"Mired in Colombia"
The Chicago Tribune
January 19, 2002

The War in Colombia

Editorial, The New York Times

Yesterday's agreement between the Colombian government and rebel forces to
hold cease-fire talks was an encouraging sign. It was a rare moment of hope
in a country long battered by civil war. The near collapse of talks earlier
this month contained an important lesson for the Bush administration and
Congress. When President Andrés Pastrana threatened to forcibly take back
the chunk of southern Colombia he had ceded to the leftist guerrillas three
years ago, civilians living in the area became terrified. For as bad as life
has been under the guerrillas - and it has been awful - the prospect of a
Colombian military takeover meant the certain arrival of the murderous
paramilitary forces. If Washington continues or expands aid to the Colombian
military, it must do so on the condition that the military cut its ties to
the paramilitaries.

Plan Colombia, the package of aid devised by the Clinton administration and
continued by President Bush, calls for cutting military-paramilitary links.
But the plan had always allowed these conditions to be waived by the
president. Last month Congress took away the presidential waiver. By law,
Washington can now provide military aid only if Colombia arrests
paramilitary figures, suspends officers suspected of paramilitary ties and
prosecutes them in civilian courts. Administrations in the past have been
known to get around such restrictions, mainly by exaggerating progress or
lying about the death toll. The Bush administration should not give in to
this temptation.

Plan Colombia is officially authorized only for counternarcotics use, but it
has actually embold need the paramilitaries, which are growing in size and
middle-class public support. Their collaboration with the military is
becoming more overt, while their involvement in drug trafficking is deeper
than that of the guerrillas. The paramilitary umbrella group was recently
designated a terrorist organization with global reach by the American State
Department.

The leftist guerrillas are kidnappers and drug traffickers, but the
paramilitaries are responsible for 80 percent of Colombia's stunning levels
of political violence. The armed forces have failed to protect villages even
when the government received advance warning of a massacre, and in many
places there is clear evidence that soldiers helped in the killings. While
the civilian government has made some paramilitary arrests and sacked
several army officers with strong ties, it is simply too weak to resist the
increasingly overt collaboration.

Colombian officials have asked that they be allowed to use Plan Colombia aid
against the guerrillas. Many in the Bush administration are ready to endorse
this shift, along with an increase in military aid. It is unlikely that
these changes would speed an end to the war. Plan Colombia has strengthened
hard-liners on both sides.

American military aid is not likely to accomplish much for peace in
Colombia, but it will make a great contribution if it can pressure the
Colombian armed forces into distancing themselves from their brutal
paramilitary allies.

Mired in Colombia

Editorial, The Chicago Tribune

With less than five hours left before a threatened offensive by government
armed forces, Colombia's largest guerrilla group agreed Monday to return to
negotiations to end the 40-year-old civil war.

That's good news--talking is almost always preferable to fighting, even if
in Colombia's case, cynics for now have the upper hand. The latest round of
negotiations have been plodding along since President Andres Pastrana took
office in 1998 and have yielded little despite sizable concessions by the
government, including turning over a huge chunk of the country to the
rebels.

Even less promising than negotiations, though, is the United States' growing
military involvement in the Colombian narco-guerrilla quagmire. The Clinton
administration poured $1.3 billion into the Plan Colombia military aid
package, followed by the Bush administration's $625 million Regional Andean
Initiative.

Both strategies claimed to target narcotraffickers--not guerrillas--even
though for the most part they are indistinguishable. According to a report
Tuesday in the Washington Post, now the Bush administration is considering
abandoning that pretense and using U.S. military aid to fight guerrillas
directly, under the umbrella of its worldwide campaign against terrorism.

Such a shift in American policy would be folly. It would detract attention
and resources from the legitimate campaign elsewhere against terrorist
groups that directly threaten American life and property, while exacerbating
the violence that is ripping apart Colombia. Neither policy would advance
American interests.

Direct American involvement in the Colombian civil war was supposedly
prompted by our wanting to stanch the production of cocaine and other
illegal drugs. But our efforts have been like sprinkling water on an oil
fire--they have only spread the flames of narcotrafficking to other parts of
Colombia and to neighboring countries such as Ecuador. The nearly $2 billion
the U.S. has invested in Colombia during the past three years could have
been much more profitably invested at home in drug treatment and education
programs to reduce narcotics consumption.

Aside from the drug issue, Colombia's bloodshed is an internal affair that
can be settled only by the participants. So far the Colombian government has
failed to confront the paramilitary armies that are responsible for much of
both the human rights atrocities and the narcotics trade in the country -- 
presumably because they are allies in the war against the guerrillas. In fact, as the 
deadline for negotiations neared Monday evening, paramilitary armies were readying 
to invade guerrilla-controlled areas and inflict their usual regimen of terror on any 
suspected civilian sympathizers.

American aid to the Colombian government has done little to quell either
narcotrafficking or the civil war. Ratcheting up that same policy, as
reportedly contemplated by the Bush administration, won't yield different
results. U.S. interests would be better served instead by pressuring the
Pastrana government to bring the rogue paramilitaries under control, as a
prelude to negotiations with the guerrillas.

Although cynics are right--a negotiated peace in Colombia is going to be a
long and tedious process--it still offers the best hope of ending! a conflict
that neither side has been able to win on the battlefield after 40 years of
fighting.