Pubdate: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 Source: International Herald-Tribune (France) Copyright: International Herald Tribune 2000 Contact: 181, Avenue Charles de Gaulle, 92521 Neuilly Cedex, France Fax: (33) 1 41 43 93 38 Website: http://www.iht.com/ Author: William Pfaff, LA Times Syndicate NEW PRESIDENT MUST NOT IGNORE WARNINGS FROM SOUTH AMERICA PARIS - Not much has been said about the impact elsewhere in South America of Plan Colombia, the U.S. program for semi military intervention in Colombia. The Washington debate has been about whether sending $1.3 billion in mostly military aid to Colombia - helicopters, arms and military training programs - will produce any drop in the amount of drugs available on the U.S. market and whether American soldiers might be drawn into the fighting between the Colombian Army and rebel groups that control regions where the raw drugs are produced. What it will do to Colombia itself has been a second-rank worry, and what it might mean to the future of U.S. relations with the rest of South America has hardly come under discussion at all. Among all the institutions concerned with relations among the Western countries, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations' 30 year series of biennial Atlantic Council conferences has been all but alone in bringing South Americans into a policy debate usually dominated by North Americans and Europeans. The latest Atlantic Conference, held early this month in Puerto Rico, where the series began in 1970, provided a sober South American contribution to the usually Washington obsessed U.S. policy dialogue. Washington's plans for Colombia provoked the most anxious discussion. Before World War II, Washington's influence on the Americas was unassertively exercised and only distantly felt by the advanced South American states of the continent's "Southern Cone": Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. The United States had dominated Central America and the Caribbean island-states since the early 19th century. Mexico had made the most powerful challenge to U.S. interests and ideas with its 1910 revolution and subsequent expropriation of U.S. oil industry holdings. Washington's attention to the Southern Cone states was mainly commercial until 1940. The major South American states were economically as closely attached to Europe as to the colossus in the north. Their cultural ties were much closer to Europe than to the United States. The war changed that, largely eliminating European influence. Washington was acutely concerned about the strategic security of the region and about Latin American resources, which were in great demand. Those wartime attentions, prolonged by the Cold War, brought creation of the Organization of American States in 1948, confirming a de facto U.S. sphere of influence that persists to this day. In recent years, economic links have further tightened. U.S. exports to South America rose by more than 40 percent from 1991 to 1999, and the increase in U.S. investment is even higher. The Argentine scholar Felipe de la Balze, a member of his country's Council on International Relations, told this year's Atlantic Conference that the success of NAFTA and general agreement in South America on the so called Washington consensus on trade expansion and economic integration had created a very favorable climate for cooperation between the United States and South America. He argues that South America (apart from Central America) "is ready for an assertive U.S. regional initiative" to consolidate relations, not only in trade and commerce, but in ideas and institutions. However, many Latin Americans criticize the United States because of its aggressive, and largely unilateral, counternarcotics policies. Washington is seen as projecting onto other countries the destructive consequences of a domestic problem that it is unwilling or unable to address effectively at home. The congressional requirement that Latin American (and other) countries be "certified" annually for their cooperation with U.S. drug policies - or suffer economic sanctions - is seen as peculiarly humiliating and regarded with particular anger. According to participants in the Puerto Rican conference, this has made it possible for drug traffickers, as well as left-wing insurgents who are the de facto allies of the drug merchants, to present themselves as the defenders of national sovereignty. Plan Colombia, aggressively backed by the Clinton administration (under pressure from elements in Congress), has found little support in Latin America. Its critics argue that by militarizing and internationalizing the Colombian conflict, Plan Colombia threatens to merge the drug war with the traumatic indigenous civil struggle that has been going on for most of the last half-century in Colombia. The result of that could be destruction of the Colombian state itself, unable to re-establish its authority in the southern regions now controlled by ostensibly left-wing rebel movements, cooperating with the drug traffickers. Critics say that by eliminating all chance of political dealings with the rebels, the U.S. intervention will undermine the legitimate government in Colombia while driving drug growers and shippers over the frontiers into neighboring countries, promoting the same politico-criminal anarchy there. Fortunately, doubts are mounting in Washington. On Nov. 16, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Benjamin Gilman, a New York Republican who was formerly a supporter of Plan Colombia, said he had changed his mind and now thought the United States was on the brink of making a "major mistake." A new administration will soon take office, probably one skeptical of intervention in other people's civil conflicts. The new president, whoever he is, should listen to South America's warnings. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek