit No. 1 for those who say: Look what happens when the outside world doesn't intervene -- local fires just burn brighter and fiercer.

But evenhanded doesn't appear in the current lexicon of Pentagon thinking on Colombia.

Almost perversely, the Clinton administration seems to be ignoring what the New York-based Human Rights Watch describes as "the root of these abuses . . . the Colombian army's consistent and pervasive failure to ensure human-rights standards and distinguish civilians from combatants."

Terrible violence is being inflicted both upon each other and on civilian innocents by the three sides in the armed struggle. But by no stretch of the independent reporting available can it be said that the left-wing guerrillas are the most vicious or the most responsible. The consensus is that the army is in league with the right-wing paramilitaries who, in turn, are in league with the drug mafia. It is they who set the pace of assassinations, organize death squads, inflict torture and practice widespread intimidation.

The army not only has failed to move against the rightist paramilitaries in any significant way; it has tolerated their activity, even providing some of them with intelligence and logistical support.

In a 1998 report the Bogota office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights observed that "witnesses frequently state that massacres were perpetrated by members of the armed forces passing themselves off as paramilitaries."

It is true that both the governments of Ernesto Samper and Andres Pastrana have suspended or closed down particular units, such as the army's notorious 20th Brigade. Yet officers are rarely, if ever, prosecuted, and some even have been promoted. Occasionally there is a dismissal.

"Defending human rights in Colombia is a dangerous profession," says Susan Osnos of Human Rights Watch. Yet it continues to attract unusually dedicated people. Last year when assassins gunned down the president of a human-rights committee in Medellin, the drug traffickers' hometown, he was the fourth president to be killed since 1987. Even so, someone else has taken his place.

The Clinton administration's attempts to be evenhanded have been derisory:

On one hand, it allows the State Department to issue human-rights reports critical of the Colombian establishment. Last year's report accused the government of "tacit acquiescence" of abuses, and in May 1998 the United States revoked the visa of one particularly corrupt and cruel general.

On the other hand, its main direction has been to increase aid to the Colombian military and reduce the strings attached as to how the aid is used. It also has deployed CIA and Pentagon operatives to work with Colombian security-force units that cannot be given a clean bill of health on human-rights abuses. Last year Gen. Charles Wilhelm, head of U.S. Southern Command, told a committee of Congress that criticism of military abuses was "unfair."

Now, with the pace being set by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the administration's top anti-narcotics official, Washington is giving more and more aid to the Colombian military, supposedly for combating the drug menace, but in practice aimed disproportionately at the left-wing guerrillas. After Israel and Egypt, Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid.

Washington's sense of frustration is understandable. The left-wing guerrillas have not responded well to the significant steps that Pastrana has taken. But then nobody expected that the betrayals, bad memories and fears of 40 years of war would be set aside by handshakes and face-to-face meetings. But it would be counterproductive for the United States to allow itself to be drawn in.

It would give substance to all the Marxist twaddle of Latin America's left-wing intellectuals and guerrillas about who really pulls the strings. And it would embolden the Colombian army and its paramilitary allies to even-worse excesses.

The path to peace in Colombia lies where it has long been: in honest and humane government within the country and serious moves by the world's largest drug-consuming nation to pull the rug from under the drug barons by amending its outdated and outmoded laws on prohibition.